Self-guided on the Lycian Way, Kaş to Demre: how luggage transfer actually works here

Which villages a car can reach

Kaş: everything. Boğazcık, the end of the first long day, is on a road; a car drops bags at the pension in the afternoon. Aperlai has no road. Bags reach it by boat from Üçağız, about forty minutes across the Kekova roads, arranged with the pension owners. Üçağız is on a road with a car park. Kaleköy (Simena) has no road; bags go by boat from Üçağız in a few minutes. Kapaklı and Çayağzı are on roads, and Demre is a town.

So a four-night version, Boğazcık, Aperlai, Kaleköy, Demre, needs two road drops and two boat drops. That is why generic luggage-transfer companies, who work the coast by van, tend to quote for the road villages and go quiet about the rest. The boats are the part that needs someone who knows the pension owners.

What the beds are like

Family pensions, mostly with dinner and breakfast, mostly run on WhatsApp rather than booking sites. Boğazcık has a pension and a campsite; Aperlai has two small pensions that open for the walking seasons and close in winter; Üçağız has a cluster of pensions and restaurants used to walkers and boat passengers; Kaleköy has pensions stacked up the hill under the castle, the prettiest beds on the section; Kapaklı has guesthouses; Demre has hotels. Booking sites are unreliable for the small villages and one of the large ones is blocked in Türkiye, which is the practical reason a local agency is worth having: it books by phone with people it knows.

In October and November, and in April and May, the good rooms fill a week or two ahead. From November the village pensions begin to close and the plan has to be checked against who is open; we do that for your dates before anything is confirmed.

What you carry

A day pack with three litres of water, more from Boğazcık onward because the peninsula has no reliable source until Üçağız. Shoes rather than sandals for the roped step before Limanağzı and the boulders along the Kekova shore. A swimsuit, because every stage ends at the sea. The waymarks are painted every fifty to a hundred metres and the route is maintained on OpenStreetMap; OsmAnd with the offline map is what the Culture Routes Society recommends, and it works without signal. Between Kaş and Boğazcık there are fake waymarks painted to divert walkers to businesses; if a stripe disagrees with the map, follow the map.

What a licensed agency does, and what we do

The agency books the beds, arranges the cars and boats, pays the pension owners, and holds the licence that Turkish law requires for selling a package of accommodation and transport. If you want a guide for a day, it sends one with a professional guide card. You pay the agency. We do not take payment on this site and we do not sell anything; we read your email, put the plan together with the agency and send you the price, usually within a day. If it does not suit you, nothing has happened.

The version most people ask for is the ghost cities section, three or four days from Kaş to Simena; the five-day version to Demre is described in the Lycian Way from Kaş. Email us your dates, how many you are, how far you like to walk in a day and whether you want a guide.