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.