Spies or karma?

06 July 2014 | Canakkale, Turkey

While sailing along the Atki peninsula, it selected Todd Rundgren’s “We Gotta Get You a Woman”. This peninsula is a very unique place, where women are not allowed. It is full of large monasteries with lonely monks.

We’re convinced that the NSA and Apple have conspired to hijack the shuffle feature in our ipod. In the last two weeks we have had two instances when our ipod has randomly selected a song that scarily fit our location. We have been listening to our ipod on random (shuffle) where it selects, from the over 10,000 songs, what to play while we sail from port to port.

Next, we were in Canakkale, Turkey and the ipod selected “”And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. Not a song that most people are familiar with, but it is an account of a young Australian soldier who was maimed at the Battle of Gallipoli during the First World War. Canakkale is right across from the Gallipoli peninsula where the Australian troops landed. We had not heard that song in years, but within hours of our arrival here, our ipod reminded us that it was in our music library.

We were in Canakkale on our way to Istanbul. The first hurdle in this passage was the Dardanelles, a narrow strait connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara. The strait is 38 miles long and less than one mile wide in some areas. This is the major waterway for oil and goods to and from the countries on the Black Sea. There is a large container ship or tanker passing by every 10 minutes. While water flows in both directions, the surface current from the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean is right on Berkeley East’s bow and over 3 knots strong. Add the current and freighter traffic together and it was an exciting trip. We were planning around an hour from the entrance of the Dardanelles to Canakkale, but as we slowed from 7 knots to 6, then to 5 and eventually to 4 knots, it ending up taking over two hours.

At the entrance to the Dardanelles is the city of Troy, well-known in history, legend and from the movie with Brad Pitt. At the Troy archaeological site, archeologists have identified nine different layers of cities built on top of one another between 3000 BC and AD 500. Troy VIII is believed to be the setting of the Trojan War described in Homer’s Odyssey. It is unclear what, if any, parts of the tale of the Trojan horse are true, but the story makes for good tourism. And you hear the phrase “beware of Greeks bearing gifts” a lot around here.

We spent one afternoon touring the Gallipoli peninsula, focused on the Australian New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) sites. The Gallipoli Campaign (as it is called) was a battle for control of the Dardanelles, which lasted nearly one year and resulted in huge casualties for many countries. There are a lot of numbers out there on how many people died and were injured (some say as many as 500,000), but our guide summed it up pretty clearly “in the end, they died for nothing”.

Perhaps our ipod’s selection of the song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” was not a result of NSA spying, but simply a chance reminder of how futile and gruesome war is.