Today we had an option to either stay on the Turkish coast or sail over to the Greek island of Symi. As there was good wind forecast for that part of the sea we decided to go for the Symi option.

No wind at the start so we motored so as not to lose time until we found some wind. It continued to build all day until it was touching over 30 knots as we approached the island. 30 knots is plenty and we were well reefed by the time we arrived. An exhilarating ride.
As we are entering a Greek port there is lot of paperwork to do for us and the boat, but we pay an agent to take care of that. All we are left to do is change our courtesy flag from a Turkish one.

To a Greek one

Surprisingly tricky whilst sailing at speed.
Symi is the first real town we have visited this trip, as all the other places have basically been yacht stops that are only open in the season. This is the last week and places are running down  stocks. Symi is a real town and although clearly tourism is big business here, it exists all year around. You can see why it is a huge pull for tourists. Postcard stuff.

Just after we arrived at motor yacht arrived and caused chaos by making a massive wash nearly causing damage to several yachts. If moored yachts roll and clash masts the damage can be huge. Anyway after a pretty frantic 10 minutes  we reset all our moorings and then the ferry showed up….

No sane person would try and get a ship this size into a harbour this size… but they get it in and out calmly with no wash…
The terminal facilities are nonexistent.

People and cars go up and down the ramp in apparently random fashion as people in uniform blow whistles for reasons that are not clear, then 10 minutes later it heads off and postcard normality returns…

Anyway as we have a choice of restaurants tonight we have gone to the one 10 metres behind our boat.

Today we only had a relatively short distance to cover so we headed off in completely the wrong direction.

The reason for this was to try and watch a bit of a “Marmaris Week” race.

We needed to head off to a bay we had planned to snorkel in so we turned down wind the same way the race would go. The difference between pure racing yachts and our cruiser is illustrated by the fact that the leaders started several miles behind and overtook us within an hour.
After 4 hours great sailing we anchored up for some snorkeling.

We took the obligatory fish pictures….

And some video

https://youtu.be/Fj8B0tokptY

Then 15 minutes motoring to our stop for the night. As you enter this bay each of the 5 restaurants has someone stood on their jetty waving a flag to guide you in. The deal is you get free mooring, electricity and water in exchange for eating in their restaurant and shopping in their mini market. With so few people about at the end of the season  competition is fierce any year but the news of the refugee crisis has hit tourism in the whole Eastern Mediterranean hard so it is probably even more fierce this year.

We can’t change the refugee problem but we can at least help the economy while enjoying wonderful food and the odd beer.

This morning we found some more information about the place we are in on a notice board. Here it is.

Today we have quite a long trip 20 nautical miles. This is a trivial distance if the wind plays ball…

The first hour was brilliant. 18 knots of wind and the yacht sailing at a steady 6 knots, more at times. But then it dropped, so rather than waste time we put the engine on and headed for a bay that had been recommended for snorkeling.
The water is a beautiful colour, I think you’d call it azure… We anchored up and got out the giant inflatable Orca, he is called Bernard.

The only slight hitch was that clearly everybody knows about this bay as about 10 other yachts showed up. Not really a problem as their is plenty of room, but as this is the end of the season most places are deserted so it is a bit odd to see so many people together.

Anyway after a swim and a brilliant lunch in the cockpit we set about the other 10 miles we had to sail. The wind remained fickle so we motored for an hour until it picked up and we sailed again. The route we needed to take was dead downwind but the yacht does not go so well like that so we actually sail about 30 degrees away from the course we want to get a better speed even though we go further. We were going to run out of daylight so when the wind dropped we put the sails away and went for the motor again.
We are now near Marmaris and apparently it is Marmaris week with lot of racing going on. Quite a few fast looking yachts about.

We are moored for the night at Kumlubuku yacht club. A very smart place with a Chinese or Turkish menu. I rather feel I should be wearing a blazer.

