I originally intended to hike the Lycian Way alone. The guidebook had said the trail was very well marked and easy to follow. But a few days before I began the hike there was a news story of a vacationing Englishman who had disappeared on the route. He just vanished.

There were all kinds of rumours that he may have found some young Turkish vixen and wanted a humane way to dump his wife. Or that his wife had got her Turkish lover to bump him off so she could live in post-widow bliss. And there was the perennial favourite storyline where he was simply tired of his current life and wanted to drift off into another. No one knows what really happened to him, but two days into his trip along the Lycian trail, he was gone. I rethought the idea of hiking alone and hired Dennis to accompany me. I was glad I did.

The Lycian Way is a 500 km footpath that stretches from Fethiye to Antalya in Southern Turkey. It takes its name from an ancient civilisation, Lycia, that once ruled over the area. An Englishwoman, Kate Clow, had fallen in love with Southern Turkey and took it upon herself to walk the entire route and way-mark it with red and white paint on rocks and trees. Thanks largely to Clow’s efforts in highlighting the route, the Sunday Times recently declared the Lycian Way as one of the 10 best walks in the world.

To walk the entire route takes a little over 35 days. A little too much time and a little too much hiking for me. I opted to do the more manageable coastal portion from Fethiye to Patara which took only eight days.

Each day Dennis and I hiked between seven to ten hours on the trail and then spent the nights at a farmhouse or small pension in the mountains or on the beach. The cost of a homestay was usually around US$20 per night, which included a healthy dinner (of fresh farm vegetables, feta cheese and grilled chicken or lamb) and a hearty breakfast (of feta cheese omelettes, vegetables, pita bread and lots of honey for dipping).

The logistics of transporting luggage depends on how much of a load you are carrying. If you are travelling backpack light, you can simply take your luggage with you as you hike. I had more bag weight than I could carry over hills and valleys and I wanted full freedom of movement while hiking. Dennis arranged for a friend, Brahim, with a sturdy old Ford to transport my luggage each day to the next location leaving me free to hike with a small day bag. Brahim also owns a small pension in the mountains that Dennis and I stayed at the first night on the walk. His entire family works the pension with his 14-year-old nephew as the porter and his 22-year-old cousin as the cook.

The sleeping accommodations along the trail varied from a mattress on the ground in a shed to a small, well-appointed air-conditioned hut a bee farmer had built on his property. The toilets varied from western-style plumbing (thank God!) to squatter’s porcelain pits (dear God!). Part of the adventure, though, was not knowing until the end of the day exactly where I would sleep or how I would pottie.

But whatever the accommodations or the toilet options, the special thing about travelling this way was the ability to enjoy the hospitality of shepherds and bee famers and seeing simple Turkish country life up close. In each hamlet, I was always a little bit of a celebrity, especially with the children who often came out to stare or play with the foreigner who was passing through their land. I regretted not having a little world map to point out where Jamaica was, and so I was stuck saying things like near Cuba or below the USA.

The Lycian walk itself is mostly uneven limestone footpaths and mule trails. There are medium to hard stretches of ascents to mountain areas and descents to hidden beaches often passing through ancient ruins. Some of the paths are quite hair-raising as you walk next to beautiful but dangerous sheer cliffs. There were a couple of times when we met a herd of mountain goats going in the opposite direction on a narrow pathway, and the only thing to do was to hug the cliff tight and let them pass on the outside. Oh, Lordee. Lucky Dennis was with me. In the eight days of hiking we came across only four other travellers on the trail. If I had been alone and had inadvertently fallen off a cliff or got lost, that would have been the end of Pondi and no one would ever have known what happened. Just like the Englishman. May he rest in peace.

You have to be reasonably fit and sure-footed to complete the hike as the walking surfaces are very varied physically – grassy, stony, wet, dusty, hilly, slippery, etc. But this makes it extremely rewarding in that macho adrenaline rush way. Oh yeah, bring it on!

