Lycian Way Hiking

My old lady knees are sore and tired! Today I hiked 10 kilometers of the 520 km Lycian Way long distance footpath from Fethiye to Antalya along the south Mediterranean coast of Turkey. It was one of the things that I definitely wanted to do while I was here and I’m delighted that I was able to do it.

10 kilometers of that up and down route, I figure, is equivalent to running a marathon! The jeep from Dragoman Tours, driven by a man whose broken-nosed profile reminded me of the now-deceased English actor Oliver Reed, drove the six of us up the road past Buyuk Cakil beach (which I had ridden up on my bike) and further up and up along a rocky red soil track (what we’d call in BC a logging road) into the hills of the Limon Agzi peninsula. We stopped briefly near the top to walk on the remains of the Silk Road, the ancient caravanserai route from China to Anatolia - wow. I could still see the old wide paving stones that would have originally paved the route. Finally we arrived at the hill village of Ufakdere where we received our ski pole walking sticks

The first downhill stretch was steep and rocky with lots of loose stones, winding down through fields of more stones and olive trees. One of our two guides, Kevser, stopped periodically to put a little pyramid of stones on top of path-side rocks, a marker to indicate to the village people that we were travelling through the area. Our first pit stop for snacks was made at sea-level on a wide field next to the ocean and a ruined seaside house. We watched goats frolic as we snacked. Leaving the beach, we began our upward ascent along the stony path through scrub brush, spiky yellow-flowered bushes, and tiny oak trees, pausing briefly to allow what looked to be a school group of hikers to pass by us. The path, marked by red and white stripes painted on the rocks, went up quite steeply and we had to keep a careful eye on the ground because of the loose stones and the possibility of falling. I really did not want to fall or twist my ankle out there in the middle of nowhere.

Our second rest stop was made at the summit and the third when we reached the opposite side of the peninsula and once again descended to sea level. The rocks along the coast here are all limestone and very pitted and eroded and a bit tricky to navigate in places. It was very, very windy and white capped surf was up on the ocean. We could see the island of Meis directly opposite us, glimmering on the mirrored surface of the ocean. (”Meis” means eye and “Kas” means eyebrow, the names linking these two geographically linked places). From there, another upward stretch took us through canyons of eroded rock and a pomegranate field; guide Alkan explained to us that nomadic people still live in this area and they move from seaside village to the mountains to farm, depending on the time of year. In earlier days pirates were a plague along this coast and people built their villages high in the mountains; later, when the Lycian people became more powerful on the sea, they returned to the coast and built villages ocean-side.

Originally written for Ms. Poiesis