A Mile Down (7 page)

Behind the bluff that contains the tombs is a great field, now growing corn, which was once the agora, or marketplace. There are still a lot of significant structures scattered up the hill, including a large stadium, aqueducts, and our favorite, the baths. We had seen a lot of Roman baths, but these were on a cliff overlooking the valley, the arches still intact; we could sit under them and gaze out on much the same view the ancients enjoyed, with the same warm breezes coming up from the valley.

While we took these tours, my Turkish crew was working hard on the varnish and other tasks, doing a great job. I wasn't making any progress with the deck seams, however. And in Kas, farther down the coast, I ran into some new difficulties.

Kas is a beautiful little town. The harbor area has narrow cobblestone lanes closed to vehicle traffic. Up a hill is a large Lycian sarcophagus right in the middle of the street. The shops cater mostly to tourists but are small enough to be cute.

I needed to renew my tourist visa, so while my guests enjoyed the town on the morning of our arrival, I went to the ferry, planning to hop over to the Greek island that was only a few miles away. The roundtrip, including paperwork, would take about two hours. But after I had bought my ticket and boarded, I was called off the ferry because my personal visa was linked to my boat. I couldn't be cleared out of the country unless my boat was also cleared out.

I had discussed this issue explicitly with Seref when he was doing my charter paperwork in Bodrum. It was supposed to have been arranged so I wasn't chained to the boat. I had paid for various licenses and permits and had even paid a $6,000 bed tax for running charters: it had been expensive, and I had expected it to be done right.

I called Seref, who told me there was nothing he could do. I would have to take the boat with me to the Greek island and back.

“But what about my guests?” I asked him. “And it's Saturday. What if I can't clear out today?”

“I am sorry, David. But Kas is good place. Your guests will like. And Saturday is no problem.”

So I collected my boat papers to clear out of customs and immigration. Then I'd clear in and out of Greece and back into Turkey.

When I found the customs office, though, it was locked. The hours posted on the door showed that they should have been open right now, but they weren't.

I asked in the restaurant next door if they knew when the customs officers would be back.

“He's never there,” a pretty young woman told me. Then her parents, apparently the owners of the restaurant, told me the customs inspector always took time off for his own business and let people wait here for days. He was not responsible, they said, and I should report his absence to the police station.

I didn't want to become involved in local politics, but hours later, after I had called the number posted on the door and asked around and was still waiting, I finally went to the police, with Muhsin as a translator. I found the port authority section and asked if they could just clear me out.

My request was too complicated for the guys at the front desk, so I was ushered into the office of an inspector who said he'd be happy to help. I would only have to fill out a statement saying I had been unable to find the customs inspector. Then he could clear me.

So I filled out the statement and waited. The clearance didn't come, so I asked again, through Muhsin, and was told that I would still need the customs inspector. And he wouldn't be in on Sunday, so I would have to wait until Monday morning.

“But I just filled out the statement so that I wouldn't need to see him,” I said.

“I'm sorry, but you must come back Monday morning,” the police inspector told me in English. “And we keep your passports. We give back to you on Monday.”

I managed to remain calm, because I couldn't afford trouble with the police, but really this was a bit unbelievable. Muhsin tried talking with the inspector again, as politely as possible, to discover other options, but there didn't seem to be any.

Everyone was annoyed by the delay, but especially Cristal's friend Jen. She was upset to be trapped somewhere on her vacation. A few hours before, the town had seemed lovely. Now it was a prison. I arranged for a tour to Saklikent, which would fill the entire next day, but we were spending too much time parked in one port. We were supposed to keep moving and seeing new places.

Saklikent is a deep canyon near Tlos, a narrow gap in the face of steep mountains lining the eastern side of the Xanthos valley. The river is cold and silty, rushing out of the canyon to twist along gravel spits to the ocean. Restaurants line either side where it pours out, with platforms for tables built over the water. Fifty feet up from the restaurants, at the entrance of the canyon, a walkway built along the rock wall leads to another restaurant tucked inside. From here, the water was low enough to cross at the fork of the river's two sources, just inside the canyon walls, and hike up the drier source, the most spectacular part of the canyon. The walls were marble, polished by the river in winter. As we continued up, we passed beneath natural cathedrals, the marble colored red and pink and even a bluish tint.

