Walking the Lycian Way

All fresh and keen at the start	Bezirgan yayla	Children on Lycian tombs at Sidyma

We walked most of the Lycian Way in Turkey in April and May 2006. The documents you can download from this site are to help you in your preparations.

Dramatis Personae

We are Dave and Claire from Cambridge, England, aged 48 and 40 respectively when we walked. As you may be able to work out from the picture, we are in good health and reasonably fit, but we are not Serious Walkers. Prior to doing the Lycian Way, our most recent long-distance walk (longer than a weekend) was 300 km or so to Santiago de Compostela in 1999.

What's here

• What stuff we took with us, and what we wished we hadn't..
• Making your flights as painless as possible. Mostly about going to/from Britain, but some information about Dalaman and Antalya airports.
• How far can you walk in a day, how much of the route should you aim to cover, and how long will it take? Our take on these perennial questions.
• Some practical tips that should be useful while walking. How to avoid the bees, sneak into empty houses, and set fire only to things you want to set fire to.
• Why Turkish is wonderful, and you should learn as much as you can.
• How to be a Lycian Geek. Why stop just because you're away from home?
• GPS (Global Positioning System) and why you need it, with an explanation for the mystified.

• Our notes on the route, in Word or PDF format so you can print them and take them with you. This should help you find good places to stay and eat, and most importantly, to get lost less often than we did. We walked most of the first half of the route (sections 1 to 15, i.e. as far as Ucagiz), plus part of 17 and all of 22b. We have incorporated other walkers' notes on section 16 and some other places.
• To make best use of the notes, you need the accompanying GPS waypoints. Follow these instructions to get waypoints for nearly the whole route, including those for the second half of the route from the official site.

You should also have a look at: The official Lycian Way site. The updates to the book (you need the book too, of course!). Jeff and Pam's site; they walked the route in 2002 and have some useful things to say. In addition to the map that comes with the book, you may see this map along the way, probably in a tourist area. If you do, buy it. It shows the Lycian Way and has accurate (we think) latitude and longitude lines, which may be useful in conjunction with the GPS. It also lets you visualize the whole route at once, which may take some figuring out from the map with the book!

Comments and corrections are most welcome. Please e-mail them to this address, changing the "q" to an "m" (this is a device to avoid getting my address spammed).