The Lycian Way, A Last Will and Testament
This is not a legally binding travel story.
I don’t especially care what happens to my body when I die. Funerals, burials, wakes, cremations: these are events for the mourning, though I do hope you all mourn. And, listen, has it always been my dream that my funeral involves—nay, centers around—my body being fired out of a cannon at whoever is considered to be my mortal enemy at the time? Of course. Do I plan to enshrine this wish into a legal document? I mean… maybe? Probably? Probably.
No. No, I don’t. Whoever is in charge of disposing of my no-longer-useful body is entitled to decide that it would be more sensible to burn it and keep the ashes in a tiny, ornate jar in a place of some significance to them and other living people, or to put me in a box and bury that box in some place and mark it with a stone so they could come by whenever they want and drop off some flowers and say a few things privately to themselves. Whatever the outcome, well, I don’t plan to make much of a fuss about that. I’ll be dead. I really won’t mind. But, also let’s not forget the whole cannon idea, okay? Should the executor of my will be reading this now, all I’m saying is don’t rule it out. Google “cannon rentals” at the very least, then—and I can’t be clearer about this—the choice is yours.
Yet there remains an ideal that we consider from time to time during our life about what should happen to us when we die. Meaning, more precisely, what will happen to our body when we are no longer using it. I suppose that for religious people this is easy, and for spiritual people less easy but still a lot easier than I find it. For those with beliefs, there’s a certainty (or at least a hedged bet) that some tiny part of our soul lingers there in the shell, and that knowing its whereabouts is somehow helpful in case they need to keep tabs on the bits that didn’t go to an after/next life. But the trouble with not believing in any form of religion or even any kind of half-assed spirituality is that there’s an ever-present certainty that when it’s over, it’s really over.
Still, the ideal. The romance. There’s something intoxicating about meeting with lawyers and finalizing outrageous demands about what to do with our leftovers on the mortal coil. People ask all kinds of favours of those they leave behind, from the outrageous (see previous, re: cannon) to the sweetly banal (“bury me in the family plot beside my husband, who died 25 years before me and who represents but a quarter of the life I lived”). If I were to sit with lawyers and pay to have my desire for the treatment of my corpse finalized, I would come up with a spectacular request, like this:
Cremate me, and scatter my ashes at some pretty place of your choosing that you think with this very specific and limited caveat: it must be in a particularly pretty place that you think I’d like, somewhere along the Lycian Way.
When we start the hike, the sun is already high in the sky, blazing unrelentingly on the hills around Fethiye, in southern Turkey. There is no tree cover on the first section of the trail, which rises gently out of a non-descript car park and up toward Babadağ, the magnificent peak towering high above the perfect crescent beach at Ölüdeniz. Only five minutes into a three-day trek, we are sweating profusely. All around us, day-tripping families skip ahead up the road in beautiful summer dresses and high heels, in casual suits and dress shoes, while over-burdened long-haul hikers slouch slowly upwards along the path.
Our journey begins (and continues, as this will show) with a touch of arrogance. Having just been handed a packet of directions and trial notes from a grumpy driver called Mustafa at the trailhead of the Lycian Way, we promptly discard them. We’ll figure it out, obviously, and throw the notes into the car. We laugh. We start the hike. At the first fork in the trail, we take a wrong turn and nearly both sprain our ankles scrambling down a hill on the way back to the path.
We: I’ve convinced my friend Sarah—an American who I met while working for Alibaba in China and a dedicated long-distance hiker who is systematically conquering the length of Appalachian Trail on her weekends—to ignore a nagging foot injury to walk with me from Ölüdeniz to somewhere near the small town of Alinca, only 40 kilometres away. It’s October 2020, in that weird bubble that occurred in the first year of the pandemic. After the first wave, when numbers were falling around the world, we all high-fived and borders opened again and travel was encouraged. I took the first flight out of Canada, where I’d been living in my mom’s basement, to Portugal for a few weeks and then onto Turkey to meet Sarah. She used Turkey as a starting point for months of pandemic remote-working, ending this particular trip in Kyrgyzstan many months later. By the end of 2020, the world has shut down again, as you probably recall.
