8. Casares and Gibraltar

From Jerez we headed east through the Sierra de Grazelema Natural Park to a rural setting just outside of the small village of Casares (located at red dot below).

We had lunch in very picturesque village of Grazelema - mid north in the Sierra de Grazelema park.

Grazelema from the top of the village

The drive down to Casares, through undulating rocky hills, was more scenic than the area west of the park where we had been.

Our new abode for six nights (again booked through Airbnb) was an old stable, renovated into a couple of cottages, located on an Appaloosa horse stud. But priority one on arrival (while the owner fixed the air con), was watching the rugby test - NZ All Blacks against the SA Springboks. Nice one ABs!

Things are very dry on the horse stud. See white cottage where we are staying in background

Since being here we have explored the local village, visited Gibraltar and done a three hour walk to remind our bodies that walking is on the agenda when we get to Britain.

Casares village - the skyline of the village illustrates the ancient and new buildings merged into each other;
this is a common occurrence in the villages we've visited

There's a very large kettle of Griffin Vultures living
in this valley. When we were out walking,
 they hovered overhead, waiting to see when
the sun might overwhelm us.

We drove down to visit Gibraltar, which included a tour through the WWII tunnels and earlier tunnels from the Great Siege in the 1780s. The Great Siege lasted three and a half years, while Britain held the Rock against Spanish - French offensives. It turns out the eighteenth century tunnels are better made and are surviving in better condition than the WWII tunnels.

Gibraltar 'The Rock' - looking north

Gibraltar with the coast of Africa on the horizon

A cute aspect of the restricted space on Gibraltar is that the road in from Spain runs across the airport runway. We parked in Spain, walked into Gibraltar and caught a bus into town.  Therefore we bus-ed across the runway.

The border between Spain and Gibraltar is a couple of hundred metres past the runway. On our way into Gibraltar, passports were waved vaguely towards border officials, as the tourist hordes streamed in. On our way back into Spain, there was not even any passport waving.

For the first time, the Spain blog is up to date. Tomorrow we head north to Cordoba.

7. Jerez and around

We picked a rental car in Seville and drove south to Jerez. We soon found that having the air con on the coolest setting and full fan doesn't make a car cool in an Andalusian summer.

Jerez was a relaxed sort of place, more good tapas and not too many tourist sights that seemed compelling. But we also wanted to check out the surrounding area. We had been impressed with our navigation getting out of Seville and into Jerez, and pleased with the Renault Captur car that Avis produced - a size bigger than we had booked.  However, trips to Cadiz, Sanlucar and the famous white villages of the area soon taught us the frustrations that easily abound when driving here:

• one way streets - almost every street that's not the motorway is one way, and you can't trust the map you are using to have placed the arrow in a direction consistent with reality
• narrow, one way streets with alarmingly tight turns and sharp descents, where you pull in your wing mirrors, implore the navigator to direct you to a wider street, and wish you had the tiny rental car you had booked
• roundabouts with haphazard lanes where you find yourself forced off your intended route into yet more narrow, one way streets, unable to find a route back.

Just proving we did make it to Cadiz - in the end

In case you wondered what a beach in southern Spain looks like when not
obliterated by a mass of cheap and ugly hotels.

The Huffington Post has an article on Discovering Spain's Charming Ancient White Villages which  notes: "A driving tour to Andalusia's pueblos blancos, or white villages, is a highlight of any trip to Spain — as long as you don't try to drive through them." huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/01/spains-white-villages

Arcos de la Frontera - one of the white villages we visited

Advice on walking the Lycian Way

This section is intended for anyone thinking about walking the Lycian Way.  We walked the Lycian in May and June 2015; from Ovacik to Geyikbayiri.  In the places where there was a choice of coastal or inland route, we took the inland route.  We did not do the side trip to Trysa. Fiona took a dolmus (local bus) on those sections where the guidebook suggested taking a dolmus (e.g. from Finike to Karaoz).  I walked every ****** step ;-)


What was good?

• Great scenery

• Lots of interesting historic sites

• Plenty of wildlife (if you keep your eyes open)

• Great people.  This was the big surprise for us.  The locals that we meet along the way were fantastic.

• And it was unpredictable enough to still be an adventure

How hard was it?

I don't know how to answer that, as I don't really have anything to compare it with.  I walked the Annapurna Circuit many years ago, and I don't remember that being as hard as the Lycian Way; but I was a lot younger then.  Some indication of how hard the Lycian is might be gained from the fact that we both finished the walk weighing about 8% less than when we started.

But, we walked the whole thing, and most people don't.  One of the good things about the Lycian Way is that it varies greatly, and there are sections suitable for almost every level of fitness.


