Of Shoes & Ships Pt 2

Chronologically and geographically going backwards! 

Canakkale was our stopping point to get to Gallipoli, which I'll address in a separate post.  A little fishing village made famous by annihilation.  The boats were beautiful, mostly little carbon copies of each other but a really dainty little design, obviously tried and tested for these waters over many lifetimes.  The fish catch is small in quantity and fish size, we find a fish meal consists of half a dozen sardine sized fish unless you want to pay 65Euro a kilo for a large fish cooked especially for you.  

So far in Turkey we have seen no evidence of the large scale, single enterprise production systems as we see at home.  Small farms, individual farmers, small fishing boats, individual fishermen, supplying the local markets, even in Istanbul, although I am sure the supermarkets exist.  The vege man barrows his veges around the town and people buy direct from the cart. A wonderful and a very community minded way to live and shop.  No polystyrene and gladwrap here.

We wander into the backstreets everywhere we go, to see beyond the tourist facade, and always seem to come across the most interesting experiences.  This particular day we found the river, lined with boats... presumably the ones that couldn't afford the flash berths in front of the restaurants in town.  The tenements were here, we passed a mother and her two young girls, both of whom yelled "Hello" very proudly practicing their schoolroom English.  It wasn't until we got about 10m on that we heard the "...money..."; apparently a hasty prompting from their mother to make some profit from the schooling.

In the very welcome shade on the other side of the river, I approached a man working on his boat, and attempted to find out what he was doing.  Immediately we were whisked to the local cafe to share a cup of "cay" (turkish tea) with his mates, including one who spoke passable English. Once they learnt about Grandpa's boat building and Dad's refurbishing  of the Wairiki and building the dinghys, we were bundled into a car and driven across town to the local boat builder.  The reason for the similarity in the boats is simple - there are only two boatbuilders in the region and they are brothers one is in Canakkale.  No plans, they just build one of two designs, in different sizes and some minor variations.  

Fascinating!  After more cay, being shown the boats in construction and serious discussions about timber with Mark, they very proudly brought up the the facebook page, I'll load it later when I have the details with me. We were delivered back to our hotel and they were gone, apparently keen to get back to doing what we'd interrupted.  This is what the Turkish people have been like everywhere - so friendly, approachable and keen to share.