Belek → Manavgat Transfer

Belek to Manavgat private transfer

Belek keeps its guests inside the grounds, so going to Manavgat is a decision to spend half a day in a town that works for a living. The market is the usual reason — priced for the people who shop in it rather than for a hotel lobby — and after that the river: the waterfall a few kilometres upstream, the boats that leave from the quay in the middle of town. Some of it is not sightseeing at all. From a Side hotel Manavgat is eight kilometres and hardly a journey; from Belek it is 43, which turns a dentist, a pharmacy or a visit to someone who lives there into a car booked with a return time.

Only the first five kilometres of this are not highway. The car leaves the resort gate, works north out of the golf belt through the pine woods, slows where the lane becomes a village street through Kadriye, and joins the D400 at a junction signed for Side and Alanya rather than for anywhere you are going. Then thirty-eight kilometres of dual carriageway east: the glasshouses at Boğazkent, orange blocks laid out in squares, drainage canals with reeds standing in them, the Taurus wall close on the inland side. Forty minutes for 43 kilometres, and the minutes are spent at the two ends — the resort spur at the start, the river bridge and the town streets at the finish.

• Ask which day the market falls on before you fix the date, because the trip is worth making for it and a good deal quieter a day either side.
• Upstream for the waterfall and the town quay for the boats are two separate stops, and doing both in one afternoon means saying so when you book.
• Book the resort lobby as the pickup rather than a side gate: the golf belt has one way out to the highway, and the car has to come in by it.
• If the market is the plan, keep the car for the way back — what people buy there is heavier than what they set out expecting to carry.