Babadag
by Jud Weaver
Delta's Flight 72, a New York-Istanbul Boeing 767, was only one-quarter full as it lifted off from New York two weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center. I was bound for Oludeniz, a little beach town in southern Turkey, a Mecca for European pilots, but almost unknown to US paragliders. People had told me I was nuts heading for an Islamic country at that time, but they were the same people who had been telling me for years what a nut I was to be flying a paraglider.
I'd started thinking about the trip a year ago. At least that's when Mike Eberle had mentioned he might start leading trips to Turkey and I told him to save me a place on the first one. In May, Mike went to Turkey, looked at a several sites and decided upon Oludeniz. Now the tour group was gathering for a week of flying, and a few more days of travel.
My itinerary had sounded daunting: five hours from Seattle to New York, nine hours to Istanbul, seven hours layover before a domestic flight to Dalaman, a local bus to Fethiye, then a van to Oludeniz. I had envisioned myself as so exhausted that I missed the bus or couldn't find the van. But the bus was waiting at the airport and the van at the bus depot.
The van dropped me at the door of the Hotel Bronze at 8 PM. The desk clerk helped me take my bags up to my room and told me that Mike and our group were waiting for me at the Oba, a nearby outdoor bar and restaurant. The group was smaller than expected, three last minute cancellations had whittled us to four. Lyne Perry and Wes Hill, Torrey Pines P3s from San Diego, had also ignored well-meaning advice. I'm from Ellensburg, a small town one hundred miles east of Seattle. We sized each other up over EfEs Pilsens, the Turkish national beer, and the first of a series of great Turkish meals. Lyne's a consulting geologist whose knowledge of rocks we were too frequently call upon. Wes is the captain of one of Scripps's research vessels, and I'm a dentist.
Any jet lag I might have had vanished as we headed up the mountain the next morning. The mountain is Babadag, 6500 feet of limestone rearing up in cliffs and spires, incised by gullies and canyons, heavily forested and starkly bare. Take your three favorite mountain sites, pile them on top of each other, throw in a couple more around the edges, plop the Med out in front, crystalline clear, neon blue, add a two mile strand of white sand LZ, and you've pretty well got it.
Several paragliding companies do business in Oludeniz. They make their living from $90 tandem flights, but they're willing to fill their trucks with as many solo pilots as they can cram in for about $8 a trip (All prices will be in dollars, as the Turkish lira is volatile. The lira was trading at 1,450,000 when we started the trip, in two weeks it had gone to 1,600,000). The standard shuttle vehicle is a Chrysler-made four wheel drive pick up; the older ones are called Fargos, more recently they've become Dodges. These vehicles carry ten, twelve, fourteen pilots jammed into the cab, facing benches in the bed, and up on the top racks with the gliders.
The diesel fours hammering and the suspensions pounding, the trucks are pushed as hard as possible. A trace of four wheel power skids around the steeper and tighter switchbacks, double-clutched downshifts into low range as the engine starts to lug on the upper mountain, the Turkish drivers leaning an elbow out the window and chain-smoking Marlboros, it's quite terrifying. We all soon agreed that we'd launch into almost anything rather than ride back down the mountain. Initially, the road switchbacks up through a forest of gnarled pines. The trees seem to grow from bare rock. Bands of goats, the creators of the strange ecosystem, wander through the trees. The road breaks out of the trees about fifteen hundred feet from the top, the last thousand feet carved into the side, and occasionally across the top, of the knife-edged summit ridge.
Launch is a babble of German, Turkish, French, Russian, Brit, Aussie, South African, and American English. Trucks from all the paragliding companies arrive about the same time and there are frequently fifty to a hundred pilots wanting to launch. The tandem guys are fast. Most of them are set up and gone in under fifteen minutes, launching into anything not coming over the back. Most solo pilots take more time, waiting for a wind dummy to find a big thermal, waiting to launch into rising air. Voices are occasionally raised, but mostly people help each other out and forty-five minutes after the trucks left I laid out and took off. The wait was wise, as the wind had come up a bit, and as I drifted down the ridge, my vario chirped cheerfully. Mike launched soon after me, and for a half hour we sailed up and down the ridge, joined by more and more pilots.
I heard Lyne's voice on my radio ask, "What way do these guys turn?"
"Right.", I said.