In the build-up to the trip, we contemplated turning the three-day hike a two-day affair, scoffing at the short distances each day—further arrogance!—but after only an hour on the Lycian Way, we’re glad to be humbled. The Lycian Way is not an experience to rush. It’s difficult walking, often along high ridges on uneven footing with certain death awaiting an importune stumble, but the reason not to rush is simpler than that: this is one of the world’s great walks, stunning view unfolding after breathtaking view, with each step revealing a new vantage point at which to stare, mouth agape, at the unbelievable beauty of the Turquoise Coast.
The Lycian Way is an ancient footpath, but has only recently been established as a coherent walking route. In the 1990s, a British historian called Kate Clow, who in all of the literature surrounding the Lycian Way is always somewhat disparagingly referred to as an “amateur historian,” researched the old byways used to connect early settlements in the area and painstakingly marked the 580-kilometre route between Ölüdeniz and Antalya. The trail is a slapdash collection of markings—sometimes having official signs labelled “Likya Yolu” pointing the distances along roads (which the trail frequently makes use of), and other times just white, red, and/or yellow bits of paint on rocks deep in the thick, green woods. In general except when leaving the parking lot, the trail is well-trod and obvious, but there are passages where a GPS is helpful, especially when coming off roads to rejoin the wilder parts of the path. Rock cairns mark the way at particular crossroads to simplify the choice, but the usual approach we took was to keep the sea on one side and the mountains on the other.
It takes us less than an hour to establish our pattern for the next three days: walking a few minutes, then turning around to say “wow that’s pretty!,” stopping for water and a few photos, and then making slow progress for another few minutes before repeating the water and photo break. Any other approach would be inappropriate. The trial rises gradually out of the small town of Ovacik, little more than a string of restaurants and shops beneath the official starting point of the Lycian Way—marked with a not-very-official-looking banner sponsored by the local rotary club—along a cobblestone road. Where the cobbles end, the trail becomes loose gravel, but is still busy with couples dressed more appropriately for a nice dinner than an arduous climb, and it isn’t for a few hundred meters that it becomes clear this is a serious hike. The crowds thin after the first viewpoint, where the crescent beach of Ölüdeniz forms the perfect backdrop for the photo hunters, the nice-dinner seekers. Beyond this, everyone we encounter is decked out in proper gear, carrying huge packs and hiking poles, presumably with an eye to completing all 30+ days of the hike. We’re dressed in running clothes and wearing matching $10 backpacks from Decathlon, and easily pass the serious hikers, unencumbered as we are by tents and a month’s worth of clothing. Before long, we have the trail completely to ourselves.
The climb isn’t easy. Over the first five kilometres, we ascend nearly one kilometre vertically, mostly on the old foot-and-mule path that has been worn by millennia of human and animal traffic, by the rain and wind. At times, the path opens out to the ruins of an ancient house, a disused cistern, an open-air museum of sheer human endeavour to inhabit such an out-of-reach part of the world. We stand in these very old places, sipping water and scratching our heads at the audacity of building anything so far above the sea, so far from the nearest place, roasting in the still-hot October sun, while above us thrill-seekers in parasails zip down from the peak of Babadağ to the eventual soft landing on the white sand of the beach far below. It’s a surreal scene, these modern Instagram-hungry tourists—having been carted up the mountain in four-wheel-drive trucks—drifting above the ancient settlements that were built stone-by-heavy-stone when this was a flourishing collection of Lycian settlements.
By mid-day, the gorgeous sweeping views of the beach are behind us, and the trail cuts inland and reveals another side of Turkey, that of rabid development, a desperation for foreign funds to curb an inflation crisis that will outlast the pandemic. We turn a corner and are suddenly hiking on a new road that runs up to the paragliding start point at Babadağ, busy with construction vehicles and their accompanying dust. Half-finished villas line the way. We have a quick lunch in a shady grove before misidentifying a forest road as the correct way down to Kabak. We walk for half an hour in thick trees, a switchback road heading back toward the sea. The air is fresh, the scent of the trees intoxicating. Yet something feels wrong; we’re going too far down. We push on, the maps and trail descriptions back in the car, but our GPS showing us as trail-adjacent, and we plod on until the road gives way to a dirt trail that gives way to a tree and a boulder. Backtracking is gruelling, hilarious, and teaches us nothing. An hour later, we’re back on a paved road, heading in the right direction, feeling hungry and happy.
