Back in January I pruned my vines carefully so that they would grow the most grapes that they could. I do it every year now, I don’t want the vines to extend any more so it seems obvious to go for the most grapes. Well this year it has worked a treat because it looks as though I’m going to have the biggest crop ever.
The annual Kaş Festival started yesterday so I had a look and took a few photographs. It will be continuing for the rest of the weekend so I’ll be taking a lot more.
The opening ceremony included a demonstration of Greek dancing by a troupe from Meis, a couple of the young men were throwing themselves into the air rather spectacularly, made me think back to the time I used to do Zorba’s Dance in Cyprus thirty years ago.
A lot of visitors came over from Meis for the occasion and although we often hear a Greek voice here in the market it is nice to hear so many all at once among the crowd in the square.
Recently there has been a public airing of disapproval at the government attempt to ride roughshod over public opinion regarding lifestyle in Turkey. There have been demonstrations in many cities and towns and Kaş has been no exception. After the dancing and the formal opening ceremony a small group continued to voice their disapproval. In typical Kaş fashion this was done in a very refined and polite way accompanied by gentle applause from the throngs of tourists and locals out for the evening.
A modern dance group from the Turkish State Ballet in Istanbul performed a series of wonderful dance routines at the ancient Greek theater and received a standing ovation at the end.
Hopefully there will be more to post about from this evenings entertainment and tomorrow (Sunday) the annual Meis to Kaş swimming race will take place starting at 8am. Looking forward to seeing that.
This time of year is breeding time for the Loggerhead turtles here on the Mediterranean beaches. After a struggling up the beach at night to dig a hole the female turtles lay their eggs in the sand and cover up the hole. They make an effort to dig the hole far enough away from the water for the sand to be dry and warm enough to incubate their eggs. In this picture you can see the tracks that the turtle made as she came and went, the eggs were laid where the two tracks met. I’m not sure which track is the coming and which the going one but they must have only been made a day or two before I saw them.
This is Rami on the beach at Demre, he is a research assistant and was going round measuring the temperature of each of the nests, there are ten on this beach. On the 7Km beach at Patara he said there are over one hundred nests.
The eggs take between forty and forty five days to hatch, I hope they are all successful and the babies can find their way to the sea for their epic journeys around the world’s oceans before they come back to breed here again. It was wonderful to see this activity that I had only ever seen on television before.
You’ll notice that I used the plural in the title, recently the car and the scooter both had to be tested so I have been able to try out the new system that is employed for us now. We have a bright shiny new testing station to take our vehicles to, unfortunately for us it is 44 Km away by the junction for Patara, an ancient Lycian site which also happens to have a nice 7 Km sandy beach where turtles lay their eggs. This distance is not a problem if I take my car because the car is relatively comfortable but on the scooter it’s a bum-numbing trip and shakes your insides up a lot. The springs and shock absorbers must be on a racing set-up or they expect two (or three) people to be on board, it nearly shakes the scooter to bits too.
Anyway I made it over there with the car a few weeks ago, I only had to wait a couple of minutes because there was only one other car there. Unfortunately it failed for cracked brake hoses on the rear but I found a place to get them done and took it straight back to the tester and he passed it. Very quick, I got there about 9am and arrived back home at 11.30 or so.
Today was a little tedious because I seemed to be waiting for a lot longer but maybe it was just feeling all shaken up by the ride over there. I didn’t have to get anything repaired though and was still back home at 11.30. A couple of my friends were there getting their scooters done too so I had someone to chat to. Here’s a photo of the new station.
Ooooh! Dead flower stems…..my favourites! Yum yum…..
Mustafa the kamyoncu (truck driver), an old friend of mine here, was telling me how his daughter Merve needed a computer for part of her studies. He was trying to see if I could help him decide on what kind to get for her, he has no experience of computers at all. After I talked to Merve about it I thought it would be a good way to dispose of my old laptop. It needed a new key, which I ordered online, and I gave it a good clean but I’m happy to say that it now has a good home. It won’t win any awards but it might help her with English, it runs XP and has an English keyboard, no wireless card (it’s ten years old), no camera, but as a first computer it will help. Actually the English version of XP might be better than the Turkish as a number of Turkish friends have said that they don’t understand the Microsoft translations for actions.
