Ölüdeniz is a lagoon on the Turkish coast near Fethiye, held still behind a low spit of pine and white sand, with Babadağ standing 1,969 metres almost directly above it. The mountain falls to the sea in under five kilometres, and that drop is what everything here is built on. Down at the bottom of it the water does nothing at all. Walled off from the waves, the lagoon lies flat and pool-warm over a floor you can see the whole way across, shallow and gentle enough for hesitant swimmers. You wade in from the spit and swim out towards the mouth, where the calm basin meets open sea. With a mask on, the edges turn out to hold small rock caves and fish, the pale bottom lit right through. The stillness is a trick of the surface: springs on the floor, an exchange with the sea outside and a small tide together replace almost all of this water every day. The spit itself has been protected since 1978, well before the resort strip behind it was built, so it carries pines and picnic tables instead of buildings.
The other end of the drop is the reason most people come. A cable car climbs Babadağ to launch decks between 1,700 and 1,900 metres, where the ground simply stops. A pilot clips you into a tandem harness and the two of you run off the edge. The flying is entirely theirs; your job is to watch the coast open out under your feet for the half hour it takes to glide down to the beach. Late in the afternoon the deck is worth standing on even without flying, as one canopy after another goes over the lip with the gulf of Fethiye below. The road down has its own lay-bys, and from them the basin is one blue pool closed by the spit. Around midday the overhead sun pulls the shallows to their brightest green and picks out the gulets moored inside. That road gives the height back in switchbacks. The canopy gives it back in one long glide over the lagoon.