HOW TO DO IT

Greg Dickinson’s self-guided Lycian Way itinerary, accommodation and transfers were organised by Jon Graham ( jonnyturkstours.com) on behalf of Walks Worldwide (walksworldwide.com).

Prices start from £579 for an eight-day selfguided tour without flights. Their Nomads Tour, following the Lycian Way, starts from £855.

Room rates at Mandalina Suites (fairlightjones.com) in Kaş start from £1,250 a week; all durations possible. sounds. I even had to tell my colleagues, as we had a jam-packed “work weddings” calendar on the wall and matrimony was the talk of the desk – the thought of the email I sent still makes me want to climb into a hole and pull something over the top.

People respond to break-ups in different ways. Some might book a one-way ticket to the sleaziest corner of Kavos. Others might retreat into a duvet-wrapped Netflix marathon. These options did appeal, but for me, in this murkiest of moments the thing to do was crystal clear. Over the dates of our now-cancelled honeymoon (a luxury escape to the Scottish Highlands) I knew I needed to go off on a long walk, far from home, on my own.

I decided to walk part of a trail along Turkey’s rugged turquoise coast between Dalaman and Antalya, poetically named the Lycian Way. Walking the whole thing would take weeks, so I opted for an eight-day self-guided itinerary organised by Walks Worldwide, taking in the highlights of the way.

My route began in the hamlet of Ulupinar, where ramshackled seafood restaurants and plump, broadleaved trees congregate around a river. To the people of Ulupinar this river is the bringer of life, and a lifetime’s supply of trout. To me, just a couple of hundred steps into my 150,000-step wander, it presented my first obstacle.

Usually you can cross the river using a few well-placed stepping stones, but after a long winter it was flowing so fast and wide that locals had felled a tree to act as a makeshift bridge. I shimmied in careful sidesteps, keeping a crablike centre of gravity as the river roared beneath my feet. I didn’t look particularly dignified, but then, who cares when your audience is simply a gaggle of cackling frogs?

I was on my way, following a steep path stomped by goat herders for more than 1,000 years. And indeed, still to this day. An hour into the walk I passed an elderly chap, fast asleep in the fetal position. He opened one eye as I approached, then sat up and scratched his head, looking as befuddled as I was as to how he ended up taking a midmorning nap on the footpath.

I delivered my best “merhabas” (“hello” in Turkish) to just three fellow walkers on the first morning, but I was certainly not expecting to bump into an old flame along the way. Yet here I was, at the crest of a hill, kneeling beside a small, flickering fire hidden beneath the hood of a blackened rock.

Known in Turkish as Yanartas, or “burning rock”, the Chimaera is a series of flames that blaze naturally, eternally, and to my nonscientific mind completely extraordinarily, through the limestone shell of Mount Olympos. The Lycians believed these flames were the breath of a chimaera – part lion, part snake, part goat – although modern science gives the more prosaic explanation that the flames are produced by a cocktail of combustible gases. This, the science, is something my ex would have marvelled at. I preferred the myth to the methane.

Further down the hill I found half a dozen more flames, even bigger and fiercer. This was clearly a place to experience at night, so I returned at dusk to find an almost Glastonburylike atmosphere, only my fellow festival-goers were getting intoxicated by natural fumes rather than illegal ones. And rather than gazing out to a stage with a booming sound system, we were looking out to the distant blackness of the Mediterranean. I sat on a boulder, warm to the touch, and watched a stray cat mooch from flame to flame like a tabby curled in front of a fireplace – deliberately, blissfully alone.

Solitude didn’t come quite as instinctively to me. Prior to the trip I had downloaded dozens of albums and podcasts as a form of company. But when I started walking something compelled me to keep my headphones in my backpack. It felt like filling the silence with familiar voices and songs would have been cheating – I would have been drowning out thoughts and questions that I needed to address.

Through the silence, the world became richer. With electronic sounds in my ears I would not have heard a couple of randy tortoises rustling about in long grass on my second day, or a distant rockfall tumble down a karst cliff on my third. I wouldn’t have heard the call to prayer reverberate mystically through Butterfly Valley, or sat quietly wondering whether it was an echo, or a distant mosque, singing back in response.

With my feet blistered and legs aching, at the end of my week, I took a few days to recuperate at a boutique hotel in the harbour town of Kas – if you can’t pamper yourself on your honeymoonfor-one, when can you? Lo and behold, everyone else staying here was on their actual honeymoon, and it was hard not to feel like a lemon as I put on my least-creased shirt, went down to the seafront restaurant, ordered an Efes and watched the sun slink behind the horizon.

In Kas I learnt that being stationary has its benefits – you can read, write, bathe, wind down.

On the Lycian Way, something sunk in: I was single, which was as terrifying as it was exciting

But there’s something about the rhythm of moving one foot in front of the other that allows your thoughts to wander into exciting new wildernesses, untrodden before. I was in barefoot paradise at Mandalina Suites, with its hammam bathroom and infinity pool balcony, but everything in me wanted to put on my stinking walking boots and get back on the Lycian Way.

I missed my ex on my “honeymoon-nothoneymoon” – there’s no point pretending I didn’t. I could almost see the excitement in her face as I discovered a secret jellyfish-filled bay; I could imagine her taking a killer panorama of the stunning ruined amphitheatre I visited in Myra; the whole trip would have taken a lot longer, because she would have fallen in love with the thousand stray dogs I passed (and which I ignored – what if they were rabid?).

But I also loved being on my own. On the Lycian Way, something sunk in: for the first time in my adult life I was single, which was as terrifying as it was exciting. I had been walking down a familiar track for years, hand-in-hand with somebody I loved, and I wouldn’t change a thing. But my new path was full of unknowns and curveballs – and, yes, the odd storm or two.

Life had reset in the last year of my 20s and I had no idea where I was heading. What a dreadful, wonderful thing to have happened.