Yes, I stayed on a farm

Just what every person dreams of doing on their vacation...staying on a farm! Right. But for whatever crazy hobo was possessing my body that day, I signed up for a week long stay at a small farm near Datca, a teensy local hideaway about two hours from Marmaris. My partner and I looked long and hard at the farm descriptions listed through WWOOF's website (the World Wide Organization of Organic Farms), which offer free room and board in exchange for about 6 hours of work a day. Dairy farm, herbal medicine harvesting, apple orchard, wine and olive oil making farm, orang....wait, wine and olive oil making farm? Only 1 km from the Mediterranean? With a volley ball court? Um, yes please. So we filled out our application, spent two hours at Kinko's trying to fax our information to Istanbul, and got a response two days later -- we were in! After introducing ourselves to Turkey with an expensive weekend in Istanbul, we would head south to experience traditional Turkish farming and a voluntourism itinerary. Spiked.

We rode for nearly 24 hours from Istanbul on an overnight bus that stopped every hour. Oddly enough, whenever I had to use the bathroom at certain bus stops, the bus driver would wag his finger at me and his watch as I stepped off the bus, tskk something in Turkish, and start to drive the bus away as I sprinted back from the world's fastest pee. And we'd rush off to the next stop, where he'd park the bus for a half hour (where of course I didn't have to use the bathroom) and completely mystify in my mind the entire system of logic in Turkish public transportation.

But we're talking about the farm today. As we bumped along the last dregs of our journey, the mountains of the Mediterranean coast poking up through its blue waters outside our window, I thought of praries, pigs, hay, and really old toothless farmers who probably wouldn't even drink the wine they produced (as my dad said once, "aren't there a lot of Muslims in that country? Why are you going there?).

Our farmer, Ali, as it turns out, not only drinks all the wine he produces ("why sell it when you can drink it?") and has plenty of young teeth, but also perfects the testosterone of a frat boy and kitchen grace of an Italian mother. His English -- impeccable -- is typically put to use with some story of a Japanese samuri sushi chef or the pointlessness of kissing during sex ("the only reason we do it is to spread our seed so what is the big deal about kissing?") As it turns out -- and a friend of his later summarized -- Ali is terrible at making relationships but the best in the world at making friendships. Ali and I established pretty quickly that we would never explore the former during a heated discussion about men as tomatoes and women as cucumbers -- they're never the same but they can mix to make a nice salad. To Ali, however, I'm more of a squash.

Ali lives on a 3 or 4 square mile plot of land tucked away in the folds of hills surrounding the baby blue waters that the Mediterranean and Aegean contest to call their own. Spread in thick cake layers of terrace and aquaducts are rows and rows of downy green vegetable fields, bushy olive trees and grape vines, their spindly legs clutched by skirts of purple leaves. The land is amorphous -- it boils and rolls over and over into microcosmic valleys of puffy brown and green life, knobby boulders at the cusp of tumbling off the hillside, tufted and ridged like some sort of primitive landscape. Flakes of color from the civilization built into it dissolve in and out of olive branches; this farm had been carved of the mountain, bits of stones rearranged to premise businesses and things-to-do. But never would you find something that didn't belong -- what is here was here before and before, dug up, spewed up, applied and recycled by man and land alike. The signs of hands claim the ordered beauty of the place; it is rugged but shaped with intent and precise if not archaic functionality. The simple, old world design of huts and tool sheds elegantly disprove the need for all that shiny steely modern house space that makes our Western world go round. Land is house, house is land and we lived with the wild in the impeccable simplicity of basic, comfortable survival.

Day One -- A 20 hour bus ride and only snatches of fitful sleep leave me grumpy, balled up and peddling a bad case of the trots. We arrive at the farm at noon -- will we have to work? I wiggle my fingers trying to imaging how I'll get them to do any thing except lay there like deader than dead sausages. First we're fed a big pasta lunch with black olives from Ali's fields -- then it's "straight to your bungalow to take a rest, then walk to the ocean to take a swim. We'll meet at 5 for a game of volley ball." I'm not regretting this WWOOF thing so much right now.

Day Two -- A dose of rest and no sign of a hangover from the two and a half bottles of homemade wine we feasted with last night, and I'm done feeling sorry for myself and my fingers. Time to prove that our hard work is worth the free rent and daily feasts we're getting in exchange. We start around 11 after a leisurely breakfast, prune some olive trees for a while, break for lunch at 2, prune a little more then 5 o'clock rolls around and its time for volley ball. By then the sun is nearly down, so I guess our whopping four and a half hours of work is done for the day as well. Time for some more wine and a fresh crock pot of veggies baked in Ali's handmade stone oven. I'm really getting the hang of this.

Day Three -- Ali comes charging into our bungalow at 9 am, a half hour before breakfast time shouting "hey! It's Sunday!" We jump out of bed alarmed that we'd overslept. "If you want to go sailing today, you have to get up!" Sailing? Does this count as work? Did he confuse us for guests instead of volunteers and expect us to pay him at the end of the week? SAILING?

The rest of our week went sort of like this -- long breakfast, prune a little, long lunch, make a little olive oil, play some volley ball or go for a swim, and cook a feast for random friends that would show up to drink homemade wine and Raki all night. Then we'd go sailing for a couple of days. Again, to Greece. Back to work a little. A spontaneous party in the afternoon. More volleyball. And this was all FREE? I started to wonder how this little farm made any money.

The party guy/motherly chef/green thumb complex of this wildly generous farmer Ali all made sense to me on our last day at the farm. A group of ten friends who had known Ali for years showed up with a few pounds of lamb, a case of Raki, and a promise to stay the next day to help him with the first olive harvest. We quit work at noon and spent the afternoon drinking, feasting, telling stories, and learning about all the people in the world who had come to know Ali's farm and came back year after year to help with whatever task the season demanded. He had a collection of friends that spanned Japan, L.A. (including Dustin Hoffman), Australia, Germany, and Panama. And while the work ethic was no more than antithetical to America's production rate, it turns out that money wasn't what Ali was interested in making. As his best friend put it to us later, "Ali's farm isn't earning any money. It's just earning friends."

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