What is the path like?

The route tends to stay off roads, and instead take rural or forest paths.  In places the paths are clear, in places the paths are overgrown.  In places the paths are wide, in places narrow.  In places steep, in places flat.  The only thing that is largely consistent is the stones.  Anatolia is the stoniest place that I've ever been, and the stones are very tough on both feet and footware.

How easy is it to follow the path?

The answer to that is complicated.  The short version is that it is very easy to follow the path in the sections that are popular, but there are a few sections that are almost unmarked, and there is everything in between.  There is a full explanation in another post on this blog.

How much do you need to carry?

That depends on your approach.  If you want to walk the entire 500+ kilometres - there are a few sections of the route where there is no accommodation.  For these you need to either carry a tent and sleeping gear etc, or you need to be confident that you can cover 35km (gaining and losing 1800m) in one day.  We took the tent approach.  That left us dividing 23kg, excluding food and water, between two people.  The amount of food / water that we carried varied greatly.  On the stretches with a long way between water sources, we carried 6 litres of water between us.  Add another 2kg of food, and on a bad day we would be carrying 31kg between two people.

If you don't want to walk the entire 500+ kilometres - there are almost endless ways that you can divide the Lycian Way up into a series of day walks carrying only a day pack.  If I wanted to do it this way, then I would:
1) Identify a series of places that I wanted to stay along the route, at towns/villages that were dolmus (local bus) transport hubs.
2) Then stay in one place for 4 to 6 days, each morning catching a dolmus to the start of the next section that I wanted to walk, and then catching a dolmus home in the afternoon.
3) Then relocate my accommodation to the next place that I wanted to stay, once I had completed all of the sections that were accessible by dolmus from the current accommodation.
I suspect that it would be possible to do over 75% of the route this way.

Are there any miss-able sections?

There are a few places were the creators of the Lycian Way struggled to find a good way to connect the interesting bits of the route together.  Anywhere in the guidebook where you see a comment along the lines of "or you could take a dolmus", is a strong hint that there is nothing to be seen on this section and you really should take a dolmus.  I thought the following were (easily) the least interesting sections of the Lycian Way:
- Pydnai to Kinik
- the stretch through Demre (stop at Andriake; then start again at the base of the mountain section, a couple of km west of Demre)
- Finike to Karaoz (the final 8km into Karaoz is OK, but the rest has little to recommend it).

That removes the most unrewarding 2.5 days from the route; unless you are a big fan of tomato hothouses, in which case you should make sure that you walk all of the above.

Beware of everything that you read / are told.  I had several walkers tell me that they were not going to walk the section immediately east of Kalkan because they had read that it went along the side of a motorway and was dangerous.  This turned out to be untrue.  The marked route crossed the motorway on a footbridge, then followed a path up into the hills.



How many other walkers are there on the route?

One of the things that attracted us to the Lycian was that we wanted to avoid crowds of walkers, and we were not disappointed.  On a busy day we would encounter about 10 other walkers, but there were a lot of days when we saw no other walkers.

Crowds on the Lycian

What is the weather like?

When we were doing the walk (May and June) the hottest part of the day tended to be in the mid twenties to low thirties.   Thankfully we finished before it got any hotter.  The days when it was overcast were very welcome.

The nights were hot in the coastal areas and cold in the mountains.

We had several people tell us that it would not rain after mid-May, but that was untrue.   It rained about one day in ten after mid-May, although for only a few hours on those days.

Eating inside the tent because it was raining outside
(in mid June).

Are there any dangerous animals?

There is a bit of chatter on the internet about dogs, snakes and scorpions on the Lycian.

Dogs - The Turkish shepherd dogs are huge and look intimidating, but we had no significant problems with them in rural areas.  As working dogs, they are generally disciplined and well trained. The places that we had trouble with dogs were on the outer edge of towns/villages.  Here we encountered a mix of poorly disciplined domestic dogs and "junk yard" dogs. By the end of the walk I'd had enough bad dog experiences on the edge of towns/villages, that I would pick up a handful of stones before entering these areas.   Turkish dogs are smart.  I would just show them my handful of stones and they would back off.

Nice doggie... nice doggie...

Snakes - we saw a dozen, and I suspect that there were a lot more that we didn't see.  I have no idea whether the snakes that we saw were dangerous or not, but a local told me that the snakes were "mostly harmless".

In general snakes do not hang around for photos

but there are exceptions to every rule.

Scorpions - We saw no scorpions.  We were told that they were around, but despite (carefully) lifting up hundreds of rocks (to clear space for the tent) we did not encounter any.


