Week 17 , Orhaniye, Turkey

Dear Ethel, Family and Friends,
Sad to say our Flotilla sailing trip is over, we sailed into the small village of Orhaniye that has a reasonable size marina. I’m happy to say we all arrived back in port safely and no damage and a great time was had by all. We had a final dinner together before our English friends had to depart back to England the following morning. They were all very generous passing on their supplies of food and beverages that they hadn’t used over the week. We have also organised some accommodation here in Orhaniye as well.

Orhaniye is a small rural village in a tranquil lush bay with a mountain range surrounding it. The marina lies at the mouth of the bay and provides work for most of the locals. The marina is also the main focal point for tourism in the area apart from one restaurant that attracts jeeps safari tours, so it is peaceful most of the time. Every house has a produce garden as well as goats, sheep, chickens and cows. So fresh eggs, butter, cheese, apricots for jam, olives, vegetables and bread is baked next door to where we live. Seafood is plentiful and cheap, 12 lire for a whole fish in a local restaurant. There are small local buses to catch into Marmaris if you need to, once a week to shop maybe.

On our second night here, we were having dinner in the local restaurant and a group of expats came in. We heard the Australian accent first. An Aussie, 3 from the UK and a South African. They invited us to the marina the following night for a music recital in an old Greek Church ruin with fabulous acoustics, a trio playing a number of popular classical pieces very surreal. The following night we had dinner on Terry’s (the Aussie) boat. Terry and his girlfriend Christina hosted dinner on board Kontiki and following that we went to the bar where a Latin American band was performing.

As it turns out, Christina has a one bedroom apartment in the village, but is now staying on board the boat with Terry, leaving her apartment empty....one thing leads to another, so we are now staying in Christina’s apartment and I’m helping Terry with some work on his boat in preparation for a trip to Sumi in Greece next week some time. It was market day yesterday so we got to stock up on the fresh produce for the week Last night at sunset we all took the tender dinghies out to the Byzantine Island fort in the middle of the bay for a BBQ dinner.

We feel we will be happy here for a month as we will do some day trips around and plan for what’s coming next.

We have posted our photos from the Flotilla week on the internet
http://picasaweb.google.com/ethelink

All the best for now
Ric & Louise