Cruising the Aegean, Part 2

Day 3 (Monday) – Despite having been awakened in the middle of the night by the necessity to reposition our boat, we woke up wide-eyed at 7:30 and found our typical Halilaga breakfast waiting for us at 8:30. We’d come to love the wonderful simplicity of yogurt, honey, bread, and coffee before the week was up. The skies were clear and blue, an incredibly invigorating azure, and the wind was subsiding, though not yet done. Conversation over breakfast was about the weather and the move in the middle of the night.

We were underway at 9:30, heading (we hoped) for a spot out of the wind. Continuing eastward along the northern side of the Gulf, we pulled into a mountain-ringed scrubby-pine inlet, typical for the Turkish coast. The wind was all but calmed, and despite our fellow passengers assuring us the water was “warm”, our toe-testing indicated otherwise. We enjoyed lunch there, battling bees from the nearby shore. Seems all that Turkish honey comes with a price: we’d be shooing honey bees every time we’d drop anchor near shore that week. It was a nervous shooing at first, but as the week progressed we’d all get a little more used to the presence of bees, and only a few of us would get stung (Lori being one, as you’ll soon see).

After lunch we moved down the coast and pulled in near the village of Çökertme, where we’d stay for the night. We enjoyed a Turkish red wine–the label called it Mystik–before and during dinner. Like most cruises, drinks are extra, but we found the prices reasonable; some of our fellow passengers who had taken Blue Cruises before remarked that the prices were higher, which seems inevitable to us.

After dinner we enjoyed conversation, particularly with our new Danish friends Karsten and Luna (you’ll remember it’s actually spelled Lone, but I’ll go with the more phonetic spelling). Karsten had been a carpenter, Luna was a cancer-surviving artist, and together they had run a wine-importing business. They owned a place in Turkey just up the coast, so had spent a good bit of time on the Turkish Aegean. Luna, endearingly had no fear of speaking English, though she often turned to Karsten to translate a word or phrase or to verify a fact for her. By the end of the week, he had rightfully earned the nickname “Mr. Google”. Luna’s accent was musical to us and an endless supply of smiles. Should you ever find yourself in conversation with a Danish woman, try your best to get her to say the word “Boogie”, and if you’re really brave, ask her if she knows what Spam (the canned meat) is.

Day 4 (Tuesday, and Lori’s Birthday) – As it turns out, we had three birthdays onboard the Halilaga this week: Lori’s on Tuesday and Jan and Jeansa’s on Wednesday. There would be no sleeping in for Lori’s birthday: with lots of miles to cover, our captain cranked up the engine at 5:00am and we were underway a few hours before we rolled out of bed. By the time we did, we were pulling up to Cleopatra Island, an island dotted with ancient ruins and where, purportedly, Cleopatra had Egyptian sand brought in to make a beach. Still, I let Lori sleep in as much as possible, and she was the last on deck for breakfast, greeted by Luna leading the passengers and crew in singing “Happy birthday to you”.

We enjoy learning a bit of the local language, and we try to be like Luna: unafraid to use what we know, as embarrassing as it might sometimes feel. So before we left for this cruise, we had indulged the friendliness of a waiter at a restaurant in Bodrum to learn the most basic of polite phrases: “thank you” and “you’re welcome”. I’ll tell you this: Turkish is a challenging language. Our waiter had to write the phrases down, and even then the pronunciations took practice. I practiced saying thank you–“TESH-Ek-Kuh-Loor”–whenever Yilmoz brought us drinks or picked up our plates. Before long he would simply smile and proactively tell me thank you (in Turkish) whenever we passed on the boat. I imagine I had earned the nickname “Thank You” amongst our crew. I would only master the response–“Air-REECH Ed-Uh-May” (you’re welcome)–the last few days of the cruise.

We stayed in the busy little harbor of Cleopatra Island that morning watching boats come and go and our fellow passengers swim. We eyed the ruins on the shore from the bee-buzzed comfort of our boat, and testing the water, we decided it might just be warm enough to get in. But before we could work up the nerve to actually do so, our crew announced at 11:00 that it was time to leave. We were soon underway and continuing eastward.

Our next inlet was peaceful and featured a small, rocky beach. It was just after noon and Lori and I managed to convince each other it was time to get in the water. After the initial shock of cold, we found it not only tolerable but relaxing. The bay was small enough to offer spots of warmth and we floated around for maybe an hour before lunch was served. It was perhaps our favorite meal of the week: karni yarek, as Hal at Cafe Efendi calls it back home…eggplant and meat in a light, tomatoey sauce.

We stayed in that inlet all afternoon, reading on the big blue cushions, lazily waving away honey bees, being served tea and coffee at 4:00, and waiting on dinner. A few times, we contemplated getting back in the water, but didn’t, not because it was cold but because it would have required an exertion of effort that was beyond us that afternoon. I checked my satellite-spotting app on my iPad, and with great luck managed to spot an Iridium Flare (the holy grail for satellite spotters) at 7:10.

Many people don’t know that you can spot satellites traversing the early night sky under the right conditions, and still fewer know that some of those satellites (any of the 66 Iridium satellites) can actually illuminate the surface of the earth, a phenomenon known as an “Iridium Flare”. It works this way: a phone-booth sized Iridium satellite rolls across the sky as it orbits the earth, and as such its highly reflective solar panels roll along the way. With one of those satellites in just the right spot at the right time of day (just after sunset, with the sun shining up where the satellites are but not down on the surface) one of those reflective panels catch the sunlight and reflects it down on the earth as it rolls. The effect is like a slow-moving lighthouse in the sky. We saw the most incredible display of an Iridium flare in June of last year in Sonoma, California: though it was dark, the satellite illuminated our neighboring vineyard and its entire valley like a giant flashlight in the sky. On our night on the Aegean, however, it was just a bit too early with too much light still out. Still, I could spot the faint, slow, pulsing of the satellite in the twilight sky as it rolled through it’s orbit overhead.

Most of my fellow cruise passengers were not as enamored with the Iridium flare as they were with dinner and Lori’s birthday cake, graciously baked by ?m?r our cook and enjoyed by passengers and crew alike. Lori turned in early and I laid up on the bow of the ship, looking for more satellites. I was unsuccessful in satellite-spotting, but did enjoy the sight of two spectacular shooting stars.