Things that I would do differently next time

• I would take tougher footware.  I was wearing North Face Havoc boots, and Fiona was wearing Keen Targee shoes.  Both choices were too light for the Lycian Way.  Our feet took a pummeling, and I estimate that by the time we finished the walk my boots had about two days life left in them.  If I had my time again I'd take boots with a full leather upper (as recommended in the Lycian Way guidebook) and a very solid shank.  I did see a few people doing day walks on the Lycian in sports sandals, and they all looked miserable.

• We started on 7 May, but if I had my time again I would try to start two weeks earlier.  The weather would be a little bit cooler, but it should still be late enough in the year for the snow to have melted in the mountains.

• I'd camp out more.  The freedom camping in Anatolia is excellent.

Things that we got right 

• The main thing that we got right was having no specific time constraint.   We didn't have a lot of fitness at the start of the walk, but having no time constraint allowed us to finish the whole walk, and enjoy (most of) it.

• Taking multiple navigation aids, including two smartphones with GPS and high resolution offline maps.

• Taking an ultralight tent and camping gear.

• Taking bottles to carry up to 6 litres of water.  We usually started each day with only three litres, but there were times when we needed to carry the full six.

• Taking Oral Re-hydration Salts.  Note that you can buy these in the major towns in Turkey, but the packets that we brought from home tasted much better.

My salt; not where it should be.

What was the most disappointing thing about the Lycian Way?

The finish was a bit of an anti-climax; it was just a dusty road in a dusty town.  In an ideal world the Lycian would finish somewhere that was more of an event in itself.  Maybe finish on top of Mt Olympus (the highest point on the route) and then take the cable car down?


What did it cost?

Accommodation and food etc cost us approximately 155 Turkish Lira (USD55) a day; but we camped about 1/3rd of the time which saved us some money.

There is no fee to walk the Lycian Way, but we made a donation to the Cultural Routes Society. They use donations to maintain and improve the route.


Anything else?

I would hesitate to recommend doing the entire Lycian Way to anyone that was afraid of heights, as there are a few places where there is a steep drop-off on one side of the path.   However, in most of these places there was an alternative road that avoided the exciting bits.

The path is almost a metre wide at this point,
but it is a long way down.

And the Lycian Way should be renamed "The Goat Way".  Sure, there are a lot of Lycian ruins, but there are a heck of a lot more goats.

6. Seville - more amazing places

We're not the types to head off to a bull fight, but having seen the bull fighting arena from the Cathedral bell tower, we decided a visit to the site was needed. It turned out that entry to the building included a guided tour. So we learnt the inside details about bull fighting (eg only two bulls have been set free in the last fifty years - this favour is granted by the president of the fight if he thinks the bull fought exceptionally well). The colours in the arena were ... well you can see for yourself.

Inside was plenty of artwork -
a painting giving a taste of the action sometime ago

And... another severed head - what is it with Seville and decapitations?

Two other amazing places where we spent time, were the Plaza de Espana and the Museum of Contemporary Art.  The latter was housed in what used to be the Santa Maria de las Cuevas Monastery, built in the C15th.

Entry area for Contemporary Art Museum, aka Santa Maria Monastery

We adored the expression of Spanish architecture at Plaza de Espana (below), initially assuming it was an old site that had been very well done up, before realising it was built for the Ibero-American World Fair in 1929. They must have had a huge budget.

You can tell how hot it must be by the absence of other tourists...

And attention to detail was everywhere

The arches were captivating

5. Seville's amazing places - the Cathedral

The skyline of Seville's old city is dominated by the Cathedral and in particular the bell tower, the 105 metre high Giralda, which initially was a smaller minaret for the Mosque that stood on the site in the 12th century. The actual Cathedral is huge and is extremely ornate even by the standard of Spanish religious buildings.  The Cathedral chapter who commissioned the building wanted people to be overwhelmed by the lavishness and to think the designers were mad. They have probably succeeded.

One of the first things you encounter on entering the Cathedral is
a very realistic sculpture of the head of John the Baptist

The lower section of the bell tower, the Giralda,
was the minaret of the Mosque in earlier times.

There were two elements of the Cathedral that Kim and I particularly enjoyed. One was the orange tree courtyard (above), the other was the 'Door of Forgiveness' which belonged to the 12th century Mosque and retains it's horseshoe shape from that time (below). The blend of faith motifs at this juncture seemed hopeful.

4. Seville - did we mention it was warm

Catching the fast train from Madrid to Seville was pretty painless, and I listened to the Radio Sport commentary of the New Zealand All Blacks playing the Argentinian Pumas during the trip. Love it when the technology works at such moments. Our Airbnb apartment in Seville was just inside the old City and had almost effective air conditioning. Even the locals say it is hot for July, and depending on your source of information, it's in the early 40s Celsius most days.