The path/road is dotted with shops serving gözleme—a wonderful crispy pancake stuffed with potatoes, cheese, meat, and local herbs—and tea and fresh fruit juices. From the teashops, the trail leads mercifully (and correctly, this time) downward, passing through olive groves, slowly heading back toward the coast. The air is cooler, the scenes bizarre. At one point, our only company is a herd of four mangy goats huddled in the shade beneath a lone farmhouse blaring Anatolian pop music, a discarded armchair and rusted motorbike stacked beside the path, and not another soul in sight. The path carries on steeply downward. Bees are everywhere, great buzzing masses of them taking up residence on the cisterns where clear mountain water flows freely. Then, suddenly, the trail once again meets a road, and we are in the tidy mountain town of Faralya, with its dozen guesthouses and restaurants perched atop the intimidating Butterfly Valley.
We settle easily into our pansion for the night, eating a delicious home-cooked meal and drinking slightly spoiled Turkish wine, watching the sun set on the sharp cliffs far below. We sleep in simple wooden cabins with a view to the sea. I sleep deeply.
The next day begins with a kind of lazy riddle. The notes on the Lycian Way (which we’ve been reunited with through Sarah’s boyfriend, who drove the car to the first night’s hotel) suggest that there are two ways out of Faralya: a steep climb that those with vertigo or a fear of heights should avoid, or a walk down the road to well past the steep parts, rejoining the trail to descend to Aktas Beach. Both are mysteriously described as tranquil and moderately difficult. We opt for moderately difficult tranquillity with a climb and the views. This is the only day that all three of us will be walking together. It’s the shortest day (only 6km), so we start casually and late, letting all the other trekkers get a head start so we can have the trail mostly to ourselves. That plan backfires twice, though not immediately.
The trail starts on the upper rim of Butterfly Valley, one of Turkey’s vaunted tourist gems. It’s one of those natural places for which there are not enough adjectives, a narrow beach at the bottom of a steep and rocky valley, that famous turquoise water made to look even more blue against the grey and brown of the sharp and shadowy hills around it. The trail leads us a few hundred feet above the valley, and the deep bay is already, at 11 am, home to half a dozen party boats from Fethiye, their ridiculous music blaring and clearly audible from a kilometre away. Above us, the sheer cliffs of Babadag’s imposing southern face block most of the sun. There’s a light breeze off the sea. It’s utterly surreal, the warm air and vast mountains and Mambo Number Five ricocheting all around while Sarah takes photos at the cliff’s edge and her boyfriend slowly works his way through a pomegranate that he carries in one hand for the first 90 minutes of the trek. He’s a weird dude.
This last detail becomes more notable and hilarious as the trail gets steeper. Heading inland, away from the valley, the walk becomes the well-advertised steep climb, first up a loose rock surface with the aid of a rope tied to a tree, then up nearly vertical steps in the rocks. Sarah and I climb using both hands to pull ourselves up; her boyfriend pauses every now and then for another mouthful of pomegranate, balancing masterfully while scaling the difficult pass with ease, always chomping on fruit.
Even so encumbered, we begin to pass the hikers who left earlier in the morning, one straggler at first and then, at the top of the rocky path, a group of Russians scattered on either side of the trail, soaked with sweat and breathing heavily, not a facemask in sight (remember, it’s the pandemic; facemasks were still a common sacrifice that we all agreed was necessary, even outdoors). This is about 2km, maybe less, from the starting point.
Two more Russian hikers come to us, rushing out of the bushes, waving their hands furiously and then demanding directions, first in Turkish and then in English, to Aktas Beach. We hurriedly put our masks on (again, it was just kind of the done thing), a social cue completely lost on our inquisitors. “Not far,” I tell them, knowing no more than they did. They shake their heads violently in disagreement, and hold up two or three fingers to ask how many kilometres, and which direction. “Three,” I say, and point vaguely toward the sea. There’s only one path, so they’d probably figure it out eventually. We hurry past them and down to the beach.
