Our school Yusuf Ziya Öner Fen Lisesi organized a school hiking toTermesos national park to carry out a project activity of Erasmus + “Mission Possible Health” project of our school on 21.12.2017 with a group of 27 project participant students and 94 other students.

This was an important day for being shortest day of the year. Teachers from diferent subjects such as biology, history, geography, mathematics and language teachers also participated to this hiking organization. During the hiking, geography teacher gave information about the geographical charcteristics  of the area that we visited, history teachers infomed the participants about  historical background of this national park as the park had the ancient city remains from the year BC 333 and the biology teacher guided the students to know the plants togetehr with the other teachers. Our aim in our project was to look for, find and observe the natural plants, endemic plants and spices in their natural growing area and take their photos.

Besides, by doing hiking we aimed to conduct  a sport activity as a part of our “Mission Possible Health” project. The walking track was about 10 km and the paticipants walked about approximately 18 km road to go up and down the national park as it was built on the hilly area. The participants walked in the path of the king in the ancinet ruins and experienced a historical voyage. During the hiking,  they saw lots of lichens in dry dallards as they walked through mixed forests of pine trees and leaves which were found as dominant species. They  walked through the forest and looked for plants and spices related to the project goals and took some photos. Because of the seasons that we were in, the diversity of the plants were lower than expected. Nonetheless, it was observed that there were pleny of thyme, sage plant, laurel and juniper trees in the area that they walked through.

Following the long hiking time, the students were provided with barbecue as lunch with meatballs and chicken consisting of  various spices such as black pepper, sweet red pepper, small amount of carnations, laurel leaves, thyme, chicken spring, curry, sweet pepper, coriander, mint and ginger. The students were informed about the characterstics of the spices that they ate. Following the lunch, the students and teachers played some games and carried out some competitions together as a part of sport activity such as skipping ropes, pulling rope and playing with the ball.

The students were pleased to  have such an experience in an interesting and natural environment. They were happy to learn by collaborating and sharing with their friends and as well as learning about biology, history and geography by living and observing. They gained a valuable learning experince and awareness about the natural and historical structure of Termesos national park as well as endemic plant species and herbs in the natural areas.