On
top of everything else, my son is falling into heat stroke. We’ve been dragging our packs and too little
water up the dusty mountain trail for hours, the Turkish sun lying like a dead
weight on our heads. Our shirts, our
shorts, even our socks are sodden with sweat.
We haven’t seen another hiker, another human, since we started up the
trail, and we’ve been half lost or worse for almost as long. Now this.
Gordon stops, stunned, in the trail.
He is flushed a dark red, and he complains that his heart is running out
of control. He’s no longer sweating. He
can’t walk any farther. I’m only in a
little better shape.
But
we can’t stop here. The next water is
over the mountain we’re climbing. If
we’re on the right trail, that is – something I’ve come to doubt as we slogged
up the endless ascent, trying desperately to match our guidebook’s landmarks to
the trail we’re on. There are no
signposts, and we can’t expect a park ranger to come along. We’re deep in the Turkish mountains on a
trail that hardly existed a few years ago, a trail that few have heard about,
let alone hiked.
Well,
if nothing else, heat stroke is a good excuse for a break. We drop our packs and fall onto them, hoping
for a breeze. Two days ago, I was practicing law in Washington, DC. Just how did I manage to get us into this fix
so quickly, I wonder. As usual, it’s a
long story, and it begins with a book.
Casting about for a summer hiking trip with my son, Gordon, I learned
that Turkey had just opened
its first long-distance hiking trail – the 500-kilometer Lycian Way -- linking the mountains and
coastline of Turkey’s
Mediterranean coast between Antalya
and Fethiye. An Englishwoman, Kate Clow,
had just released a guidebook, and The
London Times had already rated the Lycian Way one of the world’s ten best
hikes.
I
was intrigued. I’ve traveled in Turkey before
and liked it, even though the country has been relentlessly trashed by the
American media. Most of us saw “Midnight
Express,” an Oscar-winning movie in which the young drug-smuggling hero is
cruelly mistreated in a Turkish prison.
What none of us realized at the time was that the screenwriter, an
unknown by the name of Oliver Stone, was launching an entire oeuvre of politically correct lies
served up as fact. In fact, Turkey is by no
means a perfect country. But it looks
pretty good next to its neighbors – Syria,
Iraq, the former Soviet Union, Bulgaria,
Greece, and the former Yugoslavia.
The
trail sounds delightful. The Lycian Way winds
through 6000-foot mountains. It passes
Mediterranean coves and inlets that cannot be reached by road, promising
solitary noontime swims as a break from hiking.
It drops into villages and climbs to mountain pastures that rarely see
visitors, let alone foreigners. And it
carries its hikers through a mass of history unmatched by any region of the
world. When Alexander the Great marched
through this neck of the woods, wintering near Mt. Olympos,
the Lycians he met must have viewed him as an upstart barbarian. They already had a centuries-old urban
culture. The Lycians yielded in the end
-- first to Greek, then Roman, then Byzantine and Genovese and finally to Arab
and Ottoman influences – all of whom left homes and religious buildings strewn
casually across what are now lonely goat pastures.
We’re
sold. How can we go wrong?
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