In Turkey, adventure travel takes the plunge

Honestly, I didn’t think our Mediterranean vacation could get much better.  The dozen of us on the trip had already swum several miles a day through astonishing turquoise waters off Kas, a remote village on Turkey’s southwest coast, where cliffs soar up from the sea, the soft air is scented with jasmine and views of […]

Honestly, I didn’t think our Mediterranean vacation could get much better.  The dozen of us on the trip had already swum several miles a day through astonishing turquoise waters off Kas, a remote village on Turkey’s southwest coast, where cliffs soar up from the sea, the soft air is scented with jasmine and views of the glimmering bay are downright therapeutic.
Amid a ring of seven islands earlier in the week, our group of open-water swimmers glided alongside limestone coastlines, the sunlight spangling the underwater landscape of smooth boulders and serrated pillars. We swam over marine forests swaying in the current. We crossed into the open sea, pulling rhythmically through a panorama of royal blue, a laser show of sunbeams funnelling into a gleaming ring in the depth.
“It’s like swimming in the sky,” my reluctant-swimmer wife, Susan, would say later in our breezy hotel room.
Susan; our daughters, Jenna and Michaela; and I were on a weeklong adventure – a swim vacation. It is a puzzling thing to many but is slowly gaining popularity among water lovers. The tours are a tiny sliver of one of the fastest-growing segments of tourism, so-called adventure travel, which typically involves some sort of physical activity, connection with nature and cultural immersion. Think of trekking through gorilla habitats in Rwanda or kayaking down the River Kwai in Thailand – the antithesis of a package tour to Las Vegas.
We swam about 1.5 miles each morning and afternoon, in translucent waters under mighty peaks. We savoured local dishes like the squid our hosts caught in the sea and grilled on the boat. We stroked over ancient ruins by day and danced with young Turks by night.
The dozen of us who signed up – ages 17 to 65, some occasional swimmers, others training for big races – made our own way to Turkey. SwimTrek, the British company running the tour, took care of the rest: the lifeguard guides, the family-run hotel, the local tour boat, the spectacular routes.
Now, we were on the final leg of our longest single swim, a 5K international crossing from a large rock near the Greek island of Meis to the Kas peninsula, our guide Bruce Allender leading the way in a dinghy. I cruised through the pack looking for our daughters and saw them swimming side by side at the front.
Ever since they were young, I had been trying to get these two to love swimming as much as I do. Both had reluctantly agreed to swim on their high school teams, but had no interest in chlorinated laps as young adults, now in their mid-20s. They didn’t like swimming in lakes or at the beach, either, with little tolerance for critters, waves or cool, dark water.
I steered in between them, smiling in the clear, blue-green sea. We were arcing our cupped hands into the water in unison, catching views of one another with each breath. It was bliss.
And it was followed by another magical moment, when I swam the next day in sync with a large sea turtle that surely was inviting me to hitch a ride.
Not everything was perfect, of course. I would have preferred actually stepping onto the isle of Meis to start the Greece-to-Turkey swim instead of hopping from the boat a long way offshore. (That shore-to-shore crossing is undertaken by locals in an annual race in June – and at night by refugees passing through Turkey to seek asylum in Greece. Ali Gumrukcu, the captain of the daily ferry between Kas and Meis, said that of the roughly 400 refugees crossing the water into Greece each month, most of them from Syria, 10 to 20 brave the swim, waiting for nights with no moonlight so they would be undetected.)
There were confusing moments when a local competitor of SwimTrek veered his big boat toward one of our dinghies and yelled threats. And then there were the two fighting dogs that crashed through the doorway of a dance bar and nearly bowled me over.
Like most people, we had never heard of a swim vacation. When Jenna visited us in London in 2014 and arranged a hiking tour in Portugal, I wondered if there was such a thing for swimming, too. We went online and, sure enough, several companies offered trips.
“Every couple of weeks or months I’ll learn about a new form of travel and this is one I wasn’t aware of,” said Shannon Stowell, who has been president of the 1,130-member Adventure Travel Trade Association for 12 years.
His association, based in Seattle, jointly published the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s latest global report on adventure tourism. It noted how spending had surged in recent years as travellers increasingly sought authentic experiences in remote locales. Swimming wasn’t on the association’s list of 34 adventure activities, from backpacking to caving to safaris. But swim tours, he said, are in sync with the growing number of people and travel businesses customizing trips and combining interests like hiking and bird-watching, cycling and wine. “It’s engaging in immersive experiences,” Stowell said. It’s “so much more meaningful than the highly packaged tours.”
Simon Murie came up with the idea for SwimTrek in 2000, when he spent a week organizing a trip to Turkey to swim the Hellespont, the fabled stretch of water between Europe and Asia described by Lord Byron and prominent in Greek mythology. The logistics were such a hassle he figured that others would be interested in the trip if someone else did all the work and they could just turn up and swim. He led his first tour in 2003, island-hopping in Greece. Since then, Murie said, the business has grown from 90 swimmers a year to more than 2,500 taking trips to more than 30 locations around the globe, including the Hellespont in late August.