"But they drive on the left."
"Not in Turkey, only England", I said, with more conviction than I felt.
Just then a non-turning guy was coming right at me. I pulled way out to the right, even though it seemed there was plenty of room for him to move in, just in case he was a left turning Brit, and lost the lift. I got back over the ridge five hundred feet down, and there was no ridge lift, just the occasional thermal puff to slow me to 100 fpm. Nobody else was going up either, everybody from the last shuttle was heading out over Oludeniz, the Blue Lagoon, or the sea itself.
A 6500' sled ride is not all that bad, it gives you lots of room to go exploring, miles of aerial roaming without having to look for lift. High pressure covered Turkey during our entire trip; from the top of Babadag we watched the inversion at 3500' grow darker every day with accumulated smog. The thermals that got through were punchy and short lived, and the sea breeze seldom got to 10 mph. I never found such easy ridge soaring again, but there were always thermals to be found. We averaged about an hour per flight, even a straight sledder was long enough to be satisfying.
The LZ is the entire beachfront of Oludeniz, soft sand backed by a fifty foot wide paved boardwalk, tarps laid across it for packing gliders. The tandem pilots make spots on their home company's tarps. I grew to like landing in the sand and accordioning the wing onto one of the tarps. Or nearby. Mike came in low across town, dodging the trees in the park that separates the boardwalk from town and setting down just twenty feet from our favorite lunch stand.
The second your wing hits the ground, boys arrive to help you out of your harness and arrange the glider for folding. They dump any sand you might have acquired in a sloppy landing, and carefully arrange your lines, all this for a little over a buck while you rip off the flight suit that was so comfortable just a few minutes before. On my second flight that first day, I went to get change while one of the boys packed my glider. The next morning my vario was missing. Watch your gear.
After the first flight, we dumped the wings at the shuttle for a 1 PM trip up, and headed for food. "Donors," Mike said, "are the only way to go." Donor kebaps are the ubiquitous street food of Turkey. Chicken or lamb slices are pounded thin and packed onto a skewer, forming a two-foot long, eight-inch diameter, cylinder of meat. The skewer is mounted vertically in front of a charcoal fire, thin slices are trimmed from the outside and slapped onto pita bread, baguettes, or pancakes, along with tomato chunks, lettuce, pickles, and a garlic yogurt sauce. They sell for $2 in Oludeniz, in less touristy places, they're under a dollar, and I wish I could get one in Ellensburg.
We ate our donors in the shade of the park's trees. While we ate, we watched paragliders. All day long paragliders fly over Oludeniz. Up the three thousand feet of Babadag you can see from town, columns of wings outline thermals, and stately processions glide over cliff tops. The real display is offshore in front of town. The hot pilots come straight out from the mountain, a mile out to sea they've still got four thousand feet to play with. Tight spirals, huge wing overs, full frontals, horseshoe collapses, full stalls, flat spins, essentially every maneuver a paraglider is capable of can be seen in a space of fifteen minutes in front of Oludeniz. Most of these guys don't wear life jackets, and there are no chase boats out.
After lunch we were back up for another flight. After that flight Mike, Wes, and I went swimming. Hundreds of chairs and umbrellas line the shore in front of Oludeniz, all day long they are full of sunbathers, and yes, many of the women are topless. All the men, even the fattest old Germans, wear skin tight ball-catchers. We were the ones out of place in our baggy shorts. A beautiful Turkish boy clad in a tiny triangle of fuzzy blue cloth held precariously in place with thongs, paraded the length of the beach at the water's edge. Some of the tandem pilots cheered.
None of the sunbathers swim, so we had the sea to ourselves. The water was just the cool side of tepid, and so clear as to be invisible. Foot high swells crested and broke just offshore. Wes gave a demonstration of body surfing, sometimes gliding five or six feet before jamming his face in the sand.
Our days swiftly settled into a routine. Breakfast was out at eight, served on the terrace by the swimming pool. A Turkish breakfast consists, invariably it seems, of bread, feta cheese, olives, hard boiled eggs, tomatoes and cucumbers. The tomatoes were ripe and sweet like only homegrown are in the States. We were regulars on the first truck up at nine, by the third day our Brit friends, Phil and Debbie, met us there. Usually we'd be back for the eleven o'clock round, then lunch, maybe another round, or something else.
