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| Our Gulet, the Halil Aga (Courtesy Brian Yates) |
We may very well have discovered one of the greatest travel secrets on the planet: a Turkish gulet cruise on the Aegean sea, also known as a “Blue Cruise”.
A gulet (pronounced just like we’d write “gullett” and rhyming with the fish–or haircut–“mullet”) is a boat design native to southwestern Turkish Aegean coastal towns like Bodrum, Marmaris, Antalya, and Fethiye. Gulets are two-masted (sometimes, though rarely, three-masted) wooden vessels. They’re actually modern designs, developed in the 1970’s, and serving purely leisure purposes. While they’re masted and outfitted for sailing, the practicality and economy of operating under sail versus diesel means they rarely serve those leisure purposes other than by slow-rumbling diesel engines.
Ours was the Halil Aga (we also saw it written Halilaga), a 26-meter (85 feet), two-masted gulet with 8 double-bed ensuite (with shower) staterooms, and a crew of three: captain, deckhand, and cook. Our cruise left Bodrum with fourteen passengers, including ourselves, for a week-long tour of the Gulf of Gökova, the body of water lying to the east of Bodrum, trapped by mainland Turkey to the north and the Peninsula of the town of Datça to the south.
This, and the next two blogs, are our account of our week aboard the Halil Aga.
Day 1 (Saturday) – Around 2:30 in the afternoon, we left our B&B on the east crescent of Bodrum to walk to the designated meeting place for our cruise: the Tepeçik Mosque overlooking the harbor of the west crescent of Bodrum. It wasn’t a far walk, but it was raining and windy. We hurried through the narrow market streets, which would normally have been enjoyable except for the rain-slicked marble walkways and having to wear rain gear.
The cruise literature said to look for the Xanthas yachting office. On a trial run the day before we hadn’t been successful in finding such an office, but we did find a Xanthas-flagged boat. The young man working at the boat had called his “boss”, handed me the phone, and I was told to just come back Saturday afternoon “sometime after we checked out of our hotel”. So on Saturday, as we walked up to the boat, we expected to find the same young man, or someone ready to check us in. There was not a soul to be seen, so we stepped up to the cafe across the street to get out of the rain.
Before we even had time to find a seat and order a coffee (which had become our new plan) a girl with a clipboard approached us, asking, “Are you here for a cruise?” Turns out she was with a booking agent different than our own, but, no matter, she knew them and called our agent for us. Just a few minutes later a guy with a clipboard with our names on it showed up. Another few minutes after that, we were climbing the ramp of the Halil Aga–the same Xanthas-flagged boat we had seen the day before–and dropping our bags in cabin number 6.
It’s an awkward moment when you first meet a few of your fellow passengers. We met Karsten and Lone (pronounced like a cross between Luna and Lorna) from Denmark; Brian and Debbie from Scotland, but originally from South Africa; and Garretsch and Elisabeth from the Netherlands (I apologize to them if I’m misspelling their names). We stood around the aft, big-blue-cushioned deck of the boat and chatted for a while. The plan for the day was to stay in harbor that evening, with dinner served onboard at 8:00pm, and departure set for the next morning. We braved the rain and wind for another walk around the (fancier end) of Bodrum’s harbor, we enjoyed dinner (chicken with Turkish side dishes), and chatted with our fellow passengers. We were to be joined late that evening with the remainder of our passengers. We turned in around 10:15, lulled to sleep by the hum of wind and the rattling of the Halil Aga’s rigging.
Day 2 (Sunday) – We rolled over a few minutes before 8:00 and were suddenly in a hurry to get dressed (we had been told breakfast would be served at 8:30). It was pretty much the last time all week we’d be in any sort of hurry. We were on deck at 8:30, but breakfast was served fashionably late at 8:45, giving us a few minutes to meet our late-arriving passengers. They were Isabelle and Jan from Portugal, though she was originally from Mozambique and he originally from the Netherlands (“Jan” is pronounced “Yahn”). And then there were the Italians, four friends from Genoa: Dario, Jeansa, Barbara, and Kristiana. The Italians were the least English-conversant of the passengers, though we suspect they were more timid about their English skills than they were not fluent.
Our breakfast was typically Turkish: boiled eggs, bread, yogurt, cucumber, cheeses, honey, jam, coffee and tea. Yilmoz (“YIL-muss”), the youngest and most comfortable with English of our three crew members, acted as deckhand, first mate, and generally took care of all the passengers; he let us know that we’d be late leaving because of the persistent wind. Fortunately, the rain had stopped, but the wind was forecast to be severe throughout the day. With some unexpected time, we took another stroll around the harbor before returning to the boat.
Not surprisingly, Brian and Debbie being the only other native English-speakers, we gravitated toward them for much of our conversation. Originally from South Africa, they immigrated to Scotland a few years ago in search of a safer, more secure life. Brian is in the dairy business, Debbie is a nurse.
Around 12:30, Captain Ey?p (“A-yoop”) cranked up the engine and we left the harbor. We traveled eastward along the coast for a half hour or so and pulled into an inlet where we hoped to get a respite from the wind. No such luck. Brian and Debbie were the first in the water, barely minutes after we had anchored and the captain had shut down the engine. We stuck our feet in the water to find it…”refreshing”. It would take a few days for us to work up the fortitude to get in the water. For now, the water was best enjoyed by our new friends from Scotland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, rather than these two from the American South.
Lunch–spaghetti noodles, Turkish meze, and eggplant–was served shortly thereafter, and around 2:00 we left that first inlet for another one a bit to the east, one with a small, rocky beach and a harbor with a little resort. We didn’t escape the wind there either, but we were in for the night regardless. We passed the rest of the afternoon admiring the cold-water tolerance of our fellow passengers, enjoying tea served at 4:00, and generally lazy-lounging around. Despite the wind, the skies were clear and mild.
Dinner was served at 7:30: mackerel with a compliment of Turkish sides. The stars were out in abundance, the Milky Way clearly visible, and we introduced a few other passengers to the leisurely pastime of satellite-spotting, though none were to be spotted that night. After some post-dinner conversation, we turned in at 10:30 to the windy swaying of the boat, the rattle of the rigging, and faint Turkish disco music from the nearby resort carried by the wind, only to be awakened at 3:00am or so by chairs being blown over on the deck above. A few minutes later the captain fired up the engines and moved us to a calmer end of the inlet. We were back to sleep in no time.