Narrow Seville streets

The Spanish lifestyle doesn't appear to include early starts - when we told our Madrid hotelier that we would leave at 8am, he said to just leave the key in the box as it was too early for the reception desk to be staffed. A typical Spanish breakfast seems to be mid morning, then lunch and siesta from 2 or 3pm until 5 or 6pm, then dinner at 10pm or later. The down side of this for tourists is that the coolest time of the day is before 10.30am. We aspire to early starts but now that we are in the swing of the Spanish dinner timetable, we are often not in from dinner til 11pm, at which point we still need to get the apartment cool enough to sleep in (32'C overnight) and things tend to unravel from there.

In Seville we finally found the great Spanish cuisine that we had anticipated. Four tapas and drinks, all costing less than 20 euro and wonderful taste experiences. We soon found a 'favorite' restaurant but also ate at the El Rinconcillo Bar which has been serving drinks and tapas since 1670. At the El Rinconcillo, they literally chalk up your bill on the bar, which didn't seem too worse for wear for 345 years worth of chalk dust.

Our chalked up bill
 visible centre frame

Above Kim there are legs of ham perhaps
curing nicely from the 1670s

Kim's favourite tapa so far: Salmonjero (a tasty cold soup, originating from Cordoba in Andalusia, made from tomatoes, bread, oil, garlic and vinegar).

Fiona's favourite tapa so far: warm goat cheese, soaked in a sharp honey, sprinkled with walnuts and served with small pieces of toast drizzled in a very thick balsamic vinegar.

Another favorite: vinaigrette potatoes with mackerel - sounds unlikely but very good to eat.

Navigational Challenges

This page is intended for anyone thinking about walking the Lycian Way, who wants to know about the navigational challenges.


A few things to note -

1) The Lycian Way tends to avoid roads, and instead follow wilderness or rural paths.  At times it takes this to extremes, and instead of an easy one hour walk along a road to get from A to B, you are directed onto a three hour walk through a forest.  

2) There isn't really one Lycian Way -

• The official (Cultural Routes Society) route has changed several times since 1999; and 

• Other people / organisations have produced books / apps showing variations on the official route.

3) Anatolia is covered in inter-connecting paths.  When there are problems, it is generally not because there is no path, but because there are several paths to choose from.


How is the route marked?

• The Lycian Way is most commonly marked by red and white "flashes" of paint; on rocks, power-poles and walls.   When everything is going well, each flash of paint is located so that when standing at one flash you can see the next flash.

• These paint markers are often supplemented by cairns (small piles of rocks).  

• A couple of times a day you can expect to see Lycian Way (Likya Yolu in Turkish) sign posts.  These are usually in places where the route enters or leaves a town/village. 

How easy is it to follow the route? 

The answer to that is complicated:

• There are very large sections of the Lycian Way (approximately half of it) which are very easy to follow.  These tend to be the sections of the route that are the most popular, and in particular the sections that are one day's walk either side of the main tourist towns.  In these sections, there is usually either a single clear / unambiguous path to follow, or there are numerous easy to find route markers.     

• There are a few sections of the Lycian Way which are effectively unmarked.  These tend to be the sections of the route that are seldom walked.  An example of this is the forestry section behind Patara Beach; here you could walk for more than a kilometre along the route, without seeing a marker.

• And there is everything in between these two extremes.  In addition to the few sections which are effectively unmarked, we also encountered the following:

• Areas where cairns had been put in the wrong place.  While the paint markers will usually have been made by someone marking the route in an official context, the cairns will often have been made by earlier walkers; and if the earlier walker got the route wrong, then...

• Places where route markers for an old version of the Lycian Way, and the route markers for the current version of the Lycian Way, co-exist.  Ideally the old markers would have been removed (painted over), but this hasn't always occurred.

• The route is now 16 years old.  In that 16 years it has been remarked several times, and sometimes the people (volunteers) doing the remarking haven't managed to exactly relocate the previous route.  The result is that several marked versions of the route may run in parallel with each other, separated by short distances.  There is an example of this beneath Priest's Rock, a couple of kilometres NE of Alakilise.  Here there are at least three red and white paint marked Lycian Way routes running parallel to each other across the hillside. 

• In places local entrepreneurs have taken it upon themselves to paint their own red and white markers, which lead past their hotel / restaurant / shop etc.  An example of this can be found at Beycik.  Fortunately it was often possible to spot the entrepreneurs markers, because they tended to paint them much larger than the official Lycian Way markers.

