With the heat of summer past, it’s a great time to go hiking, Scott Newman, explores Turkey’s most popular trail, the Lycian Way

 “What’s a backpacker doing here?, a young female Australian voice cried out from a boat anchored just off the shore.

            I will forgive her for confusing a hiker with a backpacker, but the question deserves an answer.  Southern Turkey is a beautiful, rough coastline stretching for hundreds of kilometers of the Mediterranean sea.  There are many famous resort towns like Antalya, Fethiye and Kaş, where the tourist masses fill the beaches like colonies of beached whales, but the vast majority is untouched and inaccessible, well almost.  The most popular way to see the coastline is by boat, the ‘blue cruise’, but since 2000, the yachts have been joined by hikers on the Lycian Way, a 500km hiking trail from Fethiye to Antalya.

            Yes, 500km. WAIT, before you turn the page, you don’t have to walk the whole thing.  The trail passes many towns, villages – which is great for stocking up on supplies but also means it is easily broken up into smaller sections, of one to three days.  I have only hiked about 250km of it, so please forgive me for my laziness.   In some sections, particularly in the western parts, local villagers are establishing pensions, so much can be done without carrying tent and food supplies.  Day trekkers are in fact are as common on the trail as long distance hikers.

            Turkey has a rich and diverse range of landscapes that gives it an immense potential for hiking.  There are a vast array of pine clad mountains, green valleys, remote villages and untouched ruins awaiting those willing to put on their hiking shoes, yet that potential has long been untapped.  There is an abundance of trails used by villages and goat hearders, but they are rarely marked, and choosing the right paths, in the maze like network can be all but impossible.  Meanwhile detailed maps of the country are zealously guarded by the military as a state-secret.  And as long as people don’t think of Turkey as a hiking destination, the potential remains undeveloped.

            Into this void came a Briton resident in Antalya, Katie Clow.  She explored the remote countryside and with the help of Garanti bank, joined up the goat trails, ancient village pathways and rural roads to create the Lycian Way.    Persuading the government was more complicated than the hiking, as nobody knew whose responsibility it was to authorize the project and permission took two years of bureaucratic buck passing.   The Lycian Way finally opened in 2000, and since then the trail has been repeatedly rated one of the worlds best long distance hiking trails.  In 2004, the “St. Pauls trail” was opened, heading north from Antalya across the Taurus mountains to the ancient city of Antioch in Psidia, following one of the journeys of St Paul.  Finally in 2008 came a guide to hiking in the Kaçkars, a little piece of Switzerland in Turkeys north east, this time a series of shorter trails.

            The trails are marked in the Grande Randonne system; splashes of red and white paint, usually on rocks marking the route, a system known as ‘way marking’.  Searching for these splashes of colour is one of the main occupations on the trail.  Mostly they provide regular reassurance that you are going the right way, but there are times when they seem to disappear altogether, and you are left searching for which goat trail was the proper trail.  Sometimes infuriatingly, they disappear altogether, as it’s impossible to way mark a field or a scree slope, and you just have to hope that you are heading the right way.  The official guide, with it’s indespensible map, describes the route and grades the paths from G1 – a narrow indistinct goat trail through to G6 a full bitumen road. 

 

            One of strangest parts of hiking in this area, is feeling like a complete alien from outer space.  As a foreigner, or even an Istanbul Turk, appearing in remote village you are strange enough, but to most locals, particularly in the towns, the idea of hiking that kind of distance is simply crazy.  Few locals, apart from the villages who are now getting used to passing hikers, know the trails exists, and explaining you are looking for red and white paint patches on rocks or posts will probably convince them you are completely crazy and they’ll just put you on the bus.  Meanwhile stepping out of the bushes onto a beach full of sunbathers, with full backpack and hiking boots can definetly make you feel out of place.

 

Short Sections

Here are some short sections that can be done without a tent in a day.  Don’t forget to buy the official guide, which decribes the trail in detail, and includes a useful map.  Also the official website includes the latest updates, where the trail has changed with the never ending fight against road building.

 

The Aqueduct to Patara

The walk down the hill to ancient Patara is a relatively short easy stretch of about 16km that takes 5-6 hours and delivers you to the ruins  and beach at the end.  Most of the hike follows the ancient aqueduct, mostly an indistinct ditch the ground but with one large raised section where the aqueduct was carried through a valley by a sealed siphon, very hi-tech for the time.  The section starts in the small town of Akbel near Kalkan, though the start has been disturbed by the building of the new highway.

