INorton

On the Mediterranean coast of Turkey the village of Faralya seems to end at the air. Below the sheer descents of cliff lies Butterfly Valley, a triangle of lush land which houses a beach encampment. A path, which my guidebook described as, "steep in places," zags down the cliffs from Faralya. I descended with Nehir and Ozgur, two brilliant, laid-back university students I'd met on the minibus. Most of the path is rocky but sloping—a fleet-footed sheep beat us to the bottom—but in a couple of particularly steep places, climbers have rigged rope to help humans down.
"Darned if I'm going to do this with a tote bag.” I thought. I dropped the bag down ahead of me. But instead of stopping at the foot of the cliff, it bounced down to another cliff below. And another....
According to Ozgur, as I watched my bag roll down tiers of gorgeous rock, my response was something like this:
(thud)
Fuck...
(thudthud)
Fuck.
(thud, thud, thud)
Fuu...uuu...
(disappear bag)
uck.
"Well, you took a risk, and that is sometimes what happens when you take risks," Nehir observed. Down at the camp, it turned out others have dropped their possessions down the gorge and been bailed out by climbers who live in the valley. After wading through bushes and retracing steps, Ismail, a villager who knows the mountains (and did his bold hike across the cliffs in rubber slip-on sandals) retrieved my battered bag: passport, journal, and Lonely Planet intact.
The fraying of my nerves was nothing a draft Efes beer, the conviviality of Nehir and Ozgur, and a dusk swim in the sea couldn't cure. Swimming beside the two of them, I felt awed by the beautiful collisions and sudden friendships that arise from travel. We watched a hot orange sun slip over the horizon, disappearing into the ocean before us. And that night returned to the water's edge, a fire at our backs, the beach lit by the full moon's even cast. One of those moments when happiness is so ineluctable it's beside the point to spend many words on it.