Tour boats return to Dalyan’s sea

MUĞLA

Boats that have carried thousands of tourists every year in the western province of Muğla, a significant sea tourism hotspot, have returned to the Aegean Sea after their maintenances were completed. 

The maintenance of the tour boats, docked in the Dalyan channel, was being carried out in a boatyard, where they were carefully being maintained by workers. 

At the end of the hard maintenance process, the boats were carried to the Dalyan Canal on tractors. 

The 21-kilometer-long Dalyan Canal, which connects Lake Köyceğiz and the Aegean Sea, lures tourists for its beauties. Passing through reeds by boat to reach the İztuzu coast is among the reasons local and foreign tourists prefer the region. The channel is also an attraction site for history aficionados who get the chance to see tombs of late kings alongside the canal. 

The Dalyan neighborhood, in the Ortaca district, was registered as the “best protected open area in Europe” by the British The Times magazine in 2008 along with the İztuzu beach, the ancient city of Kaunos, the Dalyan Canal and rock tombs and mud baths in the area. 

The region, which is a wetland and a paradise for birds, has a distinctive feature thanks to the İztuzu beach, where endangered caretta carettas live.

The mud baths around Dalyan and its vicinity are currently serving for health tourism. 

Speaking to the state-run Anadolu Agency, the head of Dalyan Boat Cooperative, Mahmut Kıydan, said they put great efforts to prepare the boats for the guests of the new season. 

Stating that the boats are serving the guests accommodating in Dalyan, Kıysan said: “We organize daily dinner tours to coasts around Dalyan. We have 28 boats in the cooperative and they are above Dalyan’s standards.” 

He said that most of the boats were now in the waters and they expect the tours to start in the first week of April. 

“I hope it will be better than expectations. Our goal is to host the guests of Dalyan in the best way and make them come back again in the next years,” Kıydan said. 

500 boats operating

Özayu Akdoğan, who has served for tourism in Dalyan for some 30 years, said nearly 500 boats were operating in the Dalyan canal. 

He said the boats undergo maintenance at the end of every season. “Besides their external parts, we also maintain their engines and propellers. We apply all new innovations on the engines in order to avoid damage to the environment. If there is not too much damage, the average maintenance cost of a boat varies between 3,000-4,000 Turkish Liras,” he said. 

Akdoğan said Dalyan is visited by nearly 1 million local and foreign tourists every year and most of them take boat tours in the Dalyan Canal.