Turkey

1987 -- Turkey was the most gorgeous country. The people were wonderful, the place was lovely, and we had fun here; a lot. Of course there were bad things … like that ABBA tape that was stolen, much to my mother's dismay. She really liked that tape and was not impressed when it was nicked one day.

What I thought funny was Ismael. He wanted to hold hands with Phil—in his culture, men do so. Phil was seriously freaked by this and kept snatching his hand out of reach. Sooo funny.

Here we met Gemma, unfortunately. Less said about her the better. But since people want to know anyway, she was nine at the time, and we believed the sun shone out of her arse for a while. She'd take us ashore and play with us, but she was pretty spoiled. One of the things she would do was hurt us physically somehow on purpose and then say "I didn't mean to". Every time Damien or I would go to an adult to complain, her excuse was that it was an accident and she didn't mean it. After a while ma caught on and we stopped playing with her. Also spoke to her mother concerning her behaviour, but she consistently insisted that they were accidents. A very accident-prone child, she was. Interesting how stones would somehow "accidentally" fly from her hand and connect with our foreheads. Yeah.

Down the coast some from our first anchorage, we encountered a bay in which a local family lived. They wanted us to stay there. They made olive oil—I got to see them start from picking olives to the pure oil pouring out. Phil went boar hunting with them and took his bow. He didn't get to use it, but he brought one back nevertheless. Someone gave it to him.

At the bay, a man nearly died doing deep diving. He was in too deep or something, and when he came up he had seizures. Everyone was worried about him, but luckily he got better. They were diving for some produce … can't remember what it was now. But it was part of what they sold, and apparently they lost people to the diving frequently enough that they weren't surprised and they knew what to do.

It was a lovely place, and we definitely enjoyed the abundance of yoghurt that ma insisted on buying at every turn.