Some of this may be completely obvious to you or glaringly wrong. But it's what we learned on the trip...

Making and cooking on a fire. Collect a dozen or so pine cones that have at least partly opened, and some bits of dry leaf/twigs. Put them in circle of stones about 18 inches across. Apply cigarette lighter and/or matches. Add bigger twigs/sticks as needed. Put a flat stone in the fire to rest cooking pots on. Vegetables, sucuk etc can be wrapped in tin foil (two layers -- the Turkish stuff is thin) and cooks pretty well. Bulghur wheat cooks really easily and fast, pasta, couscous and rice less so. Get yufka bread if you can (ask for yufka ekmeği, not just yufka, as the latter is the raw material). It lasts for days, and you can wrap things (e.g. beyaz peynir) in it and fry it over the fire. We did this at the Chimera...

But note: later in the year, fires may be very dangerous and/or forbidden. There was a huge nine-day forest fire behind Kas in autumn 2006, for example.

Water. With careful reading of the Book, we found that after a couple of days we were able to avoid having to use wells and cisterns (whose water needs purifying, for sure), though we walked in April/May and you will need to use well water later in the year. We drank spring water, in the open and from fountains at mosques etc, with no precautions and no ill effects.

Thirst is a funny thing. Sometimes we felt out of sorts, tired, fed up, when actually we were getting dehydrated but didn't realise it. It helps to drink as much water as you can stomach, early in the day. I brought a little canister of salt with me from home and occasionally put it on food to keep my salt balance up. Kate tells us: "In summer, if you drink and therefore sweat out more than 2 litres in a day, you are in risk of losing essential salts, and so must replace them. Easiest is GEoral, which is a powder for rehydrating babies after diahorrea. Mix it with every second litre of water. More water is not necessarily better; shepherds drink only morning/evening and carry no water - they don't sweat and don't lose salt. I rarely drink more than a litre in a day's trekking, pack or no pack. Salt loss/ dehydration does creep up on you."

You don't need to have a water supply at your camp site. You can carry enough to cook with and drink, and you don't really need to wash, now do you?

Staying at a Pansiyon. We found prices were around 50 lira for a double room with breakfast, less in the country, more in Antalya. Maybe we should have negotiated harder.

Not staying at a Pansiyon. There are lot of nearly-built empty houses (shells) in Turkey because a large tax is payable when the house is complete. We stayed on the floors of such houses twice during our trip, once when it was offered to us, and once when we turned up in a village as night was falling, everyone had gone to bed, and it just seemed like the easiest thing to do...

Predatory animals. In order of both size and annoyingness: dogs, bees and mosquitoes. The dogs usually just bark, but a couple of times we felt quite threatened. We always picked up stones when they started up, and threw them, or made as if to, when the dog got close. It worked. The owners won't mind, it seems. Best of all, see if you can get a dog to adopt you and see off its fellow canines on your behalf, as this one did for us in Patara...

There are lots of beehives around Fethiye. They are usually arranged in parallel rows, like houses on two sides of a street. Do not walk down the middle of the street. It's much safer to go behind one side, even if that means walking much closer to the hive. Each of us got stung once, neither seriously. Mosquitoes were a minor problem most times when we slept out. Just slap the repellent on, even though it contains noxious chemicals.

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