Istanbul, Turkey: The Bosporus, this narrow channel between Asia and Europe, must be some of the busiest water anywhere, even busier than Hong Kong harbor. At any given moment you can see dozens of boats and ships moving at many different paces. To watch is mesmerizing on this gray, overcast day.
Many of the smaller craft are the equivalent of buses, taking people back and forth across the channel. This is a huge city, something we noted on our last visit here. So the "buses" don't just make one crossing but all sorts of diagonals as well. Relatively few ferries are car carriers, perhaps many of the cars take the new bridge, a great high suspension span.
Generally, the smaller the boat the faster the speed at which it travels. The great ships - cruise liners and freighters - all have a pilot aboard and move quite slowly, especially as they near the dock.
We are one of at least four large cruise ships in port today. One that came in later this a.m. was old - still pretty, still white - but with almost no balconies. The new cruise ships have many balconies; our new ship has a small balcony for every exterior pax cabin. Between us we four ships probably add ten thousand tourists to the local economy, if only for a day.
The really old cruise ships have OPEN lifeboats, basically oversized rowboats. You wouldn't want to spend many hours cooped up in one of those with 60-80 fellow pax. All the modern tenders are enclosed and hold 100-150 pax - they would still be no joyride.
In Naples we were docked alongside the Norwegian Epic - brand new, very large and substantially ugly. It looks like it was put together with Legos. It actually may be quite nice inside. However the Epic has good looking tenders, zoomy and not colored the usual eye-catching Emergency Orange.
