Blue Cruise

The Blue Cruise was the name coined for the traditional cruise route along the South West coast of Turkey between Bodrum and Antalya, famous for its distance far from modern life. With unspoiled nature and the most remarkably clear clean turquoise blue seas of the Aegean and Mediterranean these are some of the safest waters to swim in the world, tideless and calm, with the mostly friendly and benign inhabitants such as dolphins, turtles, shy fish and wary birds.

The Blue Cruise is synonymous with the Bodrum gulet, and really has to be experienced in those beautifully shaped, spacious, wooden boats crafted in Bodrum by boatbuilders who have learnt their craft from previous generations. The generous deck space has been adapted to provide the ideal sunbathing, lounging and dining space on deck. Modern technology now allows for unimaginable degrees of luxury compared to the basic fishing and spongediving boats used by the early pioneers of the 'Blue Cruise'.

The actual name was coined by Azra Erhat, the Turkish woman writer and translator who was one of the pioneering group of artists and writers who came to Bodrum to sail with the writer Cevat Şakır Kabaağaçlı. He had first been sent into exile in Bodrum in the early 1920’s from Istanbul when Bodrum was considered to be at the ends of the earth, so remote with poor road access. But Cevat Şakır loved Bodrum and first talked the fishermen of Bodrum into taking him, then his friends out on their small wooden boats to explore the coast so then he came to be called by his pen name ‘The Fisherman of Halicarnassus’. Erhat described these journeys in her 1962 travel guide book "Mavi Yolculuk" (Blue Cruise), and as she was translating Homer and other classics into Turkish, she and her fellow travellers were fascinated by the rich trove of remains of ancient cities and civilisations along the Gulf of Gokova. The 'Blue Cruise' was first an expedition by boat exploring the history and nature of the coast.