Would you like some bread with that?

Hello again. We're having a rest day in a lovely English-run B&B in the hills so I thought I'd take the opportunity to tell you about the amazing Turkish food.

First of all, everything you order comes with bread. Sadly, 9 times out of 10, we're not talking about the fabulous Turkish pide we have at home. We're just talking about white bread, admittedly in nice crusty loaves. The Turks eat bread with absolutely everything. Usually a whole crusty loaf is considered the right amount for one or two people!

All accommodation places provide breakfast. This is usually a feast. Most include chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, olives, an assortment of cheeses, eggs, homemade jams, honey, tea and loads of bread. On the trail this is welcome!

Dinners are also included with your accommodation when you're in a village with no shops. These meals are always at least four courses! They start with a soup - which has always been fantastic - then followed my an assortment of mezes (dips and small snacks), followed by the main course, usually a meat and wonderful vegies, plus a salad and then some sort of desert. By the time we get through all this we just about roll off to bed!

Dinner for two at Fatma's pansiyon.

The amazing thing is that almost everything is grown in people's gardens. Everything is so fresh and tasty! Vegetarian dishes are easy to get too.

Lunches on the trail can be anything - we've survived on chips and peanuts a few times when we've been nowhere near a town. In the towns, one of our favourite meals is a gozleme - a type of pancake usually filled with spinach and cheese. Ladies make these on a special hot plate over a fire.

HOW TO MAKE A GOZLEME (pronounced goz lemmie)

1. Roll out the dough that you prepared earlier. Use a long, thin rolling pin and keep rolling the dough until it is large and very thin.

2. Sprinkle on the filling to half of the gozleme. The filling is traditionally a local spinach and a bit of cheese but in more touristy places you can get minced meat and potato plus sweet versions like Nutella and banana or honey, lemon juice and sugar.

3. Fold the gozleme in half. Use your fingers to seal the edges and pat most of the air out of it.

4. Lift the thin gozleme very carefully on to the hotplate and cook it on one side.

5. Flip it over then brush it with olive oil.

6. When it's ready, lift it off the hotplate and cut into pieces.

7. Enjoy with the ubiquitous chopped tomatoes and cucumbers. This one also came with honey (different, but it worked!). The pomegranate and orange juice was the perfect accompaniment!

We've had some truly stunning meals - fresh, tasty and healthy. Afiyet olsun! (Bon appetit!)

The Lycian Way 2

Oh my goodness - I can't believe it's been only five days since I last wrote. So much has happened!

We had our first long, difficult day of walking. We knew when we left Fatma that there was a long slog down a steep, rocky slope. It was difficult with the large pack but the views, once again, were amazing.

We finally made it to the village at the bottom of the hill at lunchtime - and nothing was open! We had an orange with us so that was lunch. What we weren't then expecting was for the next section to be quite difficult in parts as well. At one stage we were scrambling over boulders - not easy when you're tired, hungry and getting unbalanced by the pack. We had fantastic views over Patara Beach though. We were heading for a town at this end of the beach.

Much to our frustration, the track took us way past where we wanted to go and we had to double back. We finally got to the pansiyon we had to stay in (there was only one) and this is what it looked like from the road. We had just had 7 hard hours of hiking and this is what we were greeted with.

To get to it, we had to turn at the sign and walk along a muddy track through a swamp. We then had to walk (very carefully) over a rickety home-made bridge to the decrepit-looking hotel. Anyway, the room was actually ok and the food was really good so looks can be deceiving!

The next day we explored the old fort nearby.

In our planning that night, we realised that there was nowhere to stay the next night and the night after that was a bit iffy. We decided to head to the small town of Patara and head out from there each day for a few days, still doing the walk but returning to Patara each night. What a brilliant plan this turned out to be!

Firstly, we arrived at the pansiyon and found out that both our New Zealand friends and our Dutch friends were all staying there! We liked the town immediately. Everyone was friendly and it was a really lovely place. On our first exploration we saw a cool-looking cocktail bar. We wandered over to check it out and learned that it was owned by Olivia, a British girl, and her Turkish partner Suha. They were still getting ready to open but managed to come up with some pretty mean cocktails for us anyway. We then followed this up with decent Turkish wine and raki back at the pansiyon and ended up dancing on the balcony until we were asked to keep it down!

The next day we explored some of the amazing Lycian and Roman ruins nearby. Letoon was cool - small and quiet. I loved the old theatre.

The Turks have so many ruins that they don't seem too fussy about protecting them. These goats were climbing over the ruins at Xanthos.

I loved the old theatre at Xanthos.

Back on the trail, we passed through a really old cemetery.

For a large section of the trail, we followed a 2,000 year old aqueduct. A stone aqueduct ran for 15kms. It was largely an open, stone-lined drain but in a couple of places it had to pass over a bridge like this one. In some places it was still being used today!

The most incredible part of the aqueduct though is where it had to go uphill! They managed to form a syphon using nothing but rock and lime. The lime in the water would have soon filled any small leaks. It really was an engineering marvel!

Patara itself used to be the capital of the ancient Lycian world and the ruins here are truly amazing. There are so many buildings here in various stages of discovery, ruin and restoration. Numbered stones stretch on for miles. All around the site, people still farm. It's quite obvious that there are more ruins underneath the paddocks and houses.

The main street would have been amazing in its day.