Interest in open-water swimming enjoyed a boost when it was added to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and open-water races around the globe are flourishing. Several companies are adding swim tours, some in Turkey.
“It’s going to be the next hot swimming spot, we think,” said Hopper McDonough, who runs the American company SwimVacation, which this year added a Turkish coast swim tour to its Hawaii and yacht-based British Virgin Islands trips.
Kas, which dates back to antiquity and has a bohemian vibe, is popular with swimmers because of the dramatic setting of mountains and Mediterranean – its waters clean, calm and free of Jet Skis and sharks. It became popular with backpackers in the 1980s, later with divers, now with swimmers.
People who take these tours have at least two common bonds – swimming and a sense of adventure. Our group included a British design engineer, a Swedish geologist, a retired molecular biologist from New Zealand, a 30-something Irish couple, who did the Ironman 140.6-mile triathlon in 2014, an English investor training for the Ironman and his 17-year-old daughter. We all hit it off right away.
Isabelle Hirt, 39, an anesthesiologist living in Switzerland, signed up for her third SwimTrek Mediterranean tour of the year while on the Kas trip.
We started with a briefing under a rising full moon at a table outside our hotel. Our guides, Bruce, an Australian masters swimming coach, and Alice Williams, a British beach lifeguard, explained that we would be divvied up into three teams based on speed and that we’d never be more than a moment or two away from our escorts in boats.
Our 7:30 a.m. orientation swim, hopping from a deck on the limestone ridge into jade-green water 20 feet deep, was meant to assess our abilities. But something was strange. The water was a bit cool, then suddenly ice-cold in large patches and blurry, as if baby oil had been poured in. We were swimming through what locals call sweet water, percolating down from mountaintops, pouring out cold and mineral rich through rock just below the surface.
After breakfast at the hotel (weak coffee, delicious local tomatoes), we trooped down the narrow brick streets flanked by low-rise apartments and hotels, their balconies draped with thick strands of pink, white and blue bougainvillea.
Under a hot sun at the harbour, we stepped onto the gullet – a 46-foot cross between a tiny yacht and a giant pontoon – owned and piloted by Mustafa and Zeynep Sarıca. We motored 25 minutes to a peninsula. The sea was a slightly chilly 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Our three groups stuck close to the rocky coastline to avoid the current. At times we swam a foot or two above the cragged shelves of submerged rock, as if soaring over canyons. We would swim about 20 minutes and stop to rest and drink from water bottles or to check out a turtle floating below, some passing trumpet fish or another otherworldly seascape.
When we emerged onto the teak-slatted deck after an hour or so, me shivering, hot tea never tasted better. The grilled chicken and fresh salads prepared by Zeynep for lunch seemed more flavourful. Later, Bruce and Alice videotaped our strokes from above the water and below for technique pointers. Jane Evans, from outside of Dublin, joked that in Ireland they say there are 50 shades of green; here, there are 50 shades of blue.
One of my favourite routes was the archipelago swim. One minute we were peering underwater at the waves plowing fizzily into an island’s limestone bank; the next, we were in open sea more than 100 feet deep, as if drifting through an indigo dome, with no bottom in sight.
The day with the most variety was our swim and hike at the ruins of Aperlai, which long ago made a rare purple dye for the Roman empire. An earthquake about A.D. 600 submerged part of the town, and we swam over the outlines of the storehouses for the shells that held the prized pigment.
On the way to the ruins, tilting my head to breathe on the right, the view reminded me of the Delaware Water Gap in the Poconos, the dark green mountainside towering against the bright blue sky. Breathing to the left, I was back in the Mediterranean, the shoreline hemmed by thick ridges of white and gray limestone that sloped into the crystalline water.
Climbing up a steep, rock-rutted trail, we stopped to inspect large stone tombs with curved lids and posed for group pictures against ancient crumbling walls. From the highest point on the hill, the shallow bay was a kaleidoscope of aquamarine and electric blue, the boat like a little toy in the water below.
On the last full day of swimming, I was exploring an azure bay after lunch when I came across a dark circle, maybe 25 feet below. I took a deep breath and scooped down through the water, every 6 feet or so pinching my nose and blowing out to pop my ears – a tip I got from Mike, the retired scientist.
A geometric pattern of a shell sharpened as I descended to the floor, and I fanned my fingers across its ridges. The turtle rose up slowly as I rushed to the surface for air. When I came back under it was floating as if in slow motion, flapping prehistoric-looking fins, banking to the left. I glided above, mimicking its underwater flight, as sunlight flickered across its shield.
We swam for eight minutes, me several feet above, plunging down to rub its shell. The turtle kept close. It was almost as if it were welcoming me to latch on. So I did. For three rides, several seconds each, swooping through an ocean of velvety blue.
Distributed by The New York Times