The donkey, I called her Fiona, is enjoying her stay with me and I’m discovering little bits of her character now. She likes to come and stand by the house in between bouts of feeding and stamps her foot when she wants some attention. I give her a carrot in the mornings for breakfast and she noticed one sticking out of my pocket the other day as I was taking her down the garden so she came up close behind me and pulled it out and ate it. I had noticed that her hooves are a little bit overgrown so I wanted to get a couple of tools to help me trim them. I have never been a farrier and didn’t know the slightest thing about how to go about it but all you have to do to learn something these days is look on Youtube. Yes there are instructional videos even on trimming donkey hooves! Well I asked one of the market traders to get me a couple of things, describing what I wanted to do stretched my Turkish a bit but in the end he understood. There are traders that sell what I call “village tools”, implements to do all the things that village men and women do, things like a spike with a swivel with a chain that you can stick in the ground and tether your donkey to so it won’t tangle the chain up, or a tara, like a machete but the curve goes inwards like a billhook, it’s used for general cutting of the bushes that grow all over the countryside here. Well this guy didn’t have the tools I wanted but said he would bring them and he did. One of them was a big rasp, a very coarse file for trimming and smoothing the hoof after it’s been cut, the other was probably the most dangerous hand tool I’ve ever seen. Here’s a picture.
It’s almost designed to slash your wrist for you. This is a right handed model, I assume left handed ones are available too. Actually I think he had it made specially for me. To use it you lift the donkey’s hoof and cradle it in your left hand with your thumb alongside your other fingers to keep it out of the way. Then you sharply hack at the bottom of the hoof in an attempt to remove shavings. This means that the (extremely) sharp blade is pulled directly towards your exposed inner forearm so that the outer corner of the blade is in exactly the right position to sever the arteries and veins near your wrist. I have used all sorts of tool all my life, both in work and play but a more effective tool for committing accidental suicide or at least giving yourself a serious injury I have never seen. It was obvious too that the market trader was aware of the dangers of using it because he warned me at great length, clearly the reputation of this thing is well known. Actually I don’t like the method at all, I’m not a fan of tools used in a hacking or hitting manner and I won’t be using it, a nice sharp pair of cutters will do the job much more accurately and with less danger to everyone involved. The rasp has proved to be a bit of fun though. Maybe it tickles the feet but as soon as I finish using it Fiona is off, jumping, skipping and running around and the dogs join in the fun. Of course it could also be the removal of all the stones and dirt from the recesses of the hoof that make her feel good, imagine if you were walking around with three or four sharp stones in your shoes all day, wouldn’t you jump for joy when someone took them out for you?
I had a trip over to Meis island a few days ago and before we left it was interesting to see the boats in Kaş harbour being prepared for the new season. Here’s a really cute looking little gulet looking all shipshape and ready for her owners to enjoy the summer.
My favourite of the bigger boats is this one, she has lovely sweeping lines and a very purposeful air about her.
Coming into Meis harbour it was easy to see that they have been preparing for the new season too. Lots of new paint and an air of expectation about town.
But the streets were nearly empty
and the day trippers from our ferry we were almost the only ones there.
Walking around the back streets I saw this tree that had just come into leaf on a balcony
and this heap of soil that had thousands of nasturtiums all over it making a bright show.
My garden has taken on the air of a farmyard today, that description includes the smell. My neighbours left their donkey to eat the weeds a few days ago and I suggested they leave it with me on a more permanent basis because I’ve noticed that it doesn’t get much good stuff to eat. It has to make do with whatever is growing along the roadside, in a few weeks it will be sparse and dried out so my garden will be perfect as we head into summer. I am pleased about it because I can use the manure on the bits I want to encourage too.
I should point out for anyone worried that it is not eating the oleander that is next to it.
Then this morning young Hassan brought their two goats to browse in the corner where there is a lot of young scrub oak (maquis) which they love.
Finally, Aslan turned up, he came bounding up the drive full of the joys of spring and obviously feeling fit and healthy after his bout of sickness. It is heartening to see his recovery and to know that the medication I gave has made a difference.