Here is our track from today. Winds were fairly light and we had quite a long way to go so we decided not to stop at lunchtime. We are moored up for the night in a place called Loryma. The is a citadel above the bay. Started in 400bc but never finished apparently. Here is the view from the citadel down to our boats.

It was a good place to watch the sunset from.

As well as a restaurant here they seem to grow olives. The place is not accessible by road so the sort them by hand, bag them up and then we assume take them out by boat. They have a couple of days work to do here….

Tomorrow is planned as a long days sailing so let’s hope we get a bit more wind…

This is Dalaman, just up the coast from where we will be sailing.
Super efficient new airport, met by a driver and taken 2.5 hours over the mountains to Sogut. This is the back of beyond and then some. Before we left we couldn’t even find it on google maps, but it does exist.

Usually we end up starting from a massive marina where our yacht is one of perhaps a thousand, and have to haul our heavy bags (all clutter we don’t need) to the end of the furthest pontoon… there are about 6 yachts here.. outnumbered by real fishing boats for a change. One supermarket, one restaurant. Here is our boat.

A British registered (Hence the Turkish flag flown as a courtesy not an ensign) 2014 Bavaria 37 called Lady Ann. Very odd thing is that everything on this yacht seems to work….
Dinner in the one restaurant. No menu, they show you the raw food and you choose… Cat very disappointed that we don’t seem to want to feed him.

Our horse and sleigh arrived on schedule to pull us effortlessly to our transfer pick up point, where our minibus arrived on time. There had been a small change of plan and we had been asked to share with another family, but this was not a problem at all. Then things started to go a little less well…. The promised change of weather had arrived and the traffic on the way down was very slow. The family travelling with us were flying to the US were scheduled to fly an hour and half before us, and were getting nervous. An otherwise dull journey was brightened up somewhat by continually checking google maps and the GVA live departure information for their flight to give the latest estimate of whether they were going to make it. In the end they missed it. It was lunchtime, and they faced an afternoon and a night in Geneva, so they resigned themselves to a spot of sightseeing, these things happen after all. At the time we felt very sorry for them.

The next thing to brighten our day was a total failure of the airport check in baggage conveyor system. This presented us with a 2 hour wait with a few hundred other people in ski jackets while airport staff worked hard to marshal people into the right queues, prioritise people on earlier flights and manhandle hundreds of tons of luggage and skis. We made it to through security in time and headed for our gate quickly as instructed. We were not too concerned, these things happen after all.

Arriving at the gate with minutes to spare we noticed a distinct absence of an aircraft. We also noticed that it was snowing really rather hard now, and nothing in the airport was moving. Our friendly snow storm had followed us down the mountain and closed the airport, we were clearly going to be delayed for a few hours, oh well no point getting upset…. These things happen after all.

Refreshment vouchers were handed out…. we had actually just bought lunch and a coffee, so we looked in the cafe / shop where we could spend them and realised that they sold Swiss chocolate, so amused ourselves for a while working out the exact combination to bars to buy with our vouchers to not waste any (you don’t get change), and stashed it in our bags to take home. The afternoon wore one with the usual lack of information, we found out that our plane was at Lyon where it had been diverted, and would soon fly to Geneva and pick us up. More vouchers issued, more chocolate bought (we now had about 1.5KG of the stuff). No point getting upset, these things happen after all. (We learned later that elsewhere in the airport at about this time a fight broke out amongst people queuing to get into the business class lounge….)

Other Heathrow flights came and went, all a few hours delayed, and slowly the departure screens turned from red to green and all the delayed flights were sorted out… ours and a flight to Kiev were the last to be sorted….

We were finally told to move to another gate, and that we would be leaving at 19:00, that will be 5 1/2 hours late then… We grab our bags, now seriously weighed down with chocolate and head for the new gate, where we wait a bit more. Sure enough a plane arrives, and the passengers (who have been sitting on it for a very long time at Lyon), disembark while we wait expectantly. Then the captain appears…. to explain that he is now out of hours and cannot legally fly the plane so they are cancelling the flight, and will reschedule it for the morning. These things really should not happen, airlines have professionals to deal with this kind of event, and they could have predicted that the pilot was going to run out of hours a long time ago.

