Sarah swam up from a sandbar she had been exploring, pulling off her mask and snorkel and tossing them beside mine on a nearby protrusion. A few hundred yards away floated our yacht, the blobs of color around it were our fellow passengers, who always seemed reluctant to swim more than ten feet away from it. My pockets were full of interesting shells, some of which would later prove to be owned by other creatures of the world. Having snorkeled nearly every inch of shoreline of the bay where our yacht was anchored and around the island itself, I was taking an enjoyable break to get warm in the sun, saltwater drying on my skin.
“Think we could climb that?” I asked Sarah.
Mountains—albeit small ones—rose up from the shoreline of the mainland. Their surfaces seemed like piles of pebbles left by some god child, stacked steep up to three separate peaks, the middle one noticeably higher than the others. Goats made noises at each other as they picked their way along the rocks, chewing on the scrub brush growing from the crevices. There was nothing remotely approaching a path to those peaks; there was nothing remotely approaching flatness, actually, but if you thought in terms of climbing rather than hiking, it was just a grade four scramble that couldn’t take more than an hour.
“Probably,” said Sarah, leaving it at that. I took her lack of enthusiasm as an idea rejection.
***
Several hours, the rest of a book and a number of backgammon games later, Sarah proffered a suggestion. Most of the shells had been cleaned and were drying in the bathroom of the small cabin Sarah and I shared with Doyon. The fact of other ownership became known when a couple of the shells magically moved themselves several feet away from where I had put them. The owners and their homes soon found themselves on an unasked-for adrenaline joyride through the air before splashing back into the brink.
“Let’s climb the mountain,” Sarah said to me.
She said this, of course, with only an hour before we were scheduled to leave the bay. I wasn’t sure we could get up and down in time. Sarah had spent the past two hours tanning herself and writing in her notebook a few feet from me. Why we hadn’t started earlier, save perhaps to make the experience intense instead of leisurely (I do not deny that Sarah’s subconscious as well as mine decides things in this way), I don’t know.
I thought for a moment.
“Cool.”
***
“Don’t let the devil goats get you!” Brenna yelled from the ship as Sarah and I kicked our way to shore, shoes held over our heads. The goats had been so named because, yes, they did have a certain malevolent look about them. They stayed out of our way, though, as we put on our socks and shoes and started scrambling up the steep rocks, showing up their prowess and hurting their collective pride. They “nahhed” at us in scorn.
Sarah took the lead because we both have our areas of expertise, and trailfinding is certainly one of Sarah’s. Trailfinding here entailed locating climbable rocks while avoiding the sharp branches of the shrubs. The rock was a hard, porous limestone, which made climbing up them easy, a plethora of holds available for hands and feet. We practically ran up the thing, and within half an hour were on the top, looking down at our ship and the others in the bay.
It was amazingly beautiful, but I’ll let the pictures tell the thousand words. We had enough time to pose for them, take a couple more of ourselves bouldering with that beautiful backdrop, then rock hop back down to the shoreline to swim to the boat, our little adventure taking less than 45 sweat-soaked minutes.
On top of the mountain
On board, I looked at the maps of the area. Although the mountain range behind the one we had been on had its peaks named, ours must have been too small to merit labels, or the map wasn’t detailed enough, being more concerned with the topography of the ocean floor. The point is, as far as we knew, our peak was unnamed.
So we named it, smashing our own together.
We had just climbed Mount Dan-Rah.
***
After seeing a sunken city, the foundations of its houses visible through the clear water, after seeing a fishing village on an island reachable only by ship, a castle clinging to its one peak, we sailed into a cove and dropped anchor.
As the day gave way to night, we started secretly drinking the vodka and raki (a Turkish liquorish-flavored liquor not unlike ouzo) that we had smuggled on board after our stop in Kash. We were not supposed to bring any drinks on board, which meant the ship had a monopoly of the market and allowed them to mark everything up 100%. Because we didn’t have the World Bank on our side, we were forced to turn into raki runners and Pepsi pirates (my treasure trove of cans now buried at the bottom of the ship’s cooler). Tipsy and happy, we scarfed down dinner and got dressed. Here, in the middle of the night in the middle of the Mediterranean, we were going dancing.
