Our fourth day at sea - Marilyn and Alf

Cargo ship Jacaranda at Izmir (Turkey), 8 july 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We arrived in the port of Izmir, Turkey very late last night and were told that we could go ashore this morning. We actually, left the ship about 8.00 AM and returned at 11.00 AM. Once out of the port, which is no minor challenge being a passenger on a cargo ship, we got a taxi to the centre of Izmir and were dropped off outside the covered bazaar. Despite not having visited Turkey for more than twenty years, nothing seemed to have changed but it soon brought back vivid memories of Istanbul. We were regularly asked:

You want Lacoste t-shirts or Burberry? What do you want? I can take you, show you t-shirts, leather and carpets….

Sadly, all the designer labels looked fake to us, so we bought nothing apart from some excellent freshly squeezed orange juice…

It’s not far to judge a city in a few hours and we hope to explore Turkey more fully on a future visit.

It’s now, 5.00 PM on day four. We are in Izmir, Turkey and should have left for sea some four hours earlier but all afternoon the ship has been loading and unloading cars, ready for being transported. The afternoon in port, it was seriously hot and we spent it in our cabin with the air-conditioning set to high, waiting for the ship to go to sea. Whilst, the life of a busy dockyard was interesting, we were soon wondering how much longer we would be there.

A few hours later, we were back out at sea – all problems were forgotten. The sea has its own special charm. We have just watched the magical sun setting over the sea, with its wonderful array of colours and another beautiful end to a perfect day. Alf had been exploring different camera setttings for sunset photos and settled on manual (a bit of advice from an American in Sorrento). We took the spare time at sea to edit our hundreds of photos – we promise to publish the best in the future.

In Izmir, there were two large cruise ships in dock and whilst on land, it was assumed that we were from one of the cruise ships. Actually, we had disembarked using crew identity papers. We spent dinner debating with Jean Pierre, the other passenger, the differences between a cargo and a regular cruise ship – we shall probably summarize in a later blog.

Tomorrow’s port of call is Alexandria, Egypt.

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