As in all of Turkey, no safety measures had been taken. Every time I walked that canyon, rocks came down to shatter against nearby stone or splash into the water, and we all ducked, too late, then grinned sheepishly at one another.

After hiking the canyon, we sat on cushions in one of the restaurants, the water rushing beneath, and ordered Turkish bread that was fried and filled with honey or cheese. Then I rented inner tubes for everyone, along with a guide, and we waded into the ice-cold water under an extremely hot sun, perfect conditions for tubing. Real squeals as we hit standing waves and took frigid water down our backs or fronts, but also enough heat from the sun to warm us back up.

I loved the view, the mountains a spinning panorama. It was a great outing, diminished only by the fact of returning to Kas and knowing we weren't leaving the next day until I had cleared out, in, out, and in.

By 7:30
A.M.
, I was waiting at the door of the customs office, but again it was deserted. I tried calling and asking around, but no luck. He finally showed up at about ten-thirty. I went in and politely asked for a clearance, showing him my papers, but he had already heard about the weekend's events.

“You file a complaint against me,” he said. “Why you do this?”

“I didn't mean to file a complaint,” I said. “I thought I was filling out paperwork to get a clearance from the police.”

“Ah,” he said. He was smoking, as all Turks do, especially in closed spaces. He was a young, handsome man, obviously taken with himself as an inspector and insulted by my complaint. “So you make a mistake?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes, yes, you certainly make a mistake,” he said. “You make a mistake with me.” He smoked some more and looked at the various walls with nothing on them. Behind him was a large portrait of Ataturk, which seemed to be the only portrait of anyone hanging in any office in Turkey. Modern Turkey was basically his idea, so this was appropriate. “You go to the police and take back this complaint, then you come see me again.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'm sorry.” There was no point in fighting. This man had the power to keep me in port for months if he felt like it.

I went to the police station and retracted my complaint. Curiously, they weren't disappointed to lose it. The other day they had expressed annoyance with the customs inspector, but now they talked of him as their great friend and colleague. I had clearly been made a pawn in some kind of local power struggle. My side had lost, and now no one else was on my side.

They sent me and my passport back to the customs inspector under police escort, as if I couldn't be trusted not to attempt escape.

Then the customs inspector called in the immigration inspector, and they discussed at length the various difficulties of my noxious passport. When they finally stamped it, they charged me over $100 for a clearance out, which is supposed to be free. Then they lectured me a bit, blew smoke in my face, and sent me back to the police. The police made me wait for a while, then finally cleared me and charged another $40 just for fun.

It was almost 1
P.M.
before I was back on board. I cast off with only Muhsin as crew, since Ercan and Baresh didn't have the required visas, and we motored for about half an hour to cross the channel.

The harbor on this Greek island was picturesque and completely different from Kas, the architecture and layout and feel of the town much more European. There was more money here, and greater order, and a general sense of drowsiness. No one moving very quickly.

The Greek customs officer, in his middle years, was sitting outside his office, on a chair against the wall. “You are English?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Just the flag. I'm American.”

“And you?” he asked Muhsin. “Turkish?”

“Yes,” Muhsin nodded.

The customs officer made some sour faces, letting us know how he felt about Americans and Turks. His lips pinched closed but his tongue moved around in his mouth, wanting to break free. This was 1999. The Greeks were supporters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party and Ocalan and resented U.S. and Israeli cooperation with the Turkish government in his capture. They were Christian, but not nearly as closely allied to the U.S. as Muslim Turkey was. And they had Cyprus and all the coastal islands as sore spots with the Turks. Just a few years before, the two countries had almost gone to war over possession of a few small, uninhabited pieces of rock sticking up along the coast. So this customs officer was ruminating a bit, and he was making us ruminate, too. But finally he stood up, walked into his office, and gave us our entry and clearance.

