The Trek: Prep

My living room pre-trek

Bryan came to visit, and since he was going to be here in Turkey for so long, we needed an activity that was cheap and would last a long time. This didn't happen in the end, but before we knew that we decided to take a long trek in the south of Turkey.

St Paul Trail was established and waymarked in 2004 and is one of the newest long distance trekking routes around. It's stretches about 500 kilometers from near Antalya and climbs through Turkey's lake district north following (roughly) the path of St Paul through ancient ruins and gaining over 2000 meters by the end.

We can't remember now who came up with the idea first, or where we got the idea from to go on this trek, but it looked interesting, not overly traffiked, through a beautiful area. So we bought the guide book, a new GPS (among other new gear), and started trying to figure out what the heck we were doing. Winter wasn't necessarily the most recommended time to go - but it was extra dry this year, and warm, so we decided to at least try for it.