The third afternoon we rented a speedboat, and explored the nearby coast. Five hundred foot cliffs outline much of the coast, valleys with sand beaches cut through every few miles. Five miles south of Oludeniz we ran up a particularly narrow little bay and landed. The place was called Butterfly Valley; in the spring millions of butterflies decorate every tree and rock, by October their numbers were much reduced, but the place was still lovely. Only a couple of hundred yards wide at the beach, the valley closes in quickly, within a mile there is just a slot through which a waterfall pours.
Just back from the beach is a primitive resort. A tin roofed kitchen and bar, tables under a grape arbor, showers and toilets back another hundred feet, thatched huts that could have come from some African savanna, are the amenities offered. The valley can be accessed only from the sea or the air. In the middle of the day, from eleven to four, the place is overrun with people from excursion boats, but once they leave, the twenty or thirty overnighters have the place to themselves. A grass hut, a mattress, blankets, and three meals are ten dollars. The place is owned by an old Turk who lives in a cinder block cottage a couple of hundred yards up the valley, but is run by an informal group of Turkish boys and Brit girls. The girl tending bar told us that paraglider pilots occasionally landed there, and that if we did, we could get a ride back to Oludeniz on their supply boat. We made reservations for the next night.
Our nights assumed a sort of routine also. We separated for an hour or two after our afternoon flights, some to the Internet Café, some back to the rooms for a read or nap. We'd usually form up at the Hotel Bronze bar, an open air but quite elegant affair by the pool, around seven. Adam, the bartender and hotel factotum, quickly became one of our group, spending much of his time with us on our side of the bar while Mike mixed the drinks. By eight we were ready to take on the food purveyors. The Mike Eberle restaurant selection method consists of looking at menus, maybe haggling with touts, perhaps peering at food in steam tables, and walking on. Keep repeating this until your companions threaten to strangle you, then go four or five places more, until you are finally dragged into the next place that's remotely acceptable, all the while muttering that that place up the hill and a couple of streets over, the one with the baked chicken with gravy, was a better deal. The third night was notable, because Debbie had sprained her ankle landing, and Phil was carrying her around piggyback while Mike dithered over the perfect meal.
After dinner we'd usually wander to Cloud Nine, the paraglider hangout. Every evening they show videos on big screen TVs of the day's launches and landings, and nearly every pilot in town turns out to watch. It was usually a humbling experience. An especially good tumble down launch might merit three or four reruns. Wes had one we saw several times that looked a lot worse on TV than it had on the hill. My clumsy departures and returns were always sandwiched between elegant and graceful affairs. The worst bloopers of the season were featured one night, guys crashing through umbrellas and beach chairs, into street signs, tourists and trees; disastrous launches that got worse and worse for a hundred yards; humiliations that would last people's entire flying careers.
On the morning of day four, we packed for Butterfly Valley. I stuck a toothbrush and pair of sandals in my wing pack. We wore swimsuits under our flight suits. We went up the mountain a bit later than usual, not sure if we would go to Butterfly on our first or second flights. It turned out to be the best flying day of the trip: Wes got two and a half hours, much of it near the top of the pack in the big thermals over the south bowl; Lyne and Mike were up well over an hour; without a vario and not enjoying being bounced around in a pack of twenty wings, I headed out sooner.
The valley looks tiny from three thousand feet. I had second thoughts about our decision, but little choice. At least there wasn't much wind; the bay was unruffled as I dropped below cliff level on my downwind and took the obligatory between-the-feet picture of the approach. I flew up the valley and turned steeply against the cliff, seconds later another turn close to the other wall, then down the middle of the valley in S turns, the thirty foot wide beach looking increasingly narrow. At the last moment I noticed the three foot high stone wall separating the beach from the valley brush. I turned again and landed cross-wind in the brush, filling my lines with prickly twigs and almost taking out a grass hut. Lyne chose the brush too, and we spent our time waiting for Mike and Wes to come down clearing tangles from our lines. The guys managed more elegant and tidy beach landings, as a group of German pilots that we had befriended started to follow us in.
I glanced up from folding Mike's glider just in time to see the last few hundred feet of a spiral dive taken all the way to the water several hundred yards offshore. The pilot hit with a terrific impact. We were all stunned for seconds, then Mike was running down the beach shouting, "Get a boat! Get a boat!"
