Antalya → Kalkan Transfer

Antalya to Kalkan private transfer

Most people booking Antalya to Kalkan are trading a city for a villa: a pool of their own, a bay that empties out by October, rooftop tables above the harbour, and the Lycian sites — Xanthos, Letoon, the dunes at Patara — near enough for a day out. Some have spent the first two or three nights in Antalya, because a late landing is no time to start a 210 km drive; others are joining relatives who came a few days earlier, or travelling out for one of the weddings Kalkan holds through the season. Kalkan is the address people choose when a hotel corridor is not what they want.

Allow about 170 minutes for the 210 km and expect four different roads inside one journey. Out of the city and along the Kemer coast it is open and quick; over the wooded pass above Kumluca it climbs and tunnels; from Finike to Demre it runs flat between citrus groves and greenhouses; and after Demre it turns inland for the long, thinly populated crossing to Kaş. What separates this leg from the Kaş one is the final 27 km: a ledge cut into the cliff high above the water, past the gorge at Kaputaş, before the turn down into Kalkan's steep lanes.

• Treat it as half a day rather than a hop: leave in the morning and you are in the pool by the afternoon, while an after-lunch start arrives in the dark for much of the year.
• Coaches and lorries set the pace on the climbs and overtaking places are few — time on this road comes from a steady pace, not from pushing.
• Xanthos, Letoon and Patara all lie beyond Kalkan rather than on the way in, so keep them for a day out from the house; the only thing the road itself passes is the gorge at Kaputaş, twenty minutes short of the town.
• Most Kalkan houses are self-catering and stand above the town, so ask for a stop at the shops before the last climb — once the car is up at the door, going back down for bread is a journey of its own.