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Playground of the Gods

By Patrick Symmes

It was a whisper, barely enough to flutter the sails of Agamemnon, that originally set me careening down the mountainous coast of Turkey in my puny Renault, searching for a colony of backpackers living in the trees. A 21-year-old wanderer from Iceland, whom I'd met in Egypt, had murmured of a narrow valley that spilled onto a huge crescent of beach cradling a turquoise sea. Orange groves, he uttered; Greek and Roman ruins. The hillsides erupted with flames, he claimed. The valley was called Olympos, after the home of the gods. I paid no attention to these ravings.

But later, much later, I began to dream. I thumbed through guidebooks and pored over maps, with limited success. The Aegean, from the rugged mountains and sun-bleached islands of Greece to the rocky coast of Turkey, is a remarkably uniform region, despite the divisions of borders, languages, and religions. Blessed with flinty, steep terrain, an embracing ocean, and a common history, Greece and Turkey share everything from cuisines to history to place names. I found places called Olympos, Olimpus, Olympus, and Olimpos before deciding which one of them must be The Place. I bought a ticket to Antalya, Turkey, rented a car, and blew west on a zephyr, toward the valley of Olympos.

Twelve years ago I missed the lake town of Dali in western China. I never made it to El Bolsón in Patagonia. And that undiscovered border town in Laos called—well, actually, I'm not telling you that one. The names of these oases are shared quietly among global drifters and First World vagabonds in need of a new place to pause. Scenery, cheap digs, and good music are the requirements for an outpost on this circuit, and Olympos, Turkey, is eminently qualified on all fronts.

I arrived just after dark, sliding through a gorge in Bey Mountains National Park and forcing the Renault through a flooded stream before the road led me straight into the heart of things: Kadir's Top Tree Houses, a ramshackle collection of huts built in a grove of 100-foot pines. Kadir's was packed with a hundred on-the-loose tweenagers from all corners of the globe and a heavy supplement of Turkish hipsters. Six dollars got me a creaky bunk bed, one of four in a small cabin set 25 feet up in a tree, and I spent the jet-lagged hours of my first night listening to two Danes and a German snore while the branches swayed in a breeze.

In the light of morning I got my first real look at the place: some 60 cabins and tree houses, a two-story lodge speared through the middle by a giant, gnarled pine, a total of seven public toilets, and solar-heated showers (not much good during a week of constant clouds). Kadir, the rotund eponymous Turkish owner, explained that farmers had stored their grain in elevated huts for centuries, and he was now storing backpackers that way. He's allowed his clientele to name the cabins, and, lacking a reservation, I bounced from bed to bed all week, shunted from Princess Koak to The Nuthouse, and eventually making my home in The Betty Ford Clinic.

Amid this crowd of beardless youths I was first a stranger, but by the second night, things worked as they always do. In the dinner line I met an engineer from Istanbul who insisted on being called Mickey and introduced me to his friends. Later, upstairs amid dangling brass teapots and kilim mats, I shared my topo map with a gaggle of German cyclists heading, overland, for Australia. Each night, as the music got louder and faster, the endless bottles of cheap Turkish wine cemented international brotherhood. A nightly bonfire gave focus, and people danced until 2 a.m. to traditional Turkish pop artists like James Brown and Gerry Rafferty. Clusters of travelers sat cross-legged on carpets and got stoned on raki, the licorice-flavored national drink. I met Finns, Australians, and an American who was actually named Happy.

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Patrick Symmes last reported for Outside from Dahab, Egypt.