I Can't Count My Whims

“Now, we run,” he said, and I did. Strapped to a laughing Turkish man, I ran straight off the edge of the mountain.

When you travel, you eventually reach a point of no return. Without noticing, you cross the line that used to comfortably separate what you will and won’t do and you just keep going. This is how that person who leaves home with a shiny new backpack, three photocopies of their passport, probably some sort of diarrhea medication (you know, just in case), and a tan coloured money belt strapped securely to their torso, eventually finds themselves lost in the middle of a forest sucking down a Capri-Sun while sticking their thumb into oncoming traffic and wondering just how likely it is they’ll freeze to death if they’re not picked up soon.
So, when I found myself sitting on a plane to Turkey hoping I didn’t need a visa to get into the country I was pretty sure I’d passed this point. The answer is yes by the way; you do need a visa, or rather a postage stamp stuck in the back of your passport, which costs exactly how much the guy behind the counter decides to charge you that day – I think it’s less if he’s eaten recently.

I pulled the black jumpsuit over my salt stained boardies and stared as dark figures ran towards the point where marbled ground morphed into blue sky, their flimsy parachutes rustling along the ground behind them.

“Is anyone interested in Paragliding?” A simple question asked by our weathered sea captain, and before I could finish swallowing my mouthful of eggs and olives my hand shot straight into the air. I wasn’t alone. Several freshly burnt faces smiled maniacally around bulging mouthfuls of half chewed food, their arms sticking vertically into the air.
Together, we travelled two-thousand meters into the sky.

“Now we run”. He pushed me forward. No warning, no hand holding, no comforting words like, ‘are you ready?’ or ‘I swear you won’t die’, and, mercifully, no time for second thoughts. Just a jolly laugh and a swift jog and I was lifted into the air.
We drifted quietly over the bay where tourists’ sat by pools licking melted ice-cream from their sunscreen smeared hands. I felt like a kid who had finally managed to swing all the way around the bar of the old red swing set that now sat rusting in the back yard.
“You want to do tricks?” the laughing Turkish man challenged me.
“Yes.” I accepted.
And I felt the familiar sensation of g-forces stretching my smile impossibly wide as we spun to the ground.