At 11:00 PM, a speedboat pulled up beside the yacht and everyone under the age of 30 got on board, the older people begging off, perhaps thinking it wasn’t their scene. The speedboat stopped at the other boats anchored in the cove and soon a party was making its way to a sandy beach, to a dance club reachable only by boat.
“Pirate’s Cove” was a three sided wooden building on stilts, its open side facing out towards the water. Between it and the docks were a number of wooden platforms with pillows and chairs, and they’d already lit a small bonfire before we arrived. The selection of music, spun by one of the bartenders in between getting drinks, was the most eclectic I’ve ever heard, from Counting Crows to Jay Z to Madonna, the only seeming criteria being that the next song had to be an absolutely different genre from the last. This made for better dancing because I can get bored of the same stuff after a while and loved moving to a beat never stopped changing.
Brenna, Me, Sarah, Stella, Ryan and Doyon
We danced for hours before taking a break on one of the wooden platforms, cooling off in the night air. A movie moment happened shortly thereafter: all the Americans on the boat were on that platform, as well as Stella and Doyon, who simply watched us with raised eyebrows. A fair amount of America bashing had been going on during the four days on the yacht, about its foreign policies and attitudes in general, about Bush in particular. The most virulent bashing came from the Americans, Brenna spearheading it, and the lone defensive voice was me. I was quite an America basher until I lived in Ukraine, and now I feel that even though we screw up a lot and deserve most of our stereotypes, we’re still a damn good country trying to do damn good things. I even think one of our better qualities is our self-criticism, but all of that floated away for a few minutes on the opening chords of Don Mclean’s “American Pie.”
“A long, long time ago/I remember how that music used to make me smile…”
It came to us on the night breeze from the over-amped stereo system, and no matter what we thought about our country, at that moment we felt. The thirty or so other people sitting outside—all from other countries—quietly listened, as the four of us began singing together. We four sat and looked off at the sky, the water, occasionally glancing at each other but mostly singing for ourselves, our voices in near whispers during the verses but rising up joyously together on the choruses. The four of us: Sarah, Ryan, Brenna and me, are all travelers; we pride ourselves on having visited and lived in many places, on speaking other languages and being comfortable in other cultures, but that moment something was very clear, at least to me: we were inescapably American. No one else on that beach, in that club, knew those words, at they were one of thousands of strings that bound us together as a people, a culture, a nation. And while it looked like a cool Almost Famous/”Tiny Dancer” movie moment, it was more than that because we all felt very close just then, something we remarked upon later, drawn together by childhoods staring out car windows while this song played on car radios, now adults out in the middle of nowhere in an area of the world that mostly hates us and being together being very, very American. And normally to be “very American” is a negative label, but just then it was a very positive, very beautiful concept.
***
Leave it to the Australians to ratchet up the party. At some point in the evening two of the Australian girls had gotten behind the bar and were helping to serve drinks, getting in a shot or two (or seven) for themselves. At one point I was getting hit in the back with ice cubes and, when I turned around, Jess, one of the Australian girls, was tugging the front of her tank top down and offering me a target. I underhand tossed one cube of ice at her and she maneuvered to catch it between her breasts. Another ice cube, another perfect catch and soon our Turkish bartenders, Vinnie and Hussein (yes, that was their names), happy about all that close-by cleavage, started giving out free bottles of water and soon lined up glasses and gave us all a free shot of vodka.
The dance floor was a loud group of moving bodies. Ryan was glued onto Stella at that point and possibly I should have been going for Jess but I was having too much fun dancing with Brenna, even though I knew it would probably cost me any action that night. Sarah was dancing with Ahmed, the first mate of our boat, who had started the evening by saying to her: “I want be with you tonight.”
