Eight years ago, two friends were sitting in a bar one wintery London evening. The rain was pouring down outside, buses and cars splashing up black water onto passers-by who were struggling, gritted teeth, with umbrellas flung inside out by the biting wind. The windows of the bar were steamed up with condensation from damp overcoats and the breath of groups of office workers winding down after a day of packed underground trains, traffic jams, meetings cancelled or crammed last-minute into overcrowded schedules.
“I’ve had enough of this, I need to see some sunlight”, said one to the other.
“Well what about that place in Turkey I was telling you about?” said the other. “It’s only a small town but the people are really friendly, I’ve always wanted to go back and visit again”.
So the next day they scoured the flights on Teletext for a cheap deal to Altinkum, and found a package in June, leaving from Gatwick, bed and breakfast included, for £130.
***
Eight years later, those two friends are happy owners of a two-bedroom apartment not far from Dolphin Square. One of them is living in London and was lucky enough to grab a beautiful house in a royal suburb just before prices really went through the roof. She comes over on holiday but not as much as either friend would like!
The other friend, the one who’d wanted to escape from the rain, the pollution, the relentlessness of life in London… well she’s sitting in front of a computer, typing this paragraph, while outside the January weather is red hot (in the sun at least) and the dust from the unfinished roads makes a welcome contrast to the London grime. She and her new husband have a fantastic new boat, the Flying Fish, and are gearing up to what they hope will be a busy summer of day trips, excursions to Kos, charter tours and a bit of fishing thrown in.
Of course, the road from that bar in London to this boat in Altinkum hasn’t been a straightforward one – nor is the journey anything like finished! The map of this route will definitely look more like a maze than a motorway, and it feels like a random sheep trail complete with the odd pile of manure to jump over at odd intervals.
The search for the perfect boat started on the internet (where else). There are thousands of boats for sale online – fishing boats, sailing boats, ferry boats, motor boats; new, second hand; Turkish-registered, foreign-registered; diesel engine, petrol engine; pageant winners or big ugly lumps of metal. Not one of them was “The Boat”. Hakan had a rigid list of specifications and though we found some great boats online, none of them met the requirements of this veteran of a thousand boat tours.
Having exhausted the world wide web, our search got physical. Word of mouth around Didim produced some more candidates, all failing to meet crucial criteria – too small, overpriced, not enough sunbathing space, not enough seating, gas guzzler, wrong engine, just plain wrong. Bodrum produced nothing. And so to Istanbul.
Istanbul is a BIG city. Greater London covers an area of 609 square miles (1,577.3 square kilometers). Greater Istanbul covers an astonishing 2,402 square miles – yes, two thousand four hundred and two square miles, or 6,220 square km! That’s nearly four times the size of the sprawling UK capital. And because it has coastline on the Black Sea, both sides of the Bosphorus Strait and also the Sea of Marmara, there are a lot of places for that perfect boat to hide.
.gif)