• On the northern exit from Yukari Kuzdere it appeared that someone had relocated the yellow Lycian Way signpost.  The signpost pointed down one road (toward a local hotel), while the red and white markers went down a different road.

• In places the Lycian Way passes through active forestry areas.  Here heavy machinery may have extensively modified the environment, destroying route markers, paths, and even roads.  

•  In places large trees have fallen, or been felled, across the route.

• In one place, immediately east of the Patara ruins, a forest of thorn bushes had grown over the route, making a couple of hundred metres of it impassable.  Note that it was possible to by-pass this to the north.

• Power-poles with route markers have fallen over.

• Markets have sprung up obscuring the route markers.

• The paint used in route markers has faded.

• Crops have grown up obscuring the route markers.   The markers ran through this farmers field, but the crops made them very difficult to find (and trampling through a farmers crops isn't good).

• In one or two places [naughty] people had tried to build fences over the route.

• Other route markers have become mingled in with the Lycian Way route markers.  This can occasionally get confusing because there are a few stretches of the official Lycian Way which are marked by red and yellow flashes of paint, or red painted arrows, instead of the more usual red and white flashes.

• And, of course, there is always the risk of a goat obscuring a route marker.

To repeat - There are very large sections of the Lycian Way (approximately half of it) which are very easy to follow.  These tend to be the sections of the route that are the most popular, and in particular the sections that are within one day's walk either side of the main tourist towns.   In these sections, there is usually either a single clear / unambiguous path to follow, or there are numerous easy to find route markers.  These sections require no specialist navigation skills, other than common sense. Outside of these areas, we encountered a very wide range of route marking scenarios, for which previous wilderness navigation experience was an asset.

But, you would have to be very unlucky to get into any significant trouble as a result of a navigation problem.  It is very unlikely that you could find yourself accidentally wandering for days in the wilderness.  There are lots of paths around, leading to lots of settlements.   If you did stray off the official Lycian Way route, the most likely outcome would be either:

• getting to the same place that you wanted to go, but by a different route than you had intended. This is almost certainly happening all of the time, without people even realising that they have reached the right place by some un-official route; or

• ending up at a different village from the one that you were aiming for, but if this occurred the locals would soon point you in the right direction. 

The biggest risk from navigation problems is extra kilometres walked and time lost.  These problems can be frustrating, but are unlikely to be dangerous.

How did we navigate?

1) By following the markers on the ground.  Our first rule was - where they are present, follow the red and white paint flashes (or the cairns).   We were pedantic about this.  If we got off the route at all, then we would retrace our steps until we re-located the marked route.  This happened frequently, because there are many places in the Lycian Way where the route is crossed by other paths, and it often took us 20 to 100 metres to realise that we'd suddenly run out of route markers.

2) Every 10 to 20 minutes we would check our position on the smart phone GIS apps that were we carrying.  There are lots of alternatives available.  We used the Locus app on our android smart phone, and the Galileo app on our iPhone.  Before starting the walk, into both of these apps we loaded an Open Street Maps topographical map of the Lycian Way area.  We did this in such a way that the OSM map was available "offline".  Note that there are lots of places in the Lycian that have no mobile phone coverage, so you cannot rely on online maps (your GPS will still work, but you won't have a network signal with which your phone can download a map from the internet).

3) Using the Cultural Routes Society iPhone app as a backup to the above.

We started the walk with the Locus/Galileo apps containing the OSM topographical map, and the Cultural Routes Society (CRS) Lycian Way app.  We ended up using the OSM map as our primary GIS app because (1) it had a far higher resolution topographic map and (2) we found the OSM rendering of the Lycian Way path to be more accurate than that contained in the CRS app.  The rendition of the route shown on the OSM topographic map generally matched the red and white markings on the ground with a high degree of accuracy, where-as we found the CRS app rendition of the path (and points of interest) to be accurate in places but surprisingly inaccurate in others.  The biggest problem with the OSM map was that it didn't show any path for the two days (Hisarcandir to Geyikbayiri) that have recently been added to the route.  For this we had no choice but to reply on the CRS Lycian Way app.

We found the CRS guide book to be of limited value as an aid to navigation.  There are so many junctions / turns in the Lycian Way that any guide book would need to be three times the size to describe them adequately.  And unfortunately - early in the walk we encountered several situations where the guide book appeared to get its directions reversed (it said to turn east, when we needed to turn west; or said to turn right when we needed to turn left) causing us to lose some confidence in it.  We found the CRS Lycian Way guidebook to be very useful for its sections on trip planning and explanations of the historical sites, but not as a tool for navigation.