This town is coming like a ghost town

It’s the end; all things come to an end. It’s the last week of the season. One by one the paraglider operators cease plying their trade and the tandem pilots prepare to return to their homes for the winter. Shops are closing by the day and as the thunder rolls overhead, lightning flashing across the horizon, the plaintive strains of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez add a melancholy counterpoint to a quiet evening’s solitary beer and herald the sudden demise of what was once bright, shining and new.

As each day dawns the sight of beachside emporia that no longer open the shutters becomes more familiar and each closure causes less distress than the last; there is only so much you can mourn something you had for so short a time. The tour operators pack away their boards and the lights go out, one by one as the thriving resort of Oludeniz prepares to hibernate. The place you once tentatively thought you could live in forever loses its lustre and now you've seen beneath the surface it can never be the same again.

 There can be no greater symbol that this land of eternal sunshine is shutting up shop than the fact that we all bought umbrellas two nights ago, to get us home under black, pelting skies. Swapping paragliders for parapluies, how poetic. And talking of symbols, nestled on a pile of tee-shirts a lonely glass eye charm, a gift for a loved one, struggles under the brooding skies to do its work and ward off evil.

Ennui... enervation... it's still only Wednesday. The ticking clock tediously ticks off the seconds to Friday when we make our weary way slowly back home. What to do... what to do?

Little rays of hope

But, what’s that? A chink of blue light; the eye winks hope and all may not be lost. We heft our gliders onto our backs and head out for the transport, squinting into the light, fingers tightly crossed all the way.

Whether to fly?

He was only a humble meteorologist, but one look at a girl and he could tell whether...

Some days it’s good, some days it ain’t. Working out which is which is part and parcel of being a daring, free-flying aviator. Settle down now and Uncle Batsby will give you a little lesson in flying and the weather... if only to bestow on you the knowledge to be suitably impressed by my tales of derring-do.

A paraglider might look like a parachute to you, but to us it is a wing, an aerofoil, a means to commit aviation. The world paragliding distance record is over 500km, set by one Neville Hulett of South Africa. For us it’s all about keeping it up, but eventually gravity always wins the unequal contest. It’s a bit like the European form of democracy; however hard you struggle, Europe ignores you and carries on regardless.

Actually, the main reason for landing is usually to regale your audience – any audience – with exaggerated tales of heights climbed, distance won and competitors vanquished. (Imagine then, how pissed off Neville must have been when he landed in the boonies without a soul in sight!)

Falling or flying? Just like those nutters who go in for freefall parachutery, we are always descending through the air, typically at around 1 metre every second, so we need to find air that is going up faster than we are going down. Although you can’t see it, the air is in perpetual turmoil – some going up and some going down. We need to find the uppy bits. And then stay in them.

You can’t fly without knowing whether. But wither the weather? (When we’re together?) Little fluffy clouds – that’s the ticket. When you see little fluffy clouds you can be sure they are sitting atop their very own little column of rising air. Like a lava lamp, bubbles of warm, light air pop up from all sorts of origins then rise and expand as they float on the colder, denser air around. As some air goes up, some must come down and eventually what was uppy air starts to sink again and so it goes... When you hear a glider pilot talking about thermalling he means he’s managed to spend a little time in his own personal bubble. Easier said than done; the bloody stuff is invisible.

A typical flight from Mount Babadag in Turkey starts at a mile high – a little over 5500 feet and lasts 20-30 minutes on a straight glide to the bottom. On a good day, you’ll find thermals and get up to around 8000 ft, prolonging your flight and increasing the fun factor. The other day I topped out at 12,200 feet and lest you think, “Pffft, easy!” civil aircraft regulations require the use of supplemental oxygen above 12,500 ft. 

That pimple below is a proper mountain!

Yes, yes, yes Felix Baumgartner jumped from 24miles high, but he had a balloon and a special suit. Pffft, easy! I had to do it all by myself, in shorts and tee shirt and I have to tell you, it was bloody freezing up there! Nice view though.

An assault on the senses

All is not sweetness, love and light here on the Mediterranean shores of the flying paradise that is Oludeniz. I'm here for the 13^th Annual Air Games which should be a festival of exuberant free flying fun with displays of supreme airmanship, extreme acrobatic ability and superhuman nuttiness, on all of which I shall report in due course. But first there are a few matters to address.

First, of course, there were the mosquitoes, now sorted out by a combination of soothing unguents for me and extreme aggression for them. The final solution for the mosquito population of the hotel room has been a success and we have eradicated malaria from the region. I'm expecting a World Health Organisation citation at any moment.

The other room-based affront to my health and general welfare is my co-habitant’s snoring. Not possible to measure accurately in decibels, Luke’s nasal tremors are more easily recorded on the Richter scale; an Avro Vulcan on take-off would barely register above the din. The solution to that, it appears, is mouldable silicon ear plugs and weird though it is to go to sleep cocooned against the world of sound, I finally slept a full seven hours blissfully unaware of his nightly struggle with respiration. Had Armageddon arrived I would have been the last to know.

Oh and there’s the temperature range, of course; it’s 30-plus on the ground, but near-freezing at altitude. The solution was to ditch the flying clothes and go for shorts and tee-shirts, suffering a bit of a chill after take-off in order not to burn up on re-entry to the beach-o-sphere. And then, at the end of the day, to take a prolonged dip in the breathtakingly cool depths of the hotel pool.

But there’s one more obstacle to enjoying the holiday. We have jointly managed the various assaults on our numerous senses. We have conquered pain and disease and discomfort, but my oh my, what about a senses of style? What fresh hell is this? People from all over the world are congregating here this weekend, flaunting the latest in flying gear, leisure wear and cool, cool threads. So why in the hell would the East Europeans think it was acceptable to take to the promenade in fashion throwbacks from the seventies?

My eyes! I thought budgie smuggling had been abolished long ago. The last time I saw trunks that skimpy they were being sported by the late Sir Jimmy Savile, in preparation for a charity fun-rummage through a local children’s home.

Do have a lovely day, if your retinas have not been irrevocably damaged by that image.

Poetry in Motion

Sometimes words just won't do it.

So today, I'm going all zippy-gobbed and just uploading a very short clip of exactly how one goes about tossing oneself off.

This is the westerly launch on Babadag mountain, at 1700m above sea level - I joined the 'nearly-a-mile high club'!