Koycegiz Lake by Sunset and Moonlight: A Quieter Evening

Ask for an evening boat in Dalyan and you will be offered two quite different things under one heading. One runs down into the delta for a couple of hours and comes home under the lit cliff. The other turns the opposite way, up through the reed channels and out onto Koycegiz Lake, and stays out a good deal longer.

This page is mostly about the second, which is the one people mean when they use the word romantic, and about the few decisions that make it work: which direction, which night, and what you have arranged for afterwards.

Two boats, two evenings, one word

The short version is the delta run. About two hours, no swim, no meal, out past the cliff and back with the light behind you. It is the more dependable of the two and it goes out on more evenings of the year.

The long version goes upstream instead. It threads the channels where the reeds stand taller than the wheelhouse, comes out onto the open lake, stops the engine in the middle of it, and usually calls at the thermal water on the far shore before turning for home. Three to four hours rather than two, and you land in the dark either way.

To our mind the delta run is the better two hours and the lake run is the better evening. Settle which of them you are buying before you agree to anything, because they are advertised in almost identical language and the difference is half a night.

The lake at seven is not the lake at two

In the middle of a July afternoon the open lake is a long flat glare with nowhere to hide from it. We say as much on our own page about the lake. The same water at seven in the evening is the entire argument for going out.

Such wind as there is here usually drops as the land cools. The surface goes still enough to take the mountains behind the far shore whole, the day's traffic has gone in, and what is left is a large quiet stretch of brackish water with one engine on it.

Birds are the dependable part of the hour rather than the scenery. Something long-legged is nearly always working the reed edge at dusk. You may see a great deal or you may see reeds, and anybody promising more than that is selling.

The swim, and who actually gets in

On the longer trip the skipper cuts the engine in open water and puts a ladder over the side. This is fresh water gone slightly salt rather than sea, and it runs cooler than the Mediterranean rather than warmer, which is the point of it after an hour in a hot pool.

It is deep in the middle, there is no shallow end to retreat to and there is no lifeguard on a boat. Children go in beside an adult in a buoyancy jacket, and that is a rule rather than a suggestion.

The part worth planning is not the water but the twenty minutes after it. You come up the ladder into cooling air on a moving deck, and a towel and a dry layer are the difference between a fine evening and a faintly miserable one.

What an evening boat leaves out, and why

• The mud. Grey clay needs a strong sun to dry against and there is none after six, so a late call at the thermal water is a hot soak and nothing more. Keep the full ritual for a daytime trip.
• Iztuzu. Loggerheads nest there, the beach is closed between 20:00 and 08:00 during the nesting season, and no lights or flash photography go on the sand after dark. Marked nests are not walked into, no umbrella or sunbed goes beside one, and powered boats stay a kilometre off. An evening here is a river and lake trip, and nobody is apologising for that.
• Clear water. If turquoise is what you came for, that is a day out in the gulf. The lake sells stillness rather than visibility.
• Dinner. As a rule nothing is cooked on an evening boat. Plan to eat when you get back.

The beach restrictions are the wardens' to enforce and the signs at the entrance are what count on the day, because the season shifts a fortnight either way from one year to the next.

Reading the moon before you book the week

We think the moon matters more here than the sunset does, and it is the one variable you can look up months before you fly. A lunar month runs a little under thirty days, so a fortnight in Dalyan holds about half of one, and its two ends are not the same evening at all.

Any almanac gives you the phase for your dates before you have booked flights. What no almanac gives you is the cloud, and the cloud has the last word.

The hour before you board and the hour after you land

• Repellent goes on in your room, not when you first notice. This is a delta and the mosquitoes keep the same hours as the herons.
• Take a layer. Moving water under a moving boat undoes the day's heat faster than the thermometer suggests it should.
• Eat afterwards rather than before. A full table at half past six is poor preparation for three hours of sitting still, and no kitchen here is in a hurry to close.
• Book that table anyway in August, because you land when the riverfront is at its fullest.
• Old swimwear and no silver if the thermal water is on your route. Sulphur is unkind to both, and to pale fabric it is permanent.
• Cash for the gate at Sultaniye. Entry is charged there and is not part of the boat.
• A phone copes with the last of the daylight and gives up on the lit cliff afterwards. Treat that one as something to look at rather than take home.

Who we would talk out of it

If you have one evening here and have not yet spent a day on the river, spend the day. The evening trip is a second helping, and a very good one, but it does not replace this water in daylight and we would rather lose the booking than pretend it does.

We would not put a toddler on the long version either. You are back on the quay well after dark, there is nothing to climb on for three hours, and a deck is a poor place to negotiate a bedtime.

And if you want an evening out with music and a table in it, this is the wrong purchase. It is three quiet hours with an engine and a view, which is either precisely what you were after or a long time to sit down.

What moves the price, and where the number lives

There are no figures on this site, deliberately, and the current one sits with the trip itself on our sister site. What is useful here is knowing what the number is made of, because two boats quoting for an evening are often quoting for different evenings.

• Shared or private. A seat and the whole boat are two products rather than one in two sizes, and the figure per head falls as a group grows.
• Which of the two trips it is. Two hours on the delta and four on the lake are not the same night's work for a crew.
• Whether the thermal stop is on the route at all, and whether its gate fee sits inside or outside what you booked.
• The date. High summer, weekends and the days around a public holiday are not the quiet end of the year.
• The hour you come back. Anything that keeps a skipper out late is priced with that in mind.

A weather cancellation is the skipper's call and it gets made on the evening, not the week before. Another date or your money back is the only sensible answer to that.