I think that one of the reasons we've enjoyed Patara so much is that we've had a lot of helpful English speakers. Bekir, from our hotel, and Olivia told us all about the festival that would happen on Saturday. We were supposed to leave that day but changed our plans and stayed an extra night.

In a nutshell, there is a festival that is a re-enactment of the nomad walks when people move from hot Patara before summer, high up into the mountains. They take everything with them - goats, chickens, the lot. They traditionally used camels, donkey and horses to cart everything.

This festival walks along part of the Lycian Way (a bonus for us!) and camels, donkeys and horses join in. The most obvious feature was the musicians and dancers that accompanied the trek though. Bekir gave us a lift to the start of the trek where everyone gathered for music and dancing. There must have been 300-500 people there.

The dancers all wore the orange shawls showing they are a part of the Lycian nomads. Mustafa, the owner of our pansiyon, was one of the dancers and he gave us one of the shawls!

After lots of music and dancing, we all headed off along the Lycian Way back to Patara.

Several times along the way we stopped for more music and dancing. We then stopped at one point where they had set up food for everyone. There were huge pots of stew, rice, salad and a desert.

One thing I've noticed about the Turks is they have a great knowledge of plants and they use them for food all the time. Oranges, lemons, figs etc are just plucked from trees. I don't think people actually buy many of these things in shops. All along the trail, people were picking herbs - thyme, rosemary and sage were everywhere. People were also picking certain flowers to make beauty oil with. Some were picking wild weeds, which is used as a spinach. Again, the wildflowers were amazing.

The Lycian Way brought us all back to Patara where there was yet more music and dancing plus free camel and donkey rides.

We loved that one of the main dancing ladies was (presumably) checking out her Facebook while sitting on a camel!

The dancers' costumes seemed pretty authentic.

There were local TV crews there and John and I got interviewed! They wanted to know what tourists thought of it all. Anyone involved in tourism in Turkey is struggling at the moment and they need all the help they can get. You couldn't get anywhere much safer than this area.

We've already had such a big day but tonight we're off to a wedding! I think we go to the reception rather than the ceremony but we will see!

I'll leave you with a pic of the wonderful owners and staff at our pansiyon - Mustafa, Bayram and Bekir.

Til next time!

Heather

I would walk 500 miles - well 500 kms anyway!

Helloooo!

Oh my goodness - we have started trekking the Lycian Way and it is outstanding! Our plan is to try to walk the whole way - a bit over 500kms. If we don't make it that's fine - we're not out to break any records - we just want to do one of the top 10 long distance walks in the world in a country that we've been keen to visit for a very long time.

So far, the walk has far exceeded all our expectations. I don't have enough superlatives for the scenery - every time we mount the crest of a hill another stunning turquoise bay is spread out beneath us. The wild, craggy, rocky mountains are awe-inspiring and they tumble down to the sea in wild leaps and bounds.

Each day we climb a loooong way up and a loooong way down. There has been a real variety of track surfaces. Sometimes we have to walk on the made roads which is fine as we're out in the country and the roads aren't busy. Most of the time we are on tracks though and these are usually quite rocky as this is very rocky country. Many of the tracks are ancient walkways used by the Lycians well over 2,000 years ago, or the Romans or a number of other civilisations that have lived here at different times. We've learned to appreciate pine forests because pines only seem to grow in the less rocky country and the pine needles cushion our steps.

Most of the time we walk through scrubby stuff - basically anything that can survive in this harsh, dry climate. The plants also have to survive being constantly pruned by goats! We often walk through olive groves or past terraces of wheat. There are heaps of wildflowers but I can see that many, many more are getting ready to flower. I've seen a lot of cyclamen leaves popping up along the track - I can't wait til they flower!

According to Fatma, these enormous olive trees are over 300 years old.

We've me some great people from all over the world that are doing parts, or all, of this trek. Most are only here for a short holiday and are doing parts of the walk organised through a tour company. They get their bags taken to the next town. Some are doing it all. Some are staying in pansiyons and some are camping. We had a lot of fun with these two Dutch ladies. Oohhh John, you are so handsome!

We didn't know what to expect with our accommodation and we sure have got a variety! The first place (at Faralya) was a great trekker's lodge. The next one (at Kabak) was frequented by English tourists - it had fabulous food and - wait for it - an infinity pool! It was bloody cold though! The view from our place at Alinca was unbelievable! Then we stayed in a basic place - Fatma's House. Almost everything that we ate there was grown or farmed by Fatma - the vegies, the eggs, the honey, the jams, the bread... I could go on!

Our bungalow at Kabak.....

......and that incredible infinity pool!

The view from our accommodation at Alinca. Sorry about the dark faces - we only have John's computer with us and it doesn't have photoshop!

Fatma brought us some honeycomb from her hives and showed us how to eat it. Awesome!

There are lots of dogs around. The ones at our accommodation places are usually great. We took a liking to Olive, a male kelpie-like dog at Kabak. He watched us pack up to leave then happily trotted off ahead of us. We got to a turn and went to turn right but Olive turned left. Sure enough, Olive was right. At the next junction Olive again clearly showed us the way. When we stopped to check or map you could just about see him rolling his eyes with impatience. He stayed with us for over an hour until we came to a junction where straight ahead went up to where we were going but right went back in a loop to his place. He looked at us sadly - he was clearly going to leave us here. We said our good byes and off he went.

We've been pleased with how we've held up so far. The tracks aren't easy and we had a long day to the town of Bel but still we were ok.

Gonna sleep well tonight!

Heather