I can think of few vacations more worthwhile than a gulet one week cruise around the coast of Turkey, especially if you like to swim. The gulet yachts are charming, the water astonishingly clear, clean and warm, the food is generally superb, and the cost averages a modest $75 per person per day, full board. I took my second such cruise in early June, just before the temperatures around the Turkish coast hit uncomfortable highs (90+ degree days are not exceptional). The cruise is equally suitable for individuals, couples and families. I cannot recommend them too highly.
But I certainly cannot recommend repeating the specific cruise that I took with Eco Turkey, and the ship Eco Turkey in turn outsourced to: Barbaros Yachting. The trip itself is such a magnificent concept that not even Barbaros’ poor management could spoil it – but they came close.
To begin with, there was no one in our embarkation town of Bodrum – no company representative – no one who knew anything about the cruise – to greet us. We arrived in the early evening, our flight having been delayed, and the office was closed. There was no note on the door with instructions for after hours connection, and no one answered the phone. So we wandered around the harbor for about an hour until, just by sheer happenstance, we ran into someone who could connect us with the company.
The ship itself was identical to dozens of others in the harbor, as was the accommodations. The food was exceptional, as it was on my previous cruise and which I suspect is standard for the dozens of gulets traversing the Mediterranean, but the tall masts on our ship, as on all the others, were there quite frankly simply for show. Though the brochures talk about unfurling the sails, it is so much easier for the captain to just start up the diesel engine, that you’ll never see any of the ships under sail, including ours. That’s a shame, because the ships can certainly move under sail power; we proved this on both of our cruises when we ganged up on the captain and insisted that they unfurl the sails for at least one leg of our journey (but without that pressure, it never would have happened).
The gulet ship provided just one pillow and one towel per person for an entire week — yet with temperatures consistently in the 80’s and 90’s they provided two thick wool blankets! Stupid.
But the two biggest downers for us, and the reasons why we would never recommend this company, was the smoking and the personality of the “cruise director.” All of the crew smoked, and fairly continuously, and even in the airy, open setting of our ship, there was just no way to get away from the smokers. I understand that Turkey is not California, but this is the 21st century, and I thought it outrageous that we would be subjected to this continuous, secondhand smoke. At the very least, smokers might have been restricted to one corner of the ship at certain hours so that the rest of us could get away from them.
The second challenge was the personality of the young cruise director. For no reason that I could discern, he seemed to have a chip on his shoulder throughout the cruise. His immediate, reflective response to almost any query was “No.” One would have to ask him four or five times to get him to do anything, and such little services that he might be prevailed upon to supply were executed at passive-aggressive, glacial speed.
As a guide, he was a complete flop, and the contrast between him and his predecessor on the first cruise was startling. On the first cruise, our guide had several guide-books which he used to take us ashore, whereupon he would lead us to Greek or Roman ruins, several with perfectly intact two millennium old amphitheaters; or an interesting pine forest trail; or a wonderful restaurant, etc. By contrast, the fellow on this cruise barely spoke English and when asked what sites there might be a bit inland, shrugged his shoulders and said “Too far away.”
There are probably well over a hundred gulets cruising the Turkish waters and dozens of companies through which one may book such a trip. I was drawn to this one because of the seemingly environmentally sensitive nature of your come-on brochure, but once on ship, I couldn’t see anything different from the conduct of the other ships in the harbor, not the least of which was their preference for consuming hundreds of gallons of diesel gas rather than using wind power.
One last complaint: our cruise director doled out water in those tiny, one pint plastic bottles. By the end of the cruise we had enough of those which, if recapped with air, could refloat the Titanic. Not very ecological.