Beach is a misnomer. Aktas is no more than a rocky point jutting out magnificently into the Mediterranean, with a jagged, stony shore on one side and, separated by enormous boulders, with huge, flat rocks sloping down to the water on the other. We choose the flatter half because it has fewer people and allowed for social distancing (remember?!) and all that, and spread out a packed lunch provided by our hotel on the rocks, where we are immediately set upon by gangs of hungry stray cats eager for a handout. (This is a fact of life even in remotest Turkey: when food is available, cats swarm.) The water is crystal clear and warm, and we linger in the sunshine, swimming and laughing until well after the other hikers are all gone. We are in no hurry to leave this serene spot. It’s only a couple of easy kilometres to the next hotel, and there may not be a better swimming spot in the world.
The cost of our lingering is having to pass the Russians again. We find them only a few hundred meters from the beach, once again out of breath and taking up the entire trail to recuperate, their packs laying in the bushes beside their splayed, miserable bodies. They demand to know the distance to Kabak, only to once again disagree with any estimates we give. Again, we hurry past, and enjoy the last hour on the trail in solitude, stopping frequently as each new vista is unveiled. Here, the coast is all old pine forests, interrupted occasionally by more rocky shores and olive groves, and each step towards Kabak, each corner turned, reveals another view that stuns and amazes us. Huge, steep mountains rise drastically out of a darkening sea, and the long grass has turned golden with the season and shimmers in the sunshine beneath the silvery leaves of the olive trees. Here, it is possible to imagine a world without humans, just the simple beauty of millions of years of the continents colliding, of slow and silent growth. The only reminder that people ever lived here is the fact that we are on an ancient byway between equally ancient villages, but it’s a faint trace left on much older things, and easily forgotten.
Eventually, the trail cuts inland once again, up a short and steep path, until we spill out on a dirt road in tiny Kabak, the last village on the coastal road out of Ölüdeniz. We stroll happily into the Kabak Armes, our hotel for the night.
The only other guest at the Kabak Armes is a Russian guy in his early 40s. He’s sitting at a pool-side bar at about 4 in the afternoon, wearing a bathing suit and an unbuttoned floral shirt. I don’t recognize him from the hike. Despite the time of day, the music from the bar is at what seems like full volume, a mix of early-90s hits that this lone patron dances passionately to, slipping his flipflops off and lettings his rail-thin body—that of either a lifelong labourer or a junkie—loose, all flapping arms and legs and feet. When the Macarena comes on, one of the Turkish women who works at the bar attempts to humour the Russian, doing her own lazy version of the dance from her chair, looking bored and miserable. Another of the owners looked at us pleadingly, clapping and dancing behind the bar in a way that urges both participation and rescue.
In these situations, at a remote hotel with an undeniable party-of-one mood, you have precisely two options: stick or twist. Dig in, fortify, and refuse to indulge the whims of a drunken traveller; or recognize that a moment is occurring that will likely only occur this one time, and leap in. Luckily, Sarah has enough twist for us both, and took to happily dancing around the bar in her bathing suit and towel, fulfilling the communal requirement to let loose while ordering a round of beers and dancing her way back to the table, and within half an hour the bar had returned to a kind of wonderful slumber—the music quiet and calm, the staff idly swiping away at their phones, and the three of us sipping beer and playing backgammon with what must be one of the best views in the world behind us.
Kabak sits in the armpit of one of a dozen such breathtaking valleys along this stretch of the Turquoise Coast. We got glimpses of its beauty on the 3-kilometre walk from Aktas Beach, but the full sweeping view of the bay isn’t really visible until you’re firmly in the town and perched on a terrace like that at the Kabak Armes. Beneath us, every colour of green competed to be greenest, the olive and fruit trees and the tall, wispy reeds all dancing in the late afternoon golden hue above the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean and the tree-covered hills, the jagged cliffs.
