Lycian Way Day 16: Adrasan to Olympos

Adrasan to Olympos

Starting km: 333

Finishing km: 343

Distance walked: 10km

Our plan for this day was to have a (relatively) short one and finish up at a campsite near Chimera, site of several burning natural gas vents in the mountains up above the Mediterranean coast.  Things turned out rather differently.

As with the previous day, this one, through Olympos National Park was actually pretty wild tramping, with very few signs of people or even goats.  Most of the day consisted of a climb up a 720m hill, then back down again. 

Sarah's usually pretty good and quick at the uphills, but a group of goats having a pool party in the stream-bed pond next to our campsite had meant we didn't sleep that well.  And of course this was our sixteenth day in a row of walking.

By the time we made it through the forest on the downhill (forest that could almost have been in NZ, I might add!) it had taken us six hours to cover the ten kilometres to the village/valley/ruins of Olympos.  We only had seven more to go, but it seemed pretty unlikely we'd make it to Chimera before dark. We sat ourselves up on the high rocks above the valley next to the remains of a Byzantine church to think about it over lunch.

Eventually we decided to spend the night in Olympos.  We headed down the hill and, since the trail is already inside the archaeological site had a nice look around the ruins, which span the from the Hellenistic period all the way through the Lycians and Romans to the Byzantine era.  The signage and interpretation was far more extensive than any of the other sites we'd visited, and had lots more visitors as well.

There are an absolute ton of places to stay in Olympos, most of them backpacker-y type bungalows and tree houses.  Lots were closed for the season, but we ended up with a comfy little bungalow (one of eighty four, in this place alone!)

Once settled in we thought about what to do. Sarah needed at least one rest day.  But I started thinking that, while it would doubtless be fun, and I'd like to finish what we started, the final four days of the walk really were kind of more of what we'd already enjoyed over the first sixteen.  And just like that, we decided to finish our walk in Olympos, head back to Antalya for a couple of days' rest and (this took a little longer) make a quick side trip to Cyprus since we were right in the neighbourhood anyway.

So that's that.  We had a wonderful, beautiful and very enjoyable 16 days and ~350km on the Lycian Way.  While there are a few spots that were a little hot/flat/uninteresting, we both really enjoyed the walk (the longest Sarah's ever done!) and would definitely recommend it to anyone.