At this point a number of people became reasonably upset, which is kind of understandable, although not entirely helpful. Neither the laws of civil aviation or physics were changed, and the flight remained firmly cancelled.

We headed off to collect our bags, downstairs in the baggage hall was nightmare of delayed flights arriving, there was no room for any more bags on the carousels so they brought them in one trolley load at a time in a lift… until the lift broke down. They then resorted to sending the bags down one at a time on a conveyor, where they stopped. With no staff around a few of us resorted to picking up the bags and holding them above our heads where the 100 or so assembled people could see them, then passing them through the crowd to the owner. Only by getting the bags off the conveyor could we let the next one down. These things really really should not happen.

We retrieved our last bag at 9:45pm, just over 10 hours after we had arrived at the airport we left again in a taxi, bound for a hotel to grab a few hours sleep before heading back the next morning, to try again. We rechecked our bags, finally got on the plane, and turned up at Heathrow a touch over 21 hours late.

A rather disappointing end to a fantastic holiday.

These things happen.

Our last day, so we decided to ski where others were not and sought out good snow and short queues.

We stopped at a great place for lunch, basically a bunch of enthusiastic guys with a big shed up the mountain, no running water, cheap beer, a great value Plat du Jour, and a Mac on shuffle play hooked up to some big speakers…. My Steak Hache tasted as good as the pretentious one from earlier in the week, but was about half the price on a paper plate with more chips. A dying breed it seems….

The wind was getting up to the point where it was quite unpleasant at the top, and our unbroken run of sunshine was clearly going to come to an end, but the weather held out and we completed the first run of 6 days of clear weather I can remember in a few years (we’ll ignore the light cloud on day 1)

It is interesting to reflect on how little the basics of skiing have changed since we first came here. Skis have gone through a couple of revolutions in terms of design and manufacture, the current generation are a lot easier to ski on, but work on fundamentally the same principals. Clothing has gone through a few fashion iterations, but still works on the same principal. We now all wear helmets, which were unheard of outside of competitions 25 years ago, they now give us somewhere to mount our HD digital movie cameras, a VHS-C camcorder was never going to do that…. People used to make a plan, now they stand around talking to each other on their mobiles trying to figure out where the rest of their party are and where they are meeting for lunch…. The lifts work on exactly the same principals but have been refined to a point where they can move perhaps 10X the number of people per hour on an 8 man express chair than the typical 2 man chairs could. People still push in the lift queues, and it still makes a spectacular mess if you get your skis tangled as you get off. The menus I the restaurants are the same, the currency is different, the wine still tastes as good, and the older I get the better the warm bath at the end of the day feels on my aching muscles.

If you stay in the Portes du Soleil, the thing to do is the circuit, basically a circular route around the lined resorts. There are of course many variations, we chose to go from Avoriaz, to Les Crosets, Champoussin and Morgins on the Swiss side of the border then back in to France at Chatel, and into Avoriaz. If you fail to make it in time for the last lift back to your own valley of course you are faced with a rather long bus ride or an expensive taxi… We cut the corner a bit and did not go down into Les Crosets and Champoussin to make sure we made it back. I have attempted to mark the route in purple below.

Morgins is an old traditional resort and so we had to get a bus from one side to the other. Literally 5 minutes. Frustratingly they don’t pull the buses up right by the lifts, they stop 100m away and make you clump along the road in ski boots. It is bizarre that we can put multi million pound lift systems up breathtaking cliffs, but we don’t seem to be able to paint a bus stop on the road in a convenient place?

Chatel has come up with a particularly extreme solution to the problem, at the top end of the resort they have 2 lifts that take you from one side to the other. Confusingly these lifts go up over a ridge, and then down the other side. We are very used to going up in a chairlift, the sensation of going down again is really very odd. It would probably be pretty disturbing for anyone afraid of heights!

