12 Islands Tour

I decided to take this fine excursion just for the heck of it, because it's one thing to lay on a beach and sunbathe and quite another to lay on a boat and sunbathe.  I took this same tour two years ago (yes, I'm covering a lot of familiar territory) and it included some wonderful swimming, but the passengers, mostly English, complained that the water was too cold.  I don't even know where to start with that.  First of all, the Med is nearly as warm as your average swimming pool and the British shouldn't judge because all the water around them will kill you with the hypothermia in half an hour.  So I was one of the few who swam.  That was last time.  This time, everybody got in on the action, because it's the Med.  The most wonderful of seas!

This is the good ship Braveheart 1 out of pretty little Göçek.  Funny thing, this seems to be the only place where they spelled the name of their own ship correctly.  In various other places, including their own brochure, they either spelled it "Bravehart" or "Breveheart."

So everybody stakes out space on the top deck, though many of the prone-to-burn (aka the British) cower from the sun below.  Sure, I was still nursing a burn, but I didn't let that stop me.  I had SPF 70 for the afflicted area, which was pretty much my entire back.  It turns out that most of my fellow passengers were Turks.  They all seemed to be greatly entertained by their own country.

These are some of the 12 islands, but to be quite honest, nobody was counting.

At some of our swimming stops, we were joined by various yachts.  Almost everybody swam.  The Med was in super-fine form that day. 

Of course, more 12 island tour riffraff would show up in other boats and dirty up our pristine waters, but what could we do?  Nothing, I tell you.  OK, so we had five swim stops and they were all wonderful.  I swam, I sunned and I read some Stieg Larsson.  In other words, it was by all appearances a vacation.  Ah yes, but my little mind is writing music now, which makes me tremendously glad.     

So at the end of the voyage, we ended where we started in Göçek, a very pretty little town a little ways from Dalyan.

It is also where they have a restaurant call the Kebab Hospital.  I don't know about you, but I'm not really interested in eating injured kebabs.