It was 3
P.M.
by the time we were docked again in Kas, and I still had to clear back into Turkey before we could move on to the next port.

I went to the customs inspector first. He was in his office, which was convenient, and unusual, but he also had made up some new regulations for me. He said my charter paperwork from Bodrum was incorrect and I would have to obtain a doctor's clearance and pay a lighthouse tax. “Maybe in Bodrum they do not know these regulations,” he said, smoking and gazing absentmindedly at his blank walls. “But here we are very careful.”

I knew he was full of shit, but knowledge is not power when it comes to dealing with government officials, so I had to run to the police, then to the other side of town to find the doctor, then to a notary, then back to the doctor, then to the police, and finally to customs and immigration. By the end, I had paid more than $500 just to clear in, almost all of which was bogus. I left Kas in a foul mood. And my guests weren't happy, either; it was after six by the time we left. We arrived at our next port long after dark.

The rest of the trip went well. It's hard to beat the ruins and coves and towns along that coast, and it's hard to beat a poetry workshop with Talvi Ansel. The only difficulties were when Ercan hit on Steve, by blowing in his ear, and my lack of money. When it was time to get diesel, though, Steve helped me out. He loaned me $2,200, which would fill our tanks almost halfway.

We did have one other problem that trip, which was that the air-conditioners leaked water under the beds from condensation, and this water made the cheap wood laminate flooring buckle. So I told Seref, and he promised me he would have the air-conditioning man fix the drains to the units, and he would do something about the flooring. He was vague about what and when, of course.

Then a huge earthquake hit near Istanbul. Oddly, this was one event that summer in Turkey that had no effect on my business. Although the quake was an enormous national tragedy, killing eighteen thousand people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, it left the airport in Istanbul strangely intact. Which shows, despite other indications to the contrary, that perhaps luck is only luck.

MY NEXT CHARTER was a course on Homer's
Odyssey
taught by Charlie Junkerman, who was my boss at Stanford, and Rush Rehm, his friend in the classics department. Four adult students had signed up, which was a record for paying guests that summer. Everyone arrived in high spirits, charmed by the medieval walls of Antalya's harbor and excited to sail the coast that Homer and Odysseus had sailed.

On this trip, we had the usual Turkish guides for the ruins but we also had Rush, who was extremely knowledgeable and likeable. In Myra, as we gazed at tombs carved into the cliffs, he told us the stories of the figures depicted. As we toured the large and well-preserved Roman theater, he told us about theater conventions of the time. The group had read quite a bit of background material about the sites we were visiting, and the debates were lively. This was what I had hoped for in setting up these educational charters. Vacations that were explorations and adventures, not just lying in the sun and drinking.

Rush and Charlie held class on the aft deck every morning, the students in their swimsuits and snacking on olives. It was perfect, and if it hadn't been for the war in Kosovo, it might have been a viable business.

Each charter, we toured the ruins of Phaselis, Olympos, the Church of St. Nicholas, Myra, Kekova and Kekova Island, Patara, Letoon, Xanthos, Tlos, Fethiye, and Cleopatra's baths, in addition to hiking and tubing at Saklikent and exploring lovely seaside towns and coves from Antalya to Gocek. It was hard, after setting all of this up and seeing how wonderful the trips could be, to know that the business was failing.

I continued to have problems with the boat, too. In Kas, I woke in the morning to Ercan and Muhsin knocking at my door.

“There is a problem,” Muhsin said. “You need to see.”

They led me onto the deck, then forward to the port bow and asked me to look over the side.

I hesitated for a moment, wondering what good fortune this town had brought me now. When I bent over and looked down at the waterline, I could see a piece of the paint hanging loose. This was difficult to believe. The paint and the thick epoxy beneath it are supposed to stick to the hull, of course. The paint job had taken months.