Our trip was very uneventful, which is the way it should be. Even our four very heavy bags arrived safely. We flew from Melbourne to Singapore, Singapore to Istanbul. The final leg was a domestic flight to Dalaman over spectacular scenery and snow-capped mountains. Dalaman is a 20-minute taxi ride to our destination of Gocek.



This episode’s video will give you an idea of some of the things we packed for our five months living on SCII apart from clothes etc. Some of the items not shown in the video include:
- Enough prescription medication for five months
- Extensive first aid kit including antibiotics and other medications just in case they are needed
- Yeast for making bread and some spices that are difficult to buy in Türkiye.
- Basil seeds and mint cuttings (packed in damp paper towel in a plastic bag), which we will plant into a pot on arrival, normally we travel later in April and herbs are available for purchase but this year we will arrive too early for purchasing potted herbs.
- Silicon baking paper, which is difficult to purchase in Türkiye
- Water filters to filter our drinking water, we filter the water from our tanks with a filtration jug. Some places have poor quality drinking water and this means that we do not have to purchase bottled water for drinking.
- Flat stack silicon collapsible containers (shown in the video), these save space in the cupboard and in the fridge as you collapse them down to a size that matches the contents. These will be perfect for the limited storage space on SCII.

We are staying in a lovely little apartment in the back streets of Gocek. It is in a very rustic area surrounded by local houses rather than hotels. It is a quiet area of town, despite the regular crowing of roosters that wander the streets. Yesterday morning the first rooster crow was heard at 3.00am, followed at 5.00am by the call to prayer. Despite these interruptions we are sleeping well with no real jetlag.



Each morning we walk the 300m to the hotel that manages the apartment for breakfast. We have the traditional Turkish breakfast of boiled egg, cold meat, cheese, tomato, cucumber, lettuce, olives, bread and assorted jams/honey, all washed down with copious quantities of Turkish tea. Not shown in the picture are the additional breakfast items of borek (fried pastry stuffed with cheese- delicious), fresh strawberries and baklava. Yes, baklava for breakfast is a bit excessive but it does go well with the Turkish tea. Just as well we are doing lots of walking from the hotel to the boat-yard and into town.

We are currently getting SCII ready for launching on Saturday. We have been cleaning SCII inside and out, as well as finishing the new teak. Today we visited the local butcher to stock up our freezer. We have packed meat into meal size portions and frozen these at the apartment we are staying in. These will then be directly transferred to the new freezer on SCII. Tomorrow we will do our supermarket provisioning, which is a big task. We go to the supermarket with an extensive list and Google translate on our phones, so we can be sure of exactly what we are purchasing. Many supermarket items do have some English labelling and we are getting better at recognising some common Turkish words, however for labels that are difficult to work out, Google Translate enables you to scan the label and it translates it to English or your nominated language. It is fantastic.

We have had a few meals at the apartment but we have also had some great Turkish food at a couple of local restaurants. Last night we ate at a street café serving donner kebab and iskender kebab (like a donner kebab but with a tomato and yoghurt sauce). Simple, authentic Turkish food but delicious.



The weather here has been wonderful, sunny and 23-25 degrees each day, although we suspect that the water temperature will still be a bit chilly. As we launch on Saturday, our next update will be from somewhere on the water, on the coast of Türkiye. We will be in Türkiye until early June, when we will leave and enter Greece. We can only spend a maximum of 90 days in the EU (Schengen zone), so we are very careful in counting our days.

We are looking forward to our 2024 adventures, good sailing and experiencing Turkish and Greek culture.