Day 21: It's been 5 days in a turkish gulet on Mediterranean Sea

breakfast at Ölüdeniz

After finishing Biga Peninsula, I gave a break to follow the route to south and came directly to Fethiye to join to a blue voyage with a turkish gulet at crystal blue Mediterranean sea. I'm now sailing for a two weeks cabin charter starting from Fethiye till Phaselis and back. This blue voyage kind a trips are now my favorites for a beautiful break. You can swim as much as you want. Sleep at the deck at nights under thousands of stars. Wake up to a silent and full of nature morning and wash your face with clean blue Mediterranean water. If you haven't experienced it yet, you shouldn't die before it.

St. Nicolas Island

There are lots of islands and bays on the route. Some of the islands are untouched and you can only hear the songs of the birds, talks of the goats and donkeys and smells of olive, mountain oregon, sage and lots of other spices coming to your noise with the soft breeze. While sleeping on the deck anchored to one of these islands, you can only hear the sound of the sea beating the bottom of the ship softly. The other beautiful thing about being on board is also sunsets...

sunset at Gemiler Island

Other type of the islands are the ones with ruins of old time horbours, towns or cities belonging

generally to Byzantian or Genoese, The tour lets you to go ashore, do tracking around these ruins and turn back. Although it's late august, weather is incredibly hot and after a long tracking under the sun, the best thing is directly to jump to salty waters. The temperature of the water is around 25-28 degrees and ideal for a long stay in.

start from Fethiye

We started our journey from Fethiye last saturday. Generally all the ships start their routes at saturday. We are 11 people on board. 7 passengers, 3 stuff and me. I have a different category as I'm both a passenger and stuff at the same time. It is a barter I made with the owners.

evening at Turunç Pınarı

At the evening of last saturday, we reached to Turunç Pınarı Bay close to Fethiye. Stayed over the night, had a lovely dinner, swam at night and slept under the stars. These three activities became the most popular of all for the last five days. Next day we started sailing very early like 5am and were able to have our breakfast at Ölüdeniz. I won't write our swiming sections any more but here I also had a chance to climb the hill and took that lovely photo of Ölüdeniz beach...

Ölüdeniz beach and the lagoon

Around noon we passes to Gemiler Island, St. Nicolas with its old name. This island has the ruins of an old harbour center dating back to Byzantian times which was destroyed by a big earthquake. It has 6 churches, lots of houses and an unforgetable sunset from the top of its hill where everybody took their places to watch and applaud.

the ruins of the Byzantian tunnel at St. Nicolas

We stayed over night and passed to Yeşilköy Bay at Kalkan for the morning and of course another delicious turkish breakfast. Around evening we reached to Kaş, one of my favorite places at the south. I have been in Kaş many times but this was the first time going there from the sea.

Kaş from the sea

We spent nearly three hours in Kaş. During this time I was able to visit one of my close friends who lives in Kaş and have some delicious ice cream. For the night, we anchored to Limanağzı Bay very close to Kaş.

Limanağzı also has graves carved into rock

Our next stop after Limanağzı was the famous Kekova region. We stoped at the entrance of Kekova for breakfast and went to Kaleköy(Simena) which has a big castle and an area full of Lycian tombs. It was also time for me to do some small shopping. I bought two summer dresses.

Kaleköy (Simena) and the castle

Lycian tombs

For the night we passed to a bay where there were nobody but us. No boats, no lights, no houses, even no moon... Nothing! And of course at night we appreciated this and swam within yakamoz under the Milky Way. It was a night which I slept like a baby. 

where we woke up this morning

Through our route we came to Finike and will stay here for tonight. Tomorrow we'll go on for Olimpos. I also want to share a map of our route from Fethiye to Antalya.