If you’re used to swimming lengths at your local pool, the idea of covering several kilometres a day at sea might seem “daunting”. But on one of SwimTrek’s guided group trips on Turkey’s Turquoise Coast, chances are you’ll not only manage it, but enjoy it too, says Orla Thomas in The Times.
The sea is wonderful – a “vivid blue-green that sparkles invitingly beyond pale shores”, and still balmy in the spring and autumn, when the trips run. Swimmers are divided by speed into groups, each with its own safety boat, so that everyone can go at their own pace.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Swims begin and end on the group’s main boat, a traditional gulet with “top-notch” catering, including plenty of Turkish mezze. There are generally two each day – morning and afternoon – totalling 3km or 6km, depending on the trip chosen. One route passes over the city of Aperlai, which was founded in the third century BC and later abandoned, then pushed beneath the waves by a series of earthquakes.
Floating over its ruins, you feel like “a mermaid who has stumbled on Atlantis”, and afterwards, you can explore parts of the city that remain on land, scattered across a hillside. The swims get more challenging as the week goes on, culminating in a 3km crossing to the Greek island of Kastellorizo.
The trip is “innately social”, with optional dinners out a nice way to get to know your fellow swimmers. There is no attempt to foster a competitive spirit; everyone celebrates each other’s achievements. And swimming with a group is curiously uplifting; as your mind “switches off” and time “flutters away”, you get some inkling of how dolphins might feel in their pods.
Six nights half-board from £1,160pp, based on two sharing (swimtrek.com)
-
How are these Epstein files so damaging to Trump?TODAY'S BIG QUESTION As Republicans and Democrats release dueling tranches of Epstein-related documents, the White House finds itself caught in a mess partially of its own making
-
Margaret Atwood’s memoir, intergenerational trauma and the fight to make spousal rape a crime: Welcome to November booksThe Week Recommends This month's new releases include ‘Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts’ by Margaret Atwood, ‘Cursed Daughters’ by Oyinkan Braithwaite and 'Without Consent' by Sarah Weinman
-
‘Tariffs are making daily life less affordable now’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Train Dreams pulses with ‘awards season gravitas’The Week Recommends Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton star in this meditative period piece about a working man in a vanished America
-
Middleland: Rory Stewart’s essay collection is a ‘triumph’The Week Recommends The Rest is Politics co-host compiles his fortnightly columns written during his time as an MP
-
‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
-
6 homes with fall foliagefeature An autumnal orange Craftsman, a renovated Greek Revival church and an estate with an orchard
-
Bugonia: ‘deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable’Talking Point Yorgos Lanthimos’ film stars Emma Stone as a CEO who is kidnapped and accused of being an alien
-
The Revolutionists: a ‘superb and monumental’ bookThe Week Recommends Jason Burke ‘epic’ account of the plane hijackings and kidnappings carried out by extremists in the 1970s
-
Film reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘The Mastermind’ and ‘Nouvelle Vague’feature A kidnapped CEO might only appear to be human, an amateurish art heist goes sideways, and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ gets a lively homage
-
Book reviews: ‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ and ‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’feature An examination of humanity in the face of “the Machine” and a posthumous memoir from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, who recently died by suicide