My favourite moments included coming around a corner and suddenly being stopped dead in my tracks by some spectacular but unexpected view; or having Turkish coffee in the mountains at sunset while trying unsuccessfully to communicate with my host across the barriers of my limited Turkish and his limited English; or the time I tore off my clothes dripping with sweat and just jumped into the ocean in my undies, relieved to be done with an arduous hike for the day. Life can be a real adventure if you commit to it.

My eight-day sojourn ended at Patara beach which now ranks as my favourite beach in the world. Imagine 20 kilometres of undeveloped beachfront with soft white and warm clear turquoise waters. The closest lodgings are three kilometres away and a single simple restaurant serves the entire beach. There are sizeable sand dunes which, if you have not had enough of hiking by the time you get to Patara, you can run up and down and fall into. I strolled for hours where mine were the only footprints in the sand. There are no touts to interrupt meditative walks or swims. One occasional unnatural sight is the tourists taking advantage of the near solitude and getting it on behind some bush. All in all, part of the great experience.

The Lycian Way is a prime example of what is now being called Sustainable Tourism, which aims to have a low impact on the environment and on the local culture. It stresses small hotels with local ownership (ie people who live in the city or town and not multi-property corporations) and so attempts to sustain the well-being of locals. This kind of vacation is for people who are looking to have a deeper connection with the country visited. It also brings a broader segment of the local population into the tourist industry. The bee farmers and shepherds in the mountains of southern Turkey have now become part of the tourist offering. They too get to sell their country and share in the tourism dollars. It is also an income hedge for the years when the farming business is slow.

I have recently found similar efforts at Sustainable Tourism in the state of Kerala in South India. For example, I had a peaceful night on a wooden houseboat floating around the backwaters as I watched local rice farmers and fishermen go about their day.

I spent an afternoon on a tea estate among dozens of colourfully sari-dressed women picking tea. Hundreds of butterflies swarmed around and in the late afternoon a mysterious mist came over the mountain. Quite bewitching! I had no idea that tea plantations were such things of beauty or that Tetley Tea comes from South India.

I had lunch one day at PhilipKutty, which is a working organic farm owned by a widow and her also widowed daughter-in-law. They grow coconuts, nutmeg, banana and papaya, but have added rooms for a bed and breakfast and cooking school. It is a picturesque location with a warm local family looking after you. Meals are served family-style on a large round table, with the entire family and all overnight and day guests in attendance. It made for a great lunch as we shared India travel stories and learnt about farm life and local customs from our hosts.

Creating a wide diversity of experiences is critical to a successful travel offering. The ever-pervasive all-inclusive, while beloved by many vacationers, leaves an entire market segment un-served. There are those (like myself) who cannot bear the endless buffets, the organised nightly entertainment and the visually disruptive water sports. These hoteliers often isolate the tourist from the local culture. I always think to myself, “You people have really travelled this far to jet-ski?” The walls that bar the “unseemly and unruly” locals also bar the unique parts of the local culture. In many of these properties, once inside you literally cannot tell if you are at an all-inclusive in Morocco, Mexico or Jamaica, except by slight variations in the buffet.

Imagine if in addition to our well-loved all-inclusive chains we had offerings like staying with a Jamaican family in Trelawny near where Usain Bolt grew up and run the same trails he ran as a boy. Hike through the hills of Jamaica from Kingston to MoBay passing banana plantations and illegal ganja fields. Go fishing with the fishermen of Hellshire and help cook your own lunch on the beach. Where there have been efforts like this in the past, they have never received the sustained support or promotion to make them flourish. That’s unfortunate, because there are consumers with deep pockets craving these authentic experiences. I meet them on Pondi’s Road every day.

Sustainable Tourism helps us preserve our cultural uniqueness while offering the visitor something they cannot get elsewhere. Golf courses, jet skis and spas are so pervasive that it is impossible for anyone to create an exclusive experience unless they are spending a whole lot of money to build it. But ‘licking back’ a white rum in a zinc-roof bar with some Jamaican men playing dominoes and philosophising while the reggae music is blaring, that you can only find in Jamaica.