Travel with Indigo

Following a winter layover in Bodrum, Turkey, I returned to Indigo in early April, long before hordes of tourists descend on the area in July. Spring along the Turkish Riviera where Bodrum is located is a delightful time of year. Indeed, few places on earth are more agreeable. The air is crisp and free of humidity, the sky radiant and clear, the towns peaceful and somnolent.

Before setting off on our planned voyage, I visited by car, just a half hour’s drive from Bodrum, the villages of Yalikavak and Gumusluk noted for their exceptional seafood. There are many others. At these, I dined on the most wonderful whole fish pulled that morning from the sea, grilled to perfection over a wood fire and invariably served with side dishes chosen from a wide assortment of hot and cold items, called mezzes, all expertly prepared. It is nearly impossible to have a bad meal anywhere along the Turkish Riviera, just one of its many attractions.

While in Bodrum, the crew had the benefit of the expert assistance of Ilker Varder, who I came to know. He owns a yard just out of town where he builds and repairs sailing yachts and charters his and others. These are mostly the classic wood-hulled Turkish vessels, generally 60 to 120 feet, called gullets, found by the hundreds in marinas all along the Riviera, though he also has under construction a steel-hulled sailing vessel of 180 feet.

One day, Ilker and his fiancé took me out for a day sail to some nearby islands where we anchored while his crew prepared a traditional Turkish meal washed down by wine. It was capped off with the digestive called Rakia, which in a pinch can also be used to strip away old paint. At about 65 degrees, the water was too cold to invite me into it, but the warm sun beaming down and the dry brisk air did invite slumber.

Ilker comes from a notable family in Turkey, graduated from the best schools in Istanbul, then embarked on a career in business, which until recently has prospered nicely. He and his father, a pious man, are estranged over the son’s apparent lack of sufficient devotion to Islam. It is a tension especially common in Westernized Turkey and entirely the result of the declining role of Islam in modern daily life. While the young do not renounce their religion as such, they see it as merely another facet of their lives, one to be kept in balance with education, career and family.

From the crew’s experience in dealing with him for five months, I knew that he is a man of unimpeachable integrity and in his trade considerable competence. We hit it off so well that I made a modest investment in his company to aide him in getting past a rough time caused by the worldwide Troubles.

After wandering about the countryside seeing what sights I had missed when we first arrived in the area months before, we cast off the lines and began our spring and summer tour of the Med by coasting along the Riviera in a generally eastward direction. We visited numerous towns and villages, tiny islands, and remote bays. These included Kinidos, Bozburun, Marmaris, Dalyan, Gocek, Fethiye, Gemiler Island, Kas, and Kekova.

All of these are delightful places nestled into the foreshore beneath steep arid hills and occupying sites invariably with adjacent ruins of Greek, Roman, and Ottoman or Byzantine origin. There is scarcely a protected harbor or lofty promontory that is not pockmarked with these ruins so thoroughly did the ancients clutter up the landscape. Amphitheaters are all over the place, something like drive-in movie theaters of their day, and though more than a thousand years old they appear as if they had been only recently left to the ages.

In the towns are narrow, winding pedestrian lanes lined with retail shops, ending here and there in shady squares of outdoor coffee bars and restaurants. Along their waterfronts are crisply landscaped promenades where the locals take in the night air beginning around six. Several generations of families join with friends in relaxed group and stroll along talking enthusiastically about one thing or another giving the towns an agreeable, wholesome character.

Gocek was a favorite stop. Its manicured grounds, fine marinas and up market shops rest at the base of densely forested hills. In the distance, a monumental ridge of high treeless mountains still bore patches of snow, which, set against the cerulean sky and the gray, towering peaks, made for one of the more stunning vistas along the coast. The mountains in winter are the site of numerous ski resorts popular among Europeans.

Gemiler Island, just half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, once held a dense Byzantine settlement the remains of which, seen one lazy sunny morning from the deck of Indigo, looked as if they might be fun to explore. Up close, what began as a fine idea soon became less appealing. Hiking up and down steep hills, climbing over low walls, and scampering into and out of grottos demanded far more effort than the place seemed to warrant.

Growing weary of energetic pursuits, I took the tender for a cruise along the mainland coast. While motoring at idle speed lost in a state of insouciance that failed to rise even to the minimal requirements of a daydream, the notion came upon me out of the fog that on the shore nearby stood a person. I blinked a few times and focused a vacant gaze in that general direction. Sure enough, there on the beach stood a nymph clad in minimalist swimwear, which would have easily fit into a shot glass, beckoning to me in a seductive manner. Few sights are more inspiring to the mariner.

Every man who has ever set out to sea dreams of coming upon such a beguiling scene. Yet he also knows what men have known since the time of Odysseus, that waiving nymphs have as their sole object in life the wish to lure mariners to shore and their certain demise. Many are the ships that have come to grief upon the tempting charms of Nymphs Who Waive from Shore.

