Turkey
Lycian Way
Five hundred kilometres of clifftop trail threading ruins, coves, and pine forest above the Mediterranean.
The trail drops from pine ridge to cove in a single switchback, and suddenly you are standing on an empty beach with Lycian tombs carved into the cliff behind you. The Mediterranean stretches flat and blue ahead. Your pack is heavy, your legs are tired, and this is exactly the point — the Lycian Way earns its views one step at a time.
The Lycian Way is Turkey's first long-distance hiking trail, stretching 540 kilometres from Fethiye to Antalya along the Mediterranean coast. Opened in 1999 and named one of the world's top ten trails by The Sunday Times, it threads through ancient Lycian cities, pine forests, clifftop paths, and remote coves. Sections range from sea-level coastal walks to mountain passes above 1,800 metres in the Taurus range. Most hikers walk selected sections of three to seven days. The trail passes through or near Xanthos, Patara, Olympos, and Yanartaş.
Solo
The Lycian Way is a solo hiker's ideal — pension-to-pension walking with your pack, arriving at a village gözleme dinner as the sun drops behind the Mediterranean. The trail strips life to its essentials: walk, eat, sleep, repeat.
Friends
Pick a 4-5 day section, split the weight, and walk through ruins and coves that no road reaches. The shared exhaustion, the cold swims, the evening rakı — the Lycian Way bonds groups through earned discomfort.
- Named one of the world's top ten long-distance trails by The Sunday Times upon its opening in 1999.
- The trail passes through ancient Lycian cities including Xanthos, Patara, and Olympos.
- Sections range from coastal walking to mountain passes above 1,800 metres in the Taurus range.
- Most hikers walk selected sections of 3-7 days rather than the full 540km route.
Village gözleme at trailside pensions — hand-rolled flatbread stuffed with wild greens and cheese.
Cold ayran yoghurt drink handed to hikers by farmers who know the trail passes their gate.
Pedra de Lume
Cape Verde
Float in a salt lake inside an extinct volcano, crater walls rising on every side.
Vale do Paúl
Cape Verde
Sugarcane terraces spill down a volcanic crater into the greenest valley in the archipelago.
Monastery of St. Anthony
Egypt
Earth's oldest inhabited monastery, wedged into a Red Sea mountain canyon since the fourth century.
Hoang Su Phi
Vietnam
Rice terraces so vertiginous they look like topographical maps carved directly into the sky.
Mount Ararat
Turkey
Turkey's highest peak rises alone from the plain, perpetually snow-capped and steeped in flood mythology.
Hasankeyf
Turkey
A 12,000-year-old Tigris settlement now partly drowned by a dam — cave dwellings and minarets half-submerged.
Cappadocia
Turkey
Hundreds of hot air balloons drift through a forest of stone pillars at dawn.
Ephesus
Turkey
Marble streets still grooved by Roman chariot wheels lead to a library that held 12,000 scrolls.