Of the good ship Çankaya 3 and her awful, awful captain.
This post will be a bit of a rant so bear with me (or just skip ahead to the photos)...
So, the captain on my cruise was a total f'ing a-hole (pardon my french) and tried his hardest to ruin what would otherwise have been a perfect four days. At the end of the trip there was not one person on our boat who wasn't left with sour feelings. In fact one couple is off for another blue voyage on-the-house after they complained to the tour company. From talking to other travellers it seems our experience was almost unique although one other group was told by their captain that ours has a bit of a reputation as a jerk even among the other crews.
It all started shortly after we got on the boat when it turned out that the promised cheap drinks were actually going to cost more than 2x what any other boat was charging (we checked and in fact several of us swam over to other boats moored nearbye to buy drinks on the afternoon of the first day). A call to the captain from our tour company got him partially straightened out and got the drink prices dropped from outrageous/criminal to just expensive (he still wouldn't go all the way down to the correct price even after the tour company promised to 'reimburse' him for the difference) but by that point the bad vibes had pretty much set in for good.
On day 2 things got even worse as the captain refused to put in at most of the advertised stops and offered a steady stream of lies about bad weather than never seemed to materialize by way of explanation. I was only mildly disappointed about the stops we skipped that day however many of the others on the boat were counting on seeing some of them and were royally ticked off.
To top it off he tried to impress us that evening by abusing the most junior member of the crew and regaled us with tales of the time he'd beaten the poor guy so badly he couldn't get out of bed for three days. All in all a truly lovely individual.
Finally on the last day the captain again skipped everything and made a beeline for the harbor, cutting the trip short by over 3 hours. When it came time to pay he accused everybody of lying about how much they had to drink and tried to get everyone to pay for double the drinks each of us actually had. I guess when you are as comfortable with lying as he was you assume that everyone acts the same. Or something. In my case he also tried to keep my change. I pretty much told him what I thought of him at that point and had to drag each lira out of him one by one.
[/end rant]
All that said, I still managed to have a mostly great time on the cruise (day 3 was just about perfect as far as I was concerned). The boat itself was great, the rest of the crew was very pleasant, and the food was absolutely fantastic. On top of that I could not possibly have had a more pleasant group of fellow voyagers to spend the four days with.
Anyway, on to the photos. I didn't take as many as I would have liked but here's a sampling...
Day 1:
Day 2:
Day 3:
Day 4:
In other news, I'm in Olympos now. Although I'd only planned on staying here for a couple nights I can already tell that plan is pretty much shot.
Update: Since I put up this post the company that ran my tour has gone to extraordinary efforts to make things right. Everyone on my boat has been offered their choice of a 50% refund or another trip for free. This even applied for those people (such as me) who had actually booked with a different company but were transferred to this boat last minute in Fethiye. Pretty amazing that they would go that far with no attempt to pass the buck on to the other cruise companies. Oh, and they've also said they're terminating their contract with the captain as well. This whole bad experience really seems to have been a one-off and I just happened to be unlucky enough to be on the wrong boat.
So, the captain on my cruise was a total f'ing a-hole (pardon my french) and tried his hardest to ruin what would otherwise have been a perfect four days. At the end of the trip there was not one person on our boat who wasn't left with sour feelings. In fact one couple is off for another blue voyage on-the-house after they complained to the tour company. From talking to other travellers it seems our experience was almost unique although one other group was told by their captain that ours has a bit of a reputation as a jerk even among the other crews.
It all started shortly after we got on the boat when it turned out that the promised cheap drinks were actually going to cost more than 2x what any other boat was charging (we checked and in fact several of us swam over to other boats moored nearbye to buy drinks on the afternoon of the first day). A call to the captain from our tour company got him partially straightened out and got the drink prices dropped from outrageous/criminal to just expensive (he still wouldn't go all the way down to the correct price even after the tour company promised to 'reimburse' him for the difference) but by that point the bad vibes had pretty much set in for good.
On day 2 things got even worse as the captain refused to put in at most of the advertised stops and offered a steady stream of lies about bad weather than never seemed to materialize by way of explanation. I was only mildly disappointed about the stops we skipped that day however many of the others on the boat were counting on seeing some of them and were royally ticked off.
To top it off he tried to impress us that evening by abusing the most junior member of the crew and regaled us with tales of the time he'd beaten the poor guy so badly he couldn't get out of bed for three days. All in all a truly lovely individual.
Finally on the last day the captain again skipped everything and made a beeline for the harbor, cutting the trip short by over 3 hours. When it came time to pay he accused everybody of lying about how much they had to drink and tried to get everyone to pay for double the drinks each of us actually had. I guess when you are as comfortable with lying as he was you assume that everyone acts the same. Or something. In my case he also tried to keep my change. I pretty much told him what I thought of him at that point and had to drag each lira out of him one by one.
[/end rant]
All that said, I still managed to have a mostly great time on the cruise (day 3 was just about perfect as far as I was concerned). The boat itself was great, the rest of the crew was very pleasant, and the food was absolutely fantastic. On top of that I could not possibly have had a more pleasant group of fellow voyagers to spend the four days with.
Anyway, on to the photos. I didn't take as many as I would have liked but here's a sampling...
Day 1:
Day 2:
Day 3:
Day 4:
In other news, I'm in Olympos now. Although I'd only planned on staying here for a couple nights I can already tell that plan is pretty much shot.
Update: Since I put up this post the company that ran my tour has gone to extraordinary efforts to make things right. Everyone on my boat has been offered their choice of a 50% refund or another trip for free. This even applied for those people (such as me) who had actually booked with a different company but were transferred to this boat last minute in Fethiye. Pretty amazing that they would go that far with no attempt to pass the buck on to the other cruise companies. Oh, and they've also said they're terminating their contract with the captain as well. This whole bad experience really seems to have been a one-off and I just happened to be unlucky enough to be on the wrong boat.
2 Comments:
So are you taking the refund or the free trip???
I took the refund. Wasn't quite ready to hop right back on the boat.
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