Guide Apps for Lycian Way, St. Paul Trail, and Phrygian Way available for download!

For you trekkers planning to use the Lycian Way, St. Paul Trail, and Phrygian Way, there are a few smart phone applications and tracks out there.  Most of these apps download a map into your device and use a GPS signal to identify exactly where you are on that map. So you don’t need Internet access to use them.

We (Culture Routes Society) also produce our own apps – so far the ones available are :

St Paul Trail (iPhone), Phrygian Way (iPhone and Android) and Lycian Way (iPhone beta). Most are in two versıons – lite versıon with all you need to plan your route and pro version with fully detailed maps. There will be a new update on the database of the Lycian Way app any day now, and a new maps update thereafter, in time for spring. We will move the Lycian Way app to Android as soon as we can afford to.

Firstly, the Lycian Way is marked on open-cycle-map, which is the base of many applications, including Gaia. Open-cycle-map is a great bit of mapping, pretty accurate and with many forest roads, as well as dirt roads and asphalt, marked. The village names are not always accurate though. However, the marked route is not the latest route – it is the Lycian Way as of about 2010, and there have been significant changes since then.

Second, there are many sections of the Lycian Way on wikiloc, which you can download and use on a smartphone – if you search on Lycian Way you’ll find over 1000 files. However, even using various sorts, it’s a bit of hassle to choose the good ones from out-of-date or just plain inaccurate GPS files.

We have added a few nice-to-haves to our apps:

First, most apps don’t have places of interest info. on them. Since most trekkers want to have a look around them at the historical sites,  villages, harbours etc that they pass, a bit of info and a couple of photos can help you decide whether it’s worth spending more time in a particular place or trekking a km. or two off the regular track.

The other essential for most trekkers is a bed for the night. Whether you just want a water source to camp by or a pension to stay at, they are on our apps, with contact details.

Third, the apps are currently Turkish and English, but we are working to add German and Russian.

Now, our apps are not yet perfect, and we are currently adding improvements. One of these is a Facebook link so that you can send us photos and updates to add to the database. With user feedback, this should make our database the best available on the trails. It takes time and money to maintain this info, which is why we often have workaway volunteers in our office!

So if you plan trekking the Lycian Way, St Paul and/or Phrygian Way next spring, use a smart phone and keep in touch with us as you trek. And if you want to volunteer either for trail maintenance or for updating or translating apps, check out Culture Routes Society Workaway.

For more hiking apps, visit 10 More Top Phone Apps for Walkers