After 6 days in Istanbul we flew to Antalya to start our Inntravel walking holiday along part of the Lycian way, self guided with our baggage being transferred.
The first two nights at the Olympos Mountain Lodge in Beycik.
The Lycians, known to go back to 500 BC lived in the mountains along the Turkish coast and were pirates. They carved very distinctive tombs. Herodotus wrote about them. They were subsumed by the Romans and then Byzantium.
The Mount Olympos is the Turkish version. We chose to go for a (voluntary) walk on our first day rather than to to the top of the Mountain by cable car.
We walked up to the ruins (with excellent stonework) of Laodikeia (25AD) , which is reported to be on the Lycians’ slave route, hidden from the Romans.
The next day we set off on our trek to Cirali on the coast. We took our time contemplating the views, the wildlife and the not so wildlife. And we stopped for a lunch of freshly caught trout in Ulupinar. The time given in the guide notes was 5 hours 45 mins. When we arrived in Cirali, the hotelier had been worried about us, we took over 10 hrs.
The wow factor of the day was the saddle of Mount Chimaera behind Cirali. We were wondering why some of the trees had been burnt when we realised we had found the eternal flames of Chimaera, a cluster of flames that blaze from crevices in the rock – if you scratched the ground the flames spread. And then my camera battery expired.
The Chimera was a monstrous fire-breathing creature usually depicted as a lion, with the head of a goat arising from its back, and a tail that ended in a snake's head.
The main site of this eternal flame was down the ridge, where there were also some ruins. And there was still a significant walk from there to Cirali. There was one further down-side, there was a fee to visit the main site Yanartas which they made us pay when we were leaving – about which there was a lot of muttering.
So 2 nights at the Anatolia Resort Hotel. We had the next day to explore around Cirali which has significant Roman ruins as well as Lycian.
Fairly typical Lycian tombs
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