Just a short update to say that I hadn’t seen Aslan for week since taking him back to his owners. I hoped everything was okay and they were giving him the tablets every day. Well I saw him yesterday evening just as I was going out and he was jumping around in the road outside my place and trying to get me to play with him. He is obviously a lot better, his skin seems to have lost it’s tendency to flake off but he has bare patches which I assume will eventually regrow. The way he jumped around meant that his feet must have been better too, his eyes are still a bit weepy but then they always seemed a bit like that anyway. He generally seems full of the joys of spring, I’m more than pleased.
I was down in Kaş this afternoon enjoying the warmth when a big cloud came over the horizon to sit right on top of me. Just as I pushed the door to the bank to pay my monthly Social Security Health payment my phone rang. I saw that it was a friend of mine in my village and when I answered she had bad news for me. My white dog, Molly, was round at her house and had been chased there by a very angry village woman shouting and screaming.
Dogs that upset the local domestic animals don’t last long here, so I was dismayed to hear that Molly had been caught red handed, more correctly yellow mouthed by the owner of chickens. It seems she had discovered where the chickens laid their eggs and had been seen with yolk dripping from her mouth. Normally she looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and won’t touch anything edible in my house unless I first put it in her dinner bowl or physically give it to her.
She has made a serious error of judgement this time.
Luckily the woman who owns the chickens (her name is Safiye) is a neighbour and friend of mine and I have bought some eggs to replace the ones eaten. I don’t know how many Molly ate but I bought a couple of dozen so hopefully that will placate Safiye and compensate her for the eggs.
Molly is going to have to have some training in order to teach her to leave the eggs alone, I don’t know how I’m going to do it, hopefully I can find some ideas or lessons on the internet but if not I’ll just have to come up with something myself. Wish me luck.
While I’m talking about dogs I thought I’d update the story last week about Aslan. I took him to the vet in Kalkan a few miles away for some tests and it was found that he has a disease called Leish Maniasis. This is a particularly nasty disease that dogs can suffer from and if not treated it can kill them. All the symptoms that he had are typical of the disease and Hasan the vet had no trouble in diagnosing him, he even had a little blood test specifically designed to confirm it. That was very disappointing but I bought the necessary medication from the pharmacy and started him on it then took him back to my neighbours and showed them how to administer the pills. There is sufficient medication to last for a month and I’ll get some more, it’s not expensive, when this lot runs out. We’ll just have to wait and see how he does.
Spring is with us again and we’ve just had the almond blossom decorating the village. There are thousands of almond trees in the village and great drifts of white and pink could be seen from my house. They only look a kind of muddy grey until you get closer so here’s a picture to show you what it’s like, one of mine in close-up and in the background an example of what the rest of the village looks like.
All of the other trees are budding or bursting their buds, it’s great to see all this growth in spring, easy to understand why so many people used to worship the spring Gods. On the other hand all the weeds are growing at an alarming rate, I’m going to have to get out the strimmer pretty soon.
For the last few days I’ve had a visitor, Aslan, my neighbour’s dog, he’s been sleeping on my front step on a big cushion I gave him. He has been very unwell and I’ve been trying to nurse him back to health. I gave him worming tablets, eye drops, antiseptic on two of his paws and some stuff get rid of fleas and ticks. He is very much brighter today and has a bowl of chicken soup this afternoon in addition to breakfast and dinner that I give him anyway. He needs building up since the worms sapped all of his strength and every time he shakes himself clouds of dried skin fly all over the place.
My dogs usually play with him but won’t go near him at the moment. After I gave him the chicken soup he followed me down the garden when I went to check on the fruit tree buds then he had a roll around in the long grass and made a nest to have a sleep in the warm sun. He’s not a pretty or handsome dog, in fact he doesn’t look very nice at all especially with that spiked collar my neighbour insists that he wears, but he is a big softie really.
Red sky at night shepherds delight.
That’s how the old English weather forecasting lore goes, well we’ve just had two days of beautiful sunshine so it works for Turkey too by the look of it.
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