This is my twentieth winter in
Fethiye and it is the worst one I have seen.
It isn’t so cold any more, but it has rained so much that the ground
hardly gets a chance to dry out before it is bucketing down again – and believe
me it can chuck it down. Here is the
canal that runs next to our house (the railing is the bridge!) – a local journalist who came out at night to
report on the flood fell up to her neck in one of the side channels and, as the
council policeman who was here said ‘almost became the news’; luckily the only
casualties were her camera and video recorder.
In Ankara last week the weather was extremely
cold – minus five or six in the day, minus twenty and below at night! The snow had been there for a few days when
we arrived and they are good at keeping the main roads open – one of the
important routes built on a slope even has underground heating. However it isn’t possible for the snow ploughs
to get round all the side roads and there are a lot of hills in Ankara, so there was a
lot of skidding of cars and people.
Tonight in Fethiye there is a storm
warning. The thunder and lightning don’t
bother me but the high winds do as you never quite know what is going to come
crashing down. Last week, two solar
panels (large and heavy glass panels) blew off one friend’s roof. A doctor friend of ours once told me that A
and E at the hospital is busiest after storms like this with people who have
been hit by flying objects or – somewhat stupidly – been blown off roofs while
trying to fix them. One man even tried
to fix his greenhouse during a storm by climbing up on the top and holding out
the nylon sheeting that had come loose; he ended up several fields away! Still, I hope if it is bad tonight it will at
least be like this tomorrow – this is Çalış beach after a storm a couple of
weeks ago – washed clean.
With all this bad weather, I am
beginning to feel like the guests who send mails in the winter saying ‘can’t
wait for the summer’! We have to sort
out plenty of things before we get going for another season – not least finding
all new staff. But we are starting to
get bookings through – from Hotels4u too now we finally have a contract with
them.
The weather has also been very
frustrating to some friends of ours who as chairman (lady actually) and deputy
of the Fethiye diving federation have been heading a project to sink a boat in
one of the bays. This will provide
exciting new diving opportunities, as well becoming a habitat for marine life
(yes, surprising as it seems, all sorts of sunken vehicles and junk can enrich
the natural environment). They were
given a decommissioned boat – all 43m of it – by the coast guard but the boat
was in Samsun on the Black Sea Coast. Bringing it here required a tug to pull it
(it has no engine) over a journey along the Black Sea, out through the Bosforos
Straits at İstanbul, into the Marmara Sea, out through the straits at Çanakkale
to the Aegean Sea and all the way down to Fethiye. This is of course an expensive operation –
110,000 lira expensive (about £40,000). They worked hard to get contributions
from all the diving companies in town, and support from the council and the
chamber of commerce to raise this money.
Then they were told that because of the size of the ‘load’ (measured as
the total length of the tug plus rope plus boat) they would have to pay extra
to be ‘navigated’ through both straits.
This they also managed to sort out with the help of contacts (knowing
the right people always helps in Turkey!)
But there’s one thing they can’t
organize – and that’s the weather. First
storms in the Black
Seas region delayed
them. Now the boat has got as far as
İstanbul but the weather has delayed it there and the tug has gone off to do
another job in the meantime. Hopefully
for ALL of us, the weather will improve soon and the boat will reach Fethiye
and be prepared for its final journey to the sea floor. I will keep you posted….
