If Brigitte Bardot had been more of a hard-core adventuress, she would have roughed it on the Datça peninsula and not the French Riviera. Hung over and socially spent, Ipek and I hop a ninety-minute ferry over from Bodrum, and even in the small port town of Körmen, the area feels vintage Mediterranean. At times Datça reminds me of Big Sur with its tall pines and hairpin hillside roads. Occasionally there's a little settlement with farmhouses and half-built beached gulets that look like dinosaur skeletons. We check into a funky hotel, Sabrinas Haus, and after realizing that there's perfectly nothing to do, fall into a long sleep. I haven't felt so relaxed since I arrived.

It is but a brief respite. The next day, we are heading two hundred miles east to check out the go-go yacht culture in Göcek, a harbor town with nautical supplies and a few hotels and restaurants at the base of environmentally protected dramatic hills that kick across the horizon. The action takes place in the coves secluded behind wild pines with not a speck of condo terrace to mar the view, where members of the ruling classes (think Prince Charles, Valentino, Princess Caroline) motor up in the summer aboard floating mansions. In other words, the way to join the social whirl here is to be aboard a yacht, preferably a really big one.

Luckily, a friend has pulled some strings, and Turkish socialite Çiğdem Simavi, who surveys the Göcek waters from an eight-suite, 177-foot vessel modeled after a 1900s passenger yacht, is "between guests." She invites us aboard for the night. She and her white-clad crew are waiting for us in the marina, the side of her massive wooden craft painted with gold vines and big letters spelling out Çiğdem. Çiğdem is hosting a lunch, so we must get under way, which feels a bit like cruising with a girl posse in a pink Cadillac on Saturday night. After motoring for forty minutes, we find our guests moored in a cove on a small ship with four levels and a heliport. A few minutes later, a tender appears with a British family, the women dressed in mumus and pearls. Cocktails in hand, we shuffle into Çiğdem's air-conditioned living room, furnished with a white piano, mirrored Grecian columns, and several Picassos. "We've hardly had a chance to go swimming," one of the Brits, a lawyer, drawls during the pre-meal small talk.

Lunch is a four-hour, seven-course affair, a red wine blur of fish cakes, cheese pastry, peaches in gin and Splenda, and cheesecake Häagen-Dazs. "If you go to Sardinia, Cannes, or Marbella, it's like parking in a parking lot," opines Çiğdem, from behind her monolithic dark glasses. "The marinas smell, the water is dirty, and it's expensive. Here the trees grow at the water's edge in pure nature, and there are no big ugly buildings." The topics of conversation are pirate attacks on the Suez Canal that are scaring off yachts bound here from the Middle East (bad), Russian investment (good), and the increasing number of boats puttering around in view of Çiğdem's brass portholes.