Later, over the simple dinner—included in the cost of lodging at most places along the Lycian Way—of soup, some freshly prepared mezze, even fresher bread, and grilled meat, the Russian reappears. He’s with a maybe-Turkish woman who we only see this once, and only for these five minutes. They sit down at the table beside ours, and he insists on shaking hands and not wearing a mask. I shake his hand and then liberally apply sanitizer, while he fist-bumps waves at Sarah and fist-bumps her boyfriend. He wants us to know he’s from Russia, and in telling us this reaches the outer limits of his English. Neither he nor his travelling companion touch a bit of their food; she soon disappears and he goes back to sit at the bar for a while, then he too is gone. We see him the next morning while we’re eating breakfast. He waves a friendly, though strained, good morning, and a few minutes later we see him walking back from the bar with an enormous glass of whisky and a beer. It’s 8:30 a.m.
It’s easy to imagine that the Russian is always here, leaning on the bar and demanding another whisky, always raging against the wind and his blood-alcohol level. He’s the textbook friendly local drunk, part of the furniture. Except he can’t be.
Like us, he’s probably only here for a night or two. It’s impossible to be here much longer. Kabak is nowhere near anything, not really. We walked two days to get here, and though there’s a road there’s not much reason to take it. There are prettier beaches, easier to get to. The party vibe here exists as a force of will, not as a natural feature of the place. This isn’t Paradise Found so much as Paradise Earned. Getting here was hard work, so finding an almost-empty hotel trying its best to create a Full Moon Party vibe and a leering lazy drunk is jarring.
No matter, as before long the music is turned down and the final call to prayer for the day sounds out in the distance, rattling down on the Kabak Armes from the town’s small mosque halfway up the mountain. The prayer echoes off the cliffs until this tinny invocation to god dissolves somewhere in the pitch black of the swelling sea.
The next day, our last on the trail on this trip, is the only truly difficult trekking we encounter. The first two days of the Lycian Way have been all awe-inspiring sights along the coast, always with the glimmer of the turquoise water off in the distance. There were tricky climbs and slippery descents, but being near the sea made these seem just part of an oceanside vacation. A hot, leisurely walk.
Not today. From Kabak, nearly at sea level, we must climb to the small, almost-nothing town of Alinca, somewhere over the cliffs that surround Kabak. The trail map indicates a serpentine, meandering escape from the deep valley, but in the heavy mist and gathering storm clouds, the peaks aren’t visible and any route through seems speculative at best.
We begin on the steep roads out of the village, heading up and up on switchbacks for almost two kilometres before the brickwork surface abruptly ends at a stone painted with the now-familiar red-and-white trail marking. Here, the path becomes rough and uneven, an old mule trail connecting the towns.
Who would have ever thought to try to find a way out of this valley, or sought a reason to? This lack of logic is partly what makes the Lycian Way so interesting. There is no reason for Kabak with its little beach and its sea connection to the other coastal towns to be connected in any way to Alinca and its rough hills and dusty olive groves. Yet they are connected, and by a totally improbable path.
Once on the mule trail, the path continues ever upwards, though more gently, hugging the sides of the mountains and passing through low, scrubby forests. An hour outside of Kabak, we round a bend and see black clouds lurking above. We hesitate. The path is already wet from the mist and the footing loose, and we don’t know what the landscape ahead looks like. Each step sees the forest growing thinner. We decided to wait beneath the trees for the weather to change. It does immediately, and for the worse—thunder cracks overhead and rain soaks the hills around us. But it passes quickly, and the skies look brighter, so we push on, and are glad to have carried on. The landscape is overwhelming: bare cliffs, hundreds of feet high, shoot skyward on either side of the narrow path. Still, olive trees and scraggly pines dot the trail, but each step up the path reveals more dizzying cliffs, hidden grottoes, faraway caves, and the most common wildlife spotted on the Lycian Way: grumpy Russians.
It’s the same group we’ve been following for three days. Sarah and I find them at the top of a small rise in their familiar positions: splayed on rocks, gasping for air, unsmiling and unfriendly. We say good morning, alerting them to our presence behind them, foolishly assuming this would persuade them to make room for us to pass on the narrow path in the midst of a pandemic. We put our masks on and stand at a distance, waiting. This social cue goes unnoticed. Instead, two of them approach, tapping their wrists and yelling “ALINKA?! ALINKA? HOW FAR?!”
