At home in Finike....

Sunflower in her winter berth. (ignore neighbours red dinghy)

 We have been settled in Sunflowers winter home for over a week now. Our friends have returned to Australia and life has resumed it's usual calm pace. We have spent the past week exploring Finike which is a lovely Turkish agricultural town with nary a tourist in sight!

The beautiful beach at Olympos

The marina is centrally located so all shops and services are within easy walking distance. Well they are once you get out of the marina, which is huge! A far cry from our last winter marina in Cyprus! There is a large breakwater around the marina and those cruisers that have been returning for many years, say that there is barely a ripple in the marina during winter storms. It should be a safe place to leave Sunflower for the winter.

Ducks on the freshwater stream in front of waterfront property

Before our friends left we hired a car for a couple of days to explore the local area. On the first day we drove to Olympos (no, not the Greek one!:) Which is a very ancient settlement (dates back over 3000 years) at the foot of the mountains. The location is stunning as a freshwater stream runs right thought the ancient town almost right on to the beach. So there was a harbour out to sea and a good supply of fresh water and the most glorious setting surrounded by sheer rock faces and the Taurus mountains. Many of the buildings are now in ruins, but it was still possible to get a sense of the place and there were still some sarcophagi and tombs mainly intact (apart for the holes made by tomb robbers centuries ago) 

Lycian Sarcophagus

The freshwater stream at Olympos

The ancients certainly selected a magnificent spot for their town and fortunately the setting remains as it was all those millennia ago, as the only buildings allowed near the site have to be made of timber and are only granted 5 year leases by the government. This has led to the unique development of 'tree house' hotels (although many of them are actually built on the ground:) There are no high rise hotels or permanent structures to mar the beauty of the place.

Although our trip to Olympos was dogged by the threat of rain and thunder storms the day remained clear and bright. We weren't so lucky the next day when we drove to Myra to see more ancient ruins, an amphitheatre and more rock tombs. The drive was interesting along a twisting coast road as were the local drivers overtaking techniques! Double unbroken lines in the centre. What lanes? They happily overtook on blind hairpin bends while we all held our collective breath! No surprise that Turkey has one of the highest rates of road traffic accidents in Europe! Sadly it began to rain half way there, then it started to pour and then plain bucketed down! The streets were awash in water as the drains failed to cope with the sudden torrent of water, so even getting out of the car was impossible. We did manage a glimpse of the ruins through high speed wipers and decided to call it a day and head back to the boat to curl up and read our books!.

Ruins getting some help with gravity

Naturally the next day and the trip to the airport was glorious! We stopped at the half way point in a town called Kemer. We were interested to see this place as there is also a marina there and we had heard good things about it. However we were really shocked at the amount of development in this once small fishing village and for once it was not signs in pounds and offers of a full English breakfast! The signs were all in Russian and rubles accepted everywhere!We decided we were glad we weren't spending winter there!

I don't thinks it's an elephant foot?.....

After we dropped John and Christine at the airport we did a bit of exploring. Antalya is the capital of this region and one of the biggest cities we have visited for a long time. It is home to a million people, high rise hotels and blocks of flats , motorways and dual carriage ways, traffic lights and traffic jams. All quite novel!

Lycian Lintel

We also discovered several huge shopping malls. First stop was the first big mall we came to for a loo and coffee break. It was an outlet mall complete with cinema and food hall. We appreciated the novelty for an hour or two, had coffee followed by a mooch, followed by lunch (very expensive compared to the local restaurants we had become used to!) then off to find the one store we really wanted to look at. It's called Koctas and is part of the British B&Q hardware/ homewares chain. It was located in an even bigger mall!! We had a good look around took notes and photos of things we might need for the villa and then decided we were shopped out and headed back to the marina.

Another lovely if slightly hairy drive back through the mountain roads back to Finike where we said goodbye to the car and have now been on Sunflower for over a week, trying to get revved up to start the varnishing project!

We really need to get this done before we move into the villa. Our military clearance came through a month early so we are now free to finalise the villa purchase. However we did a 'buy forward' deal with a currency trader to fix the rate of exchange (we didn't want any nasty surprises!) and fixed the transaction date for mid November. This was inline with the original estimate of the date the clearance should come through and also suited us as it gave us time to sort out Sunflower. Now however I am itching to move in and survey our new domain:)

Still we can't neglect poor Sunflower and I am sure once we start the varnishing the time will pass very quickly. All we have to do is get started.....!