Day 143: Friday 8 August – Another Quiet Day In Kaş, by Ken

As last night we awoke during the night feeling cold and slept the remainder of night in Mabel.

There was no sign of the bird that mimicked a cat yesterday morning, but a couple of cats dropped by to see Jane. One was a tortoiseshell with one yellow eye and one grey, the other cat was black. Jane lived up to their expectations that had undoubtedly been telegraphed ahead by other cats Jane had befriended on our travels. It wasn’t long before there was a bowl of bread soaked in milk for them. To Jane’s disappointment they liked the milk, but turned their noses up at the bread.

Here's Jane's latest feline friends:

At 9:00 we had a good iChat with Harry and Ella. Although they lost the picture from Turkey we were still able to see them OK. They looked up Kaş and seemed genuinely surprised at how far we had travelled since last chatting from Ioannina in western Greece. It was good to hear that Ella’s travelling had stopped and there seems to be a good forward workload to keep her in Wellington for some time to come. Harry was busy with varsity and his one-on-one coaching of Wellington College’s 2^nd XI. We also caught glimpses of a sleek looking Ziggy which Harry ascribed as due to lots of exercise chasing balls on Tinakori Hill (or whatever it’s called these days). Chewy and Kobe also made appearances and seem to have grown significantly since we left.

After our hour long chat we returned to the Gecko café for breakfast. We both opted for goats cheese and tomato omelette. I had tea with mine, Jane wentfor OJ in ieu of the Turkish coffee she had yesterday.

Dive Boat Heading Out

Then it was back to Mabel where I spent the rest of the day working on the blog while Jane snoozed and read.

Contemplative Jane

Blogger At Work

I have been wondering for a while now what happens to the sewage from camping grounds like Kas Kamping situated on the sea shore. As I sat outside working on the blog the camping ground manager appeared and lifted a piece of timber partially covering a manhole behind Mabel, then he looked out to sea, lifted the cover on an adjacent manhole, looked out to sea again and then walked off. Perhaps it pays not to wonder too much about these things?

Lunch was bread, cheese, olive pesto and a peach.

Jane was going to take me for a bob in the sea having really enjoyed a number of swims over the last three days. Jane enjoys swimming but likes to have company. I don’t have the Perrott swim genes but can float and get myself around in sea water. So, as a compromise, we go out for a ’bob’ together, so named after the Greek practice of bobbing about offshore, usually while wearing a hat. Unfortunately, the wind got up during the afternoon and the sea became too rough for a bob. The dive boat returned early, then headed towards Kaş and didn’t return, possibly it was taking shelter, or maybe it had a problem.

We Were Going To Bob Out To The Line Of Buoys, But The Sea Became Too Rough

It was my turn to cook and I prepared a sauce of garlic, onion, anchovies and tomatoes, both tinned and sun-dried to eat with pasta. By the time I had finshed Jane was feeling less than ideal and we saved the sauce for another day. Instead we nibbled on some savoury olive biscuits bought a while back in Athens.

It seemed that our visit to the lands of the Greek philosophers was having its effect, because we began a philosophical discussion as we watched the evening light fade over the gulf and its islands. First point under consideration was how big an island would the pooh generated by the average human over a lifetime create. I thought it would be akin to one of the small islands we could see offshore, Jane was skeptical. Googling the subject revealed it wouldn’t be much of an island - something like 4 tonnes in a lifetime.  Next, our massive minds turned to wee, that was also disappointing as my thought that it would be enough to make a large lake was wildly optimistic, or encouraging we thought, if you happen to be caught short some ways from a toilet. Apparently it would take 61 humans to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool over their lifetimes. While there is no way of verifying that statistic, it being unlikely that anyone would make an Olympic sized pool available, but even if they did, we thought it would be difficult to find 61 people willing to spend their lives peeing into it. We tried to calibrate it in other ways and concluded the numbers must be wrong, in particular Jane thought I must have drunk the equivalent of an Olympic pool full of beer in my life to date.

With such esoteric matters resolved we returned to our books. As it grew dark we heard the sound of a flute wafting up from the rocks somewhere below us. It sounded quite magical in the still evening air.

The process of pondering some weighty topics during the evening had taken its toll and it wasn’t long before we were asleep on our camp stretchers.