Notes from Antalya

The southern coast of Turkey has tremendous potential. Just as soon as the resorts and hotels and coastal promenades are demolished, the region will be a spectacularly attractive getaway. Unfortunately, this place is still just on the rise. Antalya some years ago was only a "village," a local man told me recently. Today, the roadside town marker 20 kilometers from the center, way out in the suburbs, says that more than 950,000 people live here.

Among these crowds I am nothing. I am just another foreigner on holiday. No one in Antalya gazes my way, or admires my bike, or shouts "Hello!" or "Mah-nee! Mah-nee!" or shakes my hand when I say I am American. (And I thought we had to hang our heads in Muslim nations.) I am boring here, one of thousands of visitors clogging the old city. I think I do bear a few distinctions worth noting, though: I don't pay tour guides for anything. I don't buy wine at 6 bucks a glass here at the Sabah Pansiyon when a bottle costs 3 bucks just a mile walk away. I don't pay to take photos of camels wearing funny hats and skirts on the waterfront. I don't sit in chairs on the beach or bumble through the waves with an inflatable ball and imagine that vacationing can get no better. Hell, I scorn long sandy beaches studded with umbrellas and flanked by rows of high-rise hotels.

So what do I do? I admire the mountains just west of here - huge towering peaks into which I'll follow a winding mountain road tomorrow. Not that there's anything wrong with flamboyant beach development. Every nation has the right to destroy its coastline for the sake of commerce. It's a crucial part of a country's proper development, and I'm confident that the Cypriots have had the wisdom to trash their sunny shores. Fortunately, the island's interior is made of mountains - the most underrated, wrongfully maligned component of any landscape. Have your beaches. I'll be in the high country.

I'll be drinking my wine, too. It's about done fermenting, and tonight I'll filter it through a t-shirt and allow secondary fermentation to commence. Then I'll age it - age it until I arrive in a high mountain meadow tomorrow night, where I'll carefully pair it to tomatoes, yogurt and melon. It will be a thick and hazy rose, and I could filter it through a multi-layered garment for fuller purification, but I'm leery of overdoing the post-fermentation processing; too much refinement and what will I have? Just another fine wine like anything stamped with the label Napa, Chianti or Rhone.