Here begins a series of posts about our archeological cruise in the South Aegean. We flew into Istanbul and then sailed the Wine-Dark Sea, under a Turkish flag.

We began our journey at Gümüşlük, a small fishing village near Bodrum on the Turkish coast.

This isn’t our boat at Gümüşlük. This is someone else’s boat at Gümüşlük. I was so excited when we got to the harbor, I completely forgot to take a picture of our boat.

I did remember to take a picture of our cabin. It was clean for maybe ten minutes after I got this photo, then it was messy for the rest of the cruise.

The crew, on the other hand, kept “The Sun World” spotlessly clean. And they protected our gulet (two-masted Turkish schooner) from being scratched. Here’s Ali, one of our sailors, helping to “park” the gulet at Datça.

Our tour was absolutely lovely. We ate delicious food every day–stuffed eggplants and grilled fish and kabobs and fresh melons and tzatziki and tea–and we swam and kayaked in the glittering waters nears Tilos, Nisyros, and the Datça Peninsula. There was lots of archeology whenever we went on shore: more about that in future posts.

We generally cruised along on fuel, mainly to keep up with our schedule. But there were plenty of other people sailing in the Aegean, like these guys we passed near Gyali, an island made entirely of pumice from the volcano on nearby Nisyros.

I liked everything about our gulet, but I was happiest when we got to sail.