Arrowtown book buyer Miranda Spary continues her regular column about her recommendations for a good read, and life as she sees it ...
I'm typing this watching the very reason the euro zone is in chaos.
In February, we bought a second-hand tender from an Australian friend whose boat was based in France.
It took five months for the French to get the paperwork done and the boat shipped to Turkey. Once in Turkey, it took just two days to get it on a truck and all the admin done.
We wanted to use a Turkish company to handle the whole thing, but only a French freight company could do the French end and of course it cost about 10 times more than the Turks would have charged.
No wonder all the clever money people are watching Turkey with interest - they are a smart and capable and industrious nation.
It has meant a whole week in Marmaris but we have had some time to explore inland.
Yesterday, a local architect friend of ours arranged a mystery tour which saw us exploring Mugla, the capital of this province.
We were taken to see an 800-year-old hamam - I nearly walked in until my darling pointed out that it was full of naked old chaps.
It would have given me less of a fright than another room which was next to a mosque - we were told we were seeing the tombs of a Sufi philosopher and his son, but I was not expecting to see the two unburied coffins on display.
They died some hundred or so years ago, which in the heat here must have made the room pretty stinky for a while.
The whole province is full of marble quarries and we could not resist going into one. The manager kindly showed us round - we saw gigantic blocks of marble like so many blocks of cheese all stacked up and best of all was the slicing factory.
These whole blocks get pushed into a sort of bread slicer - its 40 diamond blades sawing through take about an hour and a-half to turn it into 40 nice neat slabs, with ice cold water pouring down over it all the time to keep things from overheating.
It is all very hi-tech machinery but old-world safety standards.
No problem for visitors like us to wander through and nobody wearing earplugs.
One of the other great bits in Mugla was a whole corner of the city for craftsmen - blacksmiths and cobblers, tailors and woodworkers.
The other thing that surprised me was an article in the local paper saying that the construction of mosques always increases tourist numbers.
Maybe we should put one in the Wakatipu - imagine how beautiful it could look.
I wrote a story in Life and Leisure recently on Wanaka's brand new superlux tented high country lodge, and a French stonemason who was staying asked if Matt Wallis was a Muslim.
I said he wasn't, but asked why he thought he was and it was because he had a shirt saying "Minaret Station".
So there is a precedent for minarets in the district.
Thanks for all the comments on the Tasmania story I wrote in the Otago Daily Times, although I think comparing the Tasmanian Devil's lovemaking techniques with the average Wakatipu male is a little cruel! I've just read an utterly wonderful book called Dear Lupin ... Letters to a Wayward Son by Charlie Mortimer.
It is not really by him, but a collection of letters his father, a British racing correspondent, sent him. Charlie (the Lupin of the title) makes short notes after each letter.
The letters start just after Charlie is getting into trouble at Eton and looking like being expelled. They tell the story of an infuriatingly irresponsible boy turning into a no less infuriatingly irresponsible adult from a marvellously eccentric family.
If the dogs are not incontinent and uncontrollable, they've got worms or unattractive sexual habits; ditto the friends and neighbours.
Even the mother (called Nidnod) is batty and gets plastered at parties.
His sly, dry comments about all and sundry made me laugh out loud - "Lady P dipped her nut a bit too far into the martini bucket" and "a former jockey called Stan Clayton was good enough to tell me all about his blood pressure ... Perhaps I am a sympathetic listener: possibly I just lack the energy to move away."
As a bit of an expert in the field of parental disappointment (both as a disappointer and a disappointee), I had huge sympathy for Charlie and also for his dad.
