Hell in the Mountains

I have rented out an entire hotel for $17.50 US. No one else is here - and it's a good thing since the whole place now smells like moldy feet. My apartment's kitchen is fully furnished, with a mini fridge and complementary coffee. I'm not wild about about the bedroom's floor tile pattern and the wireless connection is a bit slow, but I'm no complainer.

I am still in southern Turkey, as I'm rather reluctant to leave. I have been 10 amazing days riding in the high mountains between and just inland of Antalya and Alanya, among fantastic canyons and unmarked mountain roads, from village to village - through communities relatively untouched by the modern world.

But I returned to the well-trammeled riviera today after the worst night I've ever known, in the high country of the Toros Mountains. There, deep in a cold pine forest, I nearly expired of hypothermia. A rainstorm hit me last night - a tempest of hail, thunder and lightning, and winds that blew the ice and water horizontally under my tarp shelter. The water quickly began seeping in over the ground, and my sleeping bag started soaking it up. The situation went downhill fast. There was no hope of staying dry - unless I could utilize the tarp more directly as a shelter. So I forced myself up and out of my bag to cut the tarp down from the trees and wrap it around me like a shawl - and in an instant of full exposure all the clothes I wore were drenched. I slipped back into my miserable bag and shimmied over to a cluster of tall pines where I sat in a heap, tarp over my head and leaking through to my back, and there I passed the night, shivering like a sick Chihuahua. The rain never stopped, and only by the miracle of the synthetic mummy sack did I stay liveably warm.

Then sleep took me away from there. For hours prior, through the height of my wet anguish, I had tried counting my blessings; I thought of how the situation could have been worse - like had I been clinging to the underside of a capsized sailboat in the North Atlantic, or if I'd convinced my sister to let me take my nephew along with me on his first camping trip - and then I vanished into the blessed land of sleep. I stayed there for several hours and awoke to the light of the sun coming through my tarp. The daylight revealed that I was lying smack beside one of Turkey's most under-appreciated charms, the one the guidebooks will never reveal, or the locals acknowledge - its magnificent roadside diaper dumps (diaper dumping is a tremendous problem here). I did 200 pushups to warm myself, drank a pint of my own spritzy road wine, and rolled down to sea level.

All of it - it didn't have to be. That's because just before dark I had been lodged comfortably in a covered picnic shelter in front of a village mosque, minding my own business and preparing to cut open my melon and bust into a tupperware of homemade yogurt that I'd bought just down the road - until three old men watching me told me that I couldn't stay there, for some unintelligible reason. They were firm about it, and I had to go. So I wished them prosperity and success in their nameless muddy village, regretfully abandoned that covered palapa, and headed into the woods. Damn them - but I trust that by now those three have been turned into hideous hairy beasts that no woman may ever love, if the childhood fairytales I remember bear any truth.

But now I own a beachfront villa with wireless internet and a balcony over the swimming pool. How's that for the ups and downs of Turkey in the off-season? I sail for Cyprus in two days.