In less than a minute Mike had a couple of Turks in their little fishing boat headed for the pilot. Hanging upside down under his harness and unconscious, a few more minutes could have been fatal. The pilot, Karl, a nice older guy that Mike and Lyne had met on Rhodes, had partially revived by the time the boat got to the beach. But he lay there vomiting sea water and spitting blood for forty-five minutes until a boat could be found to take him to the ambulance in Oludeniz. He was still in intensive care when we last heard about him several days later, but expected to fully recover.
The crash brought the dangers of our sport a bit close for comfort. The four of us sat at a table under the grape vines and in near record time demolished a bottle of Scotch that Mike produced from his wing bag.
I was the first person up in the valley the next morning. As the sun was coming up I hiked up to the waterfall. Most of the tourists from the excursion boats take the hike, so the trail is pounded into
the dirt, and in the upper, narrower portion the rock is polished from thousands of climbing feet. There are ropes to help you up the last few hundred feet, then a pool with the waterfall dropping down a sheer cliff. I sat there for a half hour as the sunline worked its way up the valley.
The boat that was to take us back to Oludeniz, a thirty foot wooden long boat, wouldn't start. The captain leaned into the engine compartment alternately with his two tools, a large screwdriver and a hammer, and pried or pounded vigorously, then got back behind the controls and ground on the starter. After an hour of this, we weighed anchor and took a tow from the fishing boat that had rescued our friend the day before. By the time we got back, angry looking clouds had formed over the top of the mountain and we decided to take a day off. A couple of hours later the clouds had dissipated into harmless little puffs, but by then it was too late to go up.
It was just as well, as we caught up on emails and took dirty clothes to the informal laundry across the street. Wes got a Turkish shave from the barber next to the hotel, pronounced the shave the finest he'd ever received. Good that we rested, too, for that night Mike lead us on a true marathon restaurant search in the resort town a couple of klicks up the hill, a place for Brits on $400 week-long packages, airfares, hotel and breakfasts included. Dozens of cafes and restaurants competed for the Brit's lunches and dinners, all prices were in pounds. We finally settled on a popular Italian place, and had a great meal, its deliciousness doubtless helped by our advanced state of hypoglycemia.
The next day dawned beautifully. Our shuttle service said there'd been five or six days in May that they couldn't fly, since then they'd never missed a day. Wispy little cumes were usually starting to form around thirty five hundred feet by the time the first shuttles let us off; it was strange to come to cloudbase from above. The slight prevailing winds we'd had the first few days stopped entirely, and there were only thermal cycles to launch into, coming up one side of the mountain for a half hour or so, then switching to the other. We would just manage to work our way to the front of launch when the cycles would shift and everybody would bunch and get in back of the line on the other side of the mountain, fortunately only a couple of hundred feet away. We finally learned patience, and simply waited for the next shift, frequently launching from a near deserted site.
The thermals were as unpredictable out from the mountain as they were on launch, sometimes carrying people strongly to several thousand feet over, and just as suddenly vanishing, leaving nothing but sink in the miles to the beach. Wes got a thousand over behind launch one morning, only to sink out so badly that he couldn't make it out and had to land on a bench a couple of thousand feet below. Both Lyne and I had anxious moments watching the trees come up as we scratched across the ridge above town. It had to figure where all that air is going-right into the earth?
But there were also flights when everything went as it should. Thermals popped off the ridge top, enough so that everyone had his own private column of rising air. The cliffs above town became soarable as the afternoon sea breeze came up. Short lived clouds led us to unexpected lift. And always, there was the pretty little town at the foot of the mountain. We settled on a couple of
restaurants we particularly liked, traditional Turkish places where the food was cheaper and spicier than in the tourist joints; even Mike was willing to stop the nightly food searches.
We spent a few days in Istanbul on our way home: took a
ferry up the Bosphorus, haggled for rugs in the Bazaar, wandered crowded streets and ate food from carts. On our last day, we were looking at the Blue Mosque, one of the most magnificent buildings in the world, when we realized that all of us were really watching the gray-breasted crows ridge soaring the huge dome.
web: www.fun2fly.comemail: napi@fun2fly.comusa phone & vmail: +1 206 965 8184france phone & vmail: +33 (0) 870 448 593text & talk: www.skype.com username mike.eberle