I regret to report that in resisting the temptation of these troublesome vamps the record of mariners is not an exemplary one. It is a most regrettable fact, borne out by the events of history, that when faced with a seductive siren waiving to them, mariners can be relied upon, as a rule, to do precisely the thing that they ought not to do. These thoughts, and others, passed through my mind in the way that an arrow pierces the atmosphere, hitting nothing and having as a result no effect whatever. So I cranked over the helm of the tender and set off to rescue the seductive nymph, who I imagined to be a fair maiden in distress.

As I approached the shore, there appeared in my path a rock shelf just beneath the surface, an obstacle to the heroic rescue I so fervently wished, even then imagining the gratitude the damsel would surely bestow upon the knight errant who saved her from some hideous fate. Seeing the shelf, our lady on the shore leapt into the briny deep and began flailing away at the Mediterranean in a manner that, I believe, was intended to suggest that version of the free-style stroke in which the hair is kept free of unwanted moisture lest it damage a stylist’s latest creation. Through a sea made frothy by her exertions, she made her way to the tender and climbed aboard deeply chilled from the immersion. My heroic rescue was complete.

No sooner had she got into the tender than another equally comely lass began waiving from the same shore in much the same tantalizing way I had by now come to expect. The place was awash in waiving nymphs. This one, too, jumped into the sea and, selecting a stroke more in the manner of a Retriever on fetch, began making her way toward the tender.

Once she was safely aboard, a third appeared. Now I began to think I had stumbled upon an international convention of Nymphs Who Waive from Shore. Saving one from whatever evil lurked on shore seemed like the noble thing to do. The Code of Chivalry called for nothing less. But nymph saving can be a tiresome affair, and after the first, the indomitable mariner has had about enough for the day. When the second, never mind the third, appears, he entertains the thought that maybe  there are just too many of these creatures wandering about tempting men and vessels and most likely the best course is just to leave them to Fate. That is what the wise man would do.

Never one to pass up temptation (though frequently one who has regretted not having done so), I rejected this sensible idea and grabbed up what I dearly hoped was the last of this growing platoon of femme fatales who kept popping up on the beach. I didn’t know what the daily bag limit for nymphs might be, but I felt fairly certain that I had by now exceeded it.

No sooner had the third climbed aboard than there appeared on shore another person, this one a lone male known to the nymphs. To my usually genial countenance there came the look of one who has just received a foreclosure notice and is pondering how best to explain it to the hungry children.

He, like the shore waivers, was youthful and unlike them sported a scruffy beard that brought to mind the thorn kraal so favored by the African cow herder. The hair on his head hung well below his ear lobes and complemented his beard as if it were a roof over the kraal. The lad apparently intended that his appearance should insinuate into the viewer’s mind that here stood a graduate student in philosophy, and this it did nicely.

After introductions all around, it turned out that these, along with others still on shore, were not alluring nymphs at all but graduate students from Bosporus University in Istanbul on a spring break camping trip. In the custom of college students the world over, it was cold beer they were after, not the wrecking of ships, a revelation which summoned empathy for their plight and, as I had been in their position a time or two in the past, my offer of assistance.

Winding our way among the islands at top speed, we soon found an emporium on a nearby beach from which we secured the needed refreshment then repaired to the comfortable setting of Indigo, but not before recovering from their campsite a set of bongo drums and a guitar. Two of the nymphs were the lead singer and drummer in a reggae band popular in Istanbul who, after a light meal and cold beer, performed some of their sprightly tunes for the enjoyment of us all.

Before we knew it, and despite our best efforts at self-restraint, a moderately vigorous celebration broke out. Before the evening degenerated into that sustained confusion which attends the descent from sobriety, I surveyed the participants, and here is what I found.

Our four guests were Turkish Muslims, Captain Steve and wife Gillian are Canadian, Mates Jessie and Briony are Aussies, Engineer Terry is a Brit, and Chef Ewan a Scot. Italians built indigo, and Jamaicans wrote and recorded most of the music genre the kids chose, which they played on instruments built in Indonesia. As the night wore on, I broke out the ship’s iPod, designed in America and built in Asia, and cut loose with music of the Bahamas.

At that later stage in a party when a man is apt to put a match to a fountain pen in the mistaken belief that it is his cigar, we graduated to the more sophisticated sounds of George Jones, Hank Williams and Merle Haggard, indisputably American. This prompted yours truly among others to slither about the teak deck, from Honduras, gesticulating wildly as though prancing barefoot over sharp rocks. Globalization is a tiresome cliché, but on Indigo free trade is freely practiced, as you can see, and that night it sure was fun.

Completing our tour of the Turkish Riviera, we returned to Bodrum for some last minute items and for a full stock of fuel before heading out to more Greek Islands of the Aegean and Athens.