Groovin' at Pirate's Cove. Ahmed is on the right
The lack of English meant that the insinuation could have gone either way but it was pretty apparent when, a few dances later, he was pushing his tongue in her mouth. Being attractive, Turkish and made of muscle, Sarah wasn’t minding.
***
I stripped naked and dove into the water, narrowing missing Sarah, who was dog-paddling in all her pinkness. Skinny dipping had not been our idea: it had been suggested by Brenna and seconded by Stella. Stella was now under a pile of blankets with Ryan on the top deck, though, and Brenna had become morose and lonely during the evening (there had been a distinct lack of lesbians at the club) and had gone straight back to her cabin. Most of the boat was still back at the club, our group calling it a night at 3:00 AM while they were still going strong. The music carried across the water towards us, seemingly as loud at the boat as it had been on the beach.
Never ones to let a good idea die, Sarah and I decided to still go skinny dipping, even though no one else would. Besides, who wouldn’t want to say they had gone skinny dipping in a cove in Turkey in blue-black water under a moon one day from full?
Inexplicably, the water four inches under the surface was warm while the top layer was cold. Although it was fun, the novelty wore off the colder I got and I told Sarah I was going in. Showered off and carrying my blankets up on the deck, I noticed Ahmed spreading out a blanket over two of the deck cushions and putting more on top, creating a double bed. He was ambitious. I knew he had told Sarah things like: “Look my eyes” and “I think I loving you,”, but from what I understood, she had declined his offers. Still, I made my bed up as far as possible from his.
A few minutes later, I couldn’t find Sarah. She wasn’t in the water, she wasn’t on the deck and she wasn’t in the cabin. I didn’t think she was drunk enough to have had a problem swimming, but it was too small a boat for her to have disappeared. Finally, though, she swam into view from the front of the boat and I handed her clothes to her when she got on board.
In a life moment Sarah declared to be one of her cooler ones, Ahmed had descended the chain that stretched taut from the bow of the boat down just above the water and sat on it, his feet dangling in the water. Sarah had pulled herself up out of the water, one hand on the chain, the other on the back of his head, breasts exposed and dripping in the moonlight, to make out with him.
I think her next decision to sleep on that bed with Ahmed fell into the category of teasing. She had no intention of having sex with him: with a stranger on a deck filled with half a dozen other people (most of them from the boat’s 50-and-over contingent) was not her style, but the topless making out probably gave Ahmed the idea that he was on his way to scoredom.
I awoke a few hours later, almost at daybreak, to hear her telling him to stop and that she wanted to sleep, her hushed whispers carrying over the deck. Sarah can take care of herself, but when I still heard her sharp protestations a few minutes later, I thought I might have to get up and say something (and that would have been an interesting fight to film: two guys sliding around on a dew-slicked deck, ropes and booms and elderly tour patrons all caught up in the fray). Apparently he laid off his groping, though, because soon it was quiet and I fell back to sleep.
In the debrief the next day, Sarah told me the climax of the evening had been the making out at the bow of the ship, and that it had been falling action from there. Although happy to cuddle and make-out with Ahmed, she had discovered that his idea of kissing was of the “shock and awe” variety, and she showed me where his tongue, in its forceful incursions, had actually torn a bit of that flap of skin between her tongue and the bottom of her mouth. It was swollen and bleeding a little.
Apparently for her, it had not been a Turkish delight…
***
And that was the end of our adventure. We got off the boat the next day, made our way to Antalya and spent the evening walking around the winding cobblestone streets of its walled old city. The next morning, while merchants were carrying their goods out of their stores to display in the streets, we caught a cab up to the airport and flew back to Ukraine, our ten days in Turkey at an end. Still, it had been an amazing time, and our memories were carried with us in our heads, our notebooks, our cameras, and, especially, in Sarah’s slowly healing tongue.