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Playground of the Gods

All you had to do was sit still and watch. The entire globe, it seemed, would eventually stroll into Kadir's, some hitchhiking, others riding the infrequent microbus from Antalya. Night after night, these strangers would draw close to the wood stove to talk of geography, mouth lyrics, maybe fall in love. After days, or weeks, or even months, they would exchange e-mail addresses and hugs, and then drift on.


	Cool School

	Whirling Dervish 101

		Master the paragliding basics stateside, and then head to Ölü Deniz, Turkey's paragliding hot spot, 80 miles northwest of Olympos, and practice your moves: A four-day, $440 course with Skysports. (011-90-252-617-05-11; www.skysports-turkey.com) will have intermediate-level flyers soaring to new heights before cocktail hour on day one. You'll launch from 6,000-foot Baba Dag mountain (home of Herculean thermals that can loft gliders up to 13,000 feet); members of the Turkish national paragliding squad will then talk you through spins, deflations, wing overs, and spiral dives via two-way radio from a safety boat idling below. No paragliding experience? Try a $100 tandem ride with a professional pilot‹you'll catch the same big air and take in the same awesome views of the sea. All Skysports instructors are certified by the British Hanggliding and Paragliding Association.

By day these jesters slept, sat on the beach, or hiked into the past—the interlayered ruins behind Kadir's can consume days of clambering. The Lycians, whom Homer tells us fought alongside the Trojans, were among the earliest residents of Olympos. Then came the Greeks, and then the Romans (succeeded, at various times, by the Crusaders, the Arabs, and the Turks). I followed one stone irrigation channel a few hundred yards to discover a roofless temple and a crumbled two-story house still graced with a mosaic floor where, I imagined, the children of antiquity learned to walk. Two immense sarcophagi, set in niches along a hillside, overlooked the sea.

One afternoon the arc of the beach, a strand of black stones and gray sand that ran north for more than a mile, led me on from the ruins. At the far end, past the last turquoise waves, a rutted road led to a steep path—the trail to the eternal flames that had been part of that first rumor. Half an hour uphill, I stumbled onto the foundation walls of a small Roman temple to Vulcan (the god of fire, not the planet of pointy-eared first officers). Just above it, a score of bonfires hissed; the chimaera, as they're called, have been burning for thousands of years, fueled only by a mysterious gas seeping from the rocks.

As night closed in, the Greek lettering on the stones around the chimaera left me measuring the hush of the past against the noisy future, ancient oracles against the global party. This was a tourism site for the Romans; even the Greeks were arrivistes when they came here. Today Turkish tourists hike up to light their cigarettes on the eternal flames, as if they were ancient Zippos.

When rain and then hail drove me out of the hills, I was simply too filthy to stand it anymore. The solar showers at Kadir's still cold, I checked out of Betty Ford and spent the next day driving slowly west along the Turquoise Coast, on roads that twisted over azure water and pebbled beaches. In Kas, a well-equipped center for yachting and diving, I stayed in a real hotel, with a pool and air-conditioning. I shaved. I went to a real restaurant, and ate calamari and grilled snapper with lemon. English yachtsmen wandered about while retirees complained about the price of boat tours in the harbor. It was lovely. And totally, deeply, boring.

In the morning, after one more hot shower, I rushed back to Olympos, arriving just in time for the Saturday-night bonfire at Kadir's. The Betty Ford Clinic was full, but one cabin was much like another. The toilets were a mess, but so what. Mickey was still there, and Happy, too. A woman belly danced to Nirvana. Some French people showed up. In Olympos, the good times always roll on.

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