 

Ucağız to Aperlae

The tourists come in big numbers to Ucağız for boat trips to the sunken city of Simena but few get far beyond the port town.  Head east around the bay and a short walk will take you to kale, where a castle, with Lycian tombs and a Greek island like village dominate the wide bay.  Head west for four or five hours and you will reach the little visited ruins of Aperlai.  The bulk of the walk is beside the sea, then a short crossing, past many old Greek houses to the next inland of Aperlai.  Here a family has restored some houses and set up a small pansiyon for those who want to stay the night.  The bay is small and pretty, with a beach where you can swim around a great stone Lycian Sarcophagus.   The places has an air of peace and tranquility a million miles from the tourist cities of the coasts.  The ruined city, all but a Byzantine ghost town, stand inside a complete circuit of walls.  There is no ticket office, no trails, no signs, no buses, the nearest road is a few hours walk.  Exploring the ruins entangled in jungle like growth can make you feel like a true Indiana Jones, just be careful for snakes in the Byzantine church.  For those with a tent who want to continue a day and a half to Kas, or who chose to stay in Aperlai, there are more impressive, isolated ruins inApollonia, a three hour walk inland.

 

Demre to Ucağız

The full walk from Demre to Ucağız is about a day and half, climbing up behind the theatre to the ancient Acropolis of Myra then round one of the most isolated sections of coast.  If you start at Kale, the ancient port of Demre known as Andriake, and cross the improvised wooden bridge, you can cut out enough to make it to Ucağız in about 7 hours walking.  This is a classic section of remote villages with their goats, far from the nearest roads, and curved inlet with anchored Blue Cruise yatchs.

 

The Light House

The classic image of the Lycian Way is the Cape Gelidonia light house.  On a remote, rugged headland, it is a special place.  The walk is about 2.5 hours from the small beach town of Karaöz, with the option of stopping at a pretty little beach known as Korsanköy, “Pirate’s Cove”.  If you have a car, the last section to the light house is only 40 minutes walk.  The lighthouse is also a great place to sleep the night, there is a large cistern for water, and a platform to sleep out under the stars, though of course you can’t exactly turn out the light.  From the light house it’s another 5 or 6 hours to the small beach town of Adrasan, though the trail here is rough and gravelly and the markings can easily disappear, but it is a spectaculat coastal section.

 

Adrasan to Olympos

Probably the most popular day hike is this enjoyable 5 or 6 hour hike over Musa Dağı, between these two beaches.  Getting out of Adrasan is the hardest part, finding the trail around the green houses.  The rest is a nice walk over the forrested Musa Dağı, with great sea views from the top.  From Olympos you can’t miss the Lycian Way sign near the entrance to the ruins.

 

Olympos/Çıralı to Ulupinar

From Olympos/Çıralı everyone visits the natural eternal flames of the Chimaera/Yanartaş.  If you continue, the Lycian trail takes you up to the top of the hill, then down across the valley to the small town of Ulupınar on the main highway, taking 4 or 5 hours.  Ulupinar is a village of fish restaurants, and you’ll see the fish farms at the bottom of the hill.  There are half a dozen restaurants to choose from, dining outside on wooden platforms under trees, while water channels gush around .

 

Göynük to Hisar Çandir

Göynük is a strange beach town, popular with Russians, who’s varied array of hotels include one built in the shape of a giant Ocean Liner.  Few realise that just inland is the beautiful, dramatic valley of Göynük Vadısı.  The first part, finding the road out of town, is the hardest part – but onces you find the wide rocky river bed, just simply head west a few minutes till you reach a junction, which is where the sign posted Lyican Way heads from south to north.  Off the trail, you can find a good trail on the south west, of right hand trail which heads up to a dramatic narrow Canyon,visted by some organised Canyoning tours from town.  There is no reason why you can’t explore it yourself, my hiking companion and I thought were on the trail, and headed up it, ending up in chest deep water holding our backpacks over our heads, til we admitted that this was nothing like the description in the book.  If you want to explore it, follow the usual canyoning advice and don’t go after rainfall.  The first short section is easy, with waist deep water.  To explore further some kind of waterproof shoes and preferably a helmet for the rock scrambles are strongly recommended.

 

Back to the junction and there is a beautiful hike up a valley and over a high pass with a lonely grave of one Haci Ahmet with it’s wooden tombstone.  Beyond that is a spectacular hour or twos walk with some rock scrambles and dramatic views over the sea to Antalya and the Taurus beyond; best in winter and early spring when the distant mountains are white with snow.  This section ends at the spring of Elmayanı, a little known picnic place where you can get the great view without the hiking, then down the dirt road to the end of Lycian Way in the small town of Hisar Çandir.  This last section is atleast 9 hours, and is usually done overnight with a tent, but if you can organise tranport to Hisar Çandir and up the hill to Elmayanı early in the morning then it is possible as one long day, particularly in long summer days.