Hiking along the Lycian way day one

Saturday October 27th



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We dragged our arses out of bed early in order to get going early - only to find all the staff got up half an hour later than said on their notice board. A bit of an argument ensued and from that a frosty breakfast with no cereal. I ate my cheese and honey in silence - Thorsen has never got his head around the fact that I eat my goat's cheese with bread and honey - which I suppose is fair enough. Although I feel the same way about eggs.









We had a lot of fun trying to get a dolmus to the nearest town - Eret I think it was - but we finally managed it. We got a taxi from there to Alinca. Alinca turned out to be not a town at all - rather about 5 houses in all with Bayram's house (meaning headman) at the top. There were about 8 other hikers at this place; over the next couple of days we came to know this amount of people as a multitude.








The Times recommends the Lycian way as one of the 10 best hiking routes in the world. You can see why. It is simply incredible. It follows the azure waters of the South Aegean around the verdurous, twisting, Turkish coastline. Cutting through valleys. under huge overpasses, across rock-falls, along shepherd's trails, winding down cliff-faces. Through farms, olive orchards, streams, along side mountains. These paths are over three thousand years old in some places. We hiked for most of the afternoon - we had started late due to the above-mentioned circumstances - so we did not get as far as a intended destination the first day. Instead we made it to the beautiful beach village of Kabak.



It took us quite a while from first spotting it to get to the beach. On the way we met a right old funboy. He was about 70 and had most of his teeth missing. I didn't need Fatima's help to translate his words as I could tell he was as mad as a hatter. He was standing by the road selling grapes. All around us were wild grape trees. Still we bought a bunch each from him. He then tried to sell us pomegranates. All around us were... you get the picture. By the time we got to the beach the sun was setting so we all had an evening swim to freshen up and then had dinner from our packs.



We climbed up the ridge and found a lovely tree house hostel to stay in called the full-moon. It had a bunch of tree house bungalows and was really peaceful. There were massive spiders running around the main porch area (Pem you would have loved them) but the poor things kept on being eaten by the tribe of cats that prowled around there. We met a cool elderly German couple who were also hiking. They told us in detail about the Lycian way and showed us the book by Kate Clow. We fell into bed exhausted.