“Three or four kilometres,” I tell them. They wag their heads no, and hold up four fingers. Four kilometres, then. They seem deeply irritated that we didn’t know the answer to their quiz, much like we didn’t know the previous day. They have mistaken us, perhaps, for tour guides, or at least for locals, and they assume that our presence on the trail is for their convenience. They huff back to a spot to sit down, stomping along the uneven path.
We push past them, wondering aloud to one another about their elective misery in doing this hike. None of them seems to be enjoying it, not even remotely, so scowling and unhappy they are each time we see them. To what end are they pursuing this difficult task so joylessly? Is this what a bucket list item looks like in the flesh? Or is this a peculiar Russian trait, a perpetual suffering needed to justify the eventual drunkenness at the hotel bar, which only sandblasts away enough of the suffering so they can face the next day? Sarah reminds me as we walk away that the only time we saw any of them smile in three days was when I slipped and nearly fell in front of them, which brought only smirks and mirthless laughter. Somewhere along the trail to Kabak, I’d seen one of them crumple a water bottle and check over his shoulder repeatedly to see if I was watching as he threw it down the mountain side instead of putting it into his empty-looking backpack. This simple act seems a perfect summary of whatever dark thing lurks in the core of this group: when the easy option is also the kindest, opt instead for the harder, crueller choice.
They are soon far below us on the track, and the unpleasant interruption is soon forgotten. The trail here begins to cross through dried creek beds and waterfalls that must be intense and terrifying in springtime. The rain from earlier has made the air thick with fog, sticky and hot, even at altitude, yet these river and creeks remain bone dry. We start a long series of switchbacks, following a stray dog along the path into a high rocky pass, where it waits for us and desperately drinks water from the palm of my hand. We pass hippies in sandals coming the other way, and think that Alinca must be close, but the hippies have fooled us with their casualness and it’s another three kilometers of laboured climbing through curiously landscaped olive groves and more dense pine forests before the first glimpses of the town come into view. There are false dawns of hope, little moments where the trail seems to level out or descend, only to creep back up again at the next bend. And all the while Kabak recedes in the distance down below.
Then, abruptly, the path becomes a road, with a skinny bull plodding around a muddy patch behind chain link fence to one side and small parking lot with a couple of dusty motorbikes on the other. Ahead lie two teahouses or restaurants, looking smoky and abandoned in the mid-day gloom. And older Turkish couple sits eating lunch over a low table. They wave and smile as we walk by. We have made it out of the valley.
For most, is the halfway point of day three on the Lycian Way. The route carries on for another eight kilometres to the lighthouse viewpoint above Yediburunlar—The Seven Capes—but this is the end of our road. Sarah’s boyfriend has driven the long way around from Kabak to pick us up, and from here we skip along to nearer the end of the Lycian Way, the beautiful seaside town of Kas. It’s a Monday, and we have jobs to check in with back home.
We sit at one of the roadside restaurants in Alinca for one last plate of goreme and shepherd’s salad, happily washing down the food with big steaming cups of sweet Turkish tea while we try to recap this abridged version of the hike. We vow to come back and do more, in similarly short bursts, down the years. We’ve only covered about 30 kilometres of trail, give or take a few kilometres’ worth of wrong turns, which accounts for just a little over 5 per cent of the entire trail. It’s barely a start.
But as a microcosm, it’s remarkable: the variation in the landscape, the friendliness of the locals, the tastiness of the food, the tiredness at the end of each day. To carry on like this would be heavenly: a slow walk across a beautiful part of the world, with only a vague idea of where to sleep for the night. Long days and short days, good and bad (though mostly good) weather. Days on the beach, days in the woods. Coming into a town near sunset and looking around for a bed and a hot meal, then waiting for the morning to decide if it’s time to move on or not. Then moving on, or not.
Marvelous hike to continue to explore, with the hope of spotting or avoiding, the famous wildlife:)