Our last day hiking on the Lycian Way was spent on its most iconic segment: The Gelidonya Point Lighthouse walk. This is a coastal walk through wilderness that passes by a lighthouse on a very acute-angle peninsula sticking into the Mediterranean, and there are famously 5 islands off the coast that have prevented the area from being used for major shipping since classical times. As with all of these coastal walks, there were steep, shortish uphills and downhills, and contour-hugging segments above small bays. The vegetation was pine forest with occasional olive trees and other things. The water is as blue as anything can be, and the bays are turquoise. It is a very fine, very satisfying, and not particularly easy Mediterranean coast walk. I would just like to point out something I’ve noted over the course of walking these 6 days in old Lycia. This is not really the middle of nowhere. A near miss could leave you in Antalya (pop. 1 million. Ugly, ugly city) or at one of the resorts stretching as far as the eye can see along the coast from there (hundreds of thousands of beds, all-inclusive type resorts, and not the nice ones). But go a little further, and suddenly it is real wilderness. The quiet of it is amazing: The sort of silence I’ve only heard a couple times in the US. Our walks started and ended in villages, and we were transported to them by minibus. Turkey is not home to a particularly quiet and retiring people. But often, as in every-day-often, it would happen that if I stopped walking the only thing I could hear was my own heart beating disappointingly fast. That doesn’t obviously count the basically continuous experience of having distant waves, wind, and birds being the only sound. In some sense, a big part of this country is still a simple place. And that is why you should hike the Lycian Way.
Here are some pictures to make you jealous.
View of the point with the lighthouse all tiny-like
Things like this are pretty much everywhere
You-know-who walking through the woods
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