In the evening the resort had a carnival. We checked the tourist information and were told that it would start at 6:15 for a particular hotel. We rushed to get a good spot to watch the fun, but were a little surprised that nobody else had a sense of urgency….. About half an hour later the promised procession appeared. Think a combination of Mardi Gras, Chinese Dragons, the Padstow Obby Os, but all done at -5C on snow in the dark.

Somewhat at random a couple of guys poured some liquid into some metal frames and lit them to make these interesting flaming things (they are about 8 feet height). They tried to stop some small children sledging down a steep slope towards them, but when they carried on anyway nobody seemed to mind.

After a while the dragons arrived to dance by these… Now I am no expert but paper dragons being held aloft by children in ski boots in close proximity to that many flames feels like a bad idea? Anyway, with no unplanned additional fires, they let off some fireworks as a finale. Of course in the UK this would require large amounts of orange fencing, and men in hard hats and yellow jackets, but these seem to not be needed in this part of the world.

We returned to Switzerland, but this time we headed over first thing in the morning. I’d better show you map at this point so some of this makes sense.

You can see Avoriaz in the middle, and Morzine and Les Gets where we skied yesterday off to the right. Les Crosets, is top left. We skied almost to the extreme left of the map, the only thing left was a cable car down to the car park and Champery. This map represents an area about 16km wide by 10km, but is distorted to show the runs and lifts.

There were lots more of the steep well groomed red runs we enjoy so much over here, so lots of fun was had. We came back over a mountain called Chavanette, the site of the famous ‘wall’. According to the sign at the top this is a 330m drop at more than 90%. From the lift up it is just a steep slope covered in huge moguls.

There is a great restaurant at the top, and lunch seemed a much better idea than skiing back down. I ordered a Steak Hache Frites…. Now is it me or is this a bit pretentious for a self service cafe 8000ft up perched on top of a ridge?

It only took a few minutes to turn it into this:

We had arranged to meet some friends later in the afternoon so we skied back into Avoriaz. Stopping at the way at “the igloo” which is a bar constructed of snow and ice, with a collection ofsnow and ice carvings inside… Very odd indeed.

We decided to Ski over to Morzine today. Although in theory linked to Avoriaz you can only ski down to one side of town, and all the skiing we wanted to get to is the other side. As this is a real town with proper roads you have to use  short ride in a shuttle bus. We used to do this all the time, but we are so used to the luxury of ski in ski out places we had forgotten how irritating it is to clump along pavements in ski boots and clamber aboard buses carrying skis. Anyway we made it and took the lift up the other side. Here is the view down.

You can just make out Avoriaz on the skyline just to the left of the larger mountain in the foreground on the right. They have some really nice steep but well groomed red runs here, nobody else seemed to want to ski them so you can still see the tracks from the piste grooming machines.

We skied over to Les Gets, which is another valley over again, I remember this as a small area from when we were here before but with quite a few new lifts there is a huge amount of skiing here. We did not have time to visit mucg of it before we had to head back. There is a lot that is in the trees here, making it all very pretty to look at.

We found a border cross, one of those shaped areas of snow with whoops and jumps… another thing that was unheard of when we first cam here. Anyway, we enjoyed playing on it.

Back to Avoriaz (via another shuttle bus across Morzine and the new cable car). It seems to be a requirement at this time of year that ski resorts put on some sort of show in the evening, starting with a torchlit descent by the instructors (they use LEDs these days, not the actual burning things we had to contend with the couple of time we have skied in torchlit descents). This is followed by some kind of show… Over the years we have seen impressive jumping, including by people inexplicably dressed in animal costumes. But Avoriaz does not really have a suitable bit of snow for that, so instead of that we were treated to a few of the instructors dancing, while a few others waved their (LED) torches….

I hope they pay them well. The ones assigned to handing out the free Vin Chaud probably had the best job….