Antalya Airport to Adrasan Beach transfer
Adrasan lies in a bay closed off at both ends by forested ridges, a couple of headlands south of Olympos. The shore is small pebble that turns sandy at the waterline, and because the mountains shelter the bay the sea usually stays flat, which is why families keep coming back. Behind the beach a single road carries family pensions, small hotels and restaurants, boats leave the far end for the islands and coves along the coast, and the Lycian Way climbs over the ridge towards Olympos. People come here to swim rather than to go out.
From Kemer it is 35 km down the D400 and then fourteen kilometres off it, most of them descending bends: about forty-five minutes, and a bay you come to for the day rather than for two hours. Tekirova is forty minutes away, Olympos twenty over the ridge and Çıralı half an hour round by the main road, which is why the three get combined. Central Antalya is an hour and twenty, Lara an hour and thirty-five, Belek an hour and fifty, Side well over two hours each way, so an early start. Alanya is out. A coach mostly comes for the boats; a car lets you pick a pension, eat on the shore road and leave when the light goes.
Straight from the terminal it is 109 km and about 90 minutes. That works if the bay is where you are staying: the pensions line the shore road, so the drop is at a door. It is no stop on the way to a Kemer hotel, though — the bay lies 49 km beyond Kemer, the last fourteen of them off the D400 and mostly bends, and after dark they are slow.
Visiting Adrasan Beach
More days here have a boat in them than not. The ones that go out to the coves and the islands leave from the far end in the middle of the morning and tie up again in the late afternoon, which fixes the shape of the whole day before it starts. Without a boat the day is simpler and no shorter: swim, eat on the shore road, swim again, and watch the ridge shadow come down across the water at the end of the afternoon. What almost nobody does is come for two hours, because the bay holds people much longer than its size suggests.
Small pebble gives way to sand at the waterline, so walking in is easy on bare feet and lying down higher up is not. The ridges at both ends keep the bay flat, and the surface usually stays glassy until the breeze comes over the top in the afternoon. There is no shade at all on the open shingle, but the trees and frontage along the shore road are ten paces behind it, which is why the middle of the day is spent under cover here and the swimming happens on either side of it. Nothing on the shore is more than a minute from that road.
Because the day fills itself, this is a drop-off with an evening hour set in advance rather than a car standing by, and where a boat is involved that hour is decided for you by when it comes in. Anyone who wants more than a beach can take the Lycian Way where it climbs the ridge at the northern end: twenty minutes up puts the whole bay below you, and it is the only walking here that is not done on stones. Say which end of the shore road you want the car at, because a driver at the wrong end means the last stretch on foot in the dark.
- You walk into the water on sand and sit down on pebble, so the useful thing to pack is something to lie on rather than anything for your feet.
- The surface is usually at its flattest before the afternoon breeze, so the serious swimming gets done in the morning.
- If a boat is part of the day then the day ends when it ties up, and everything else has to be built around that hour.
- Twenty minutes up the path at the northern end puts the whole bay below you, and it is the only climb here that repays the effort.