Demre → Antalya Transfer

Demre to Antalya private transfer

Northbound the clock is usually an aircraft. There is no airport anywhere near Demre and no railway on this coast at all, so a holiday that ended among the Lycian tombs closes with a car ride, and most of those cars leave early: an eleven o'clock departure from Antalya means loading the boot while the greenhouses are still grey. The rest of the traffic is less dramatic — a hospital appointment in the city, a son studying there, a connection at the coach terminal, a family that spent the weekend at Kekova and wants two nights in Kaleiçi before flying.

The easy kilometres come first. The plain runs flat out of town, Finike arrives with its citrus and its harbour, and then the road starts working: climbs and descents all the way up to Kumluca, with almost nowhere to overtake. At the Olympos junction the sea comes back for good and the D400 settles on to its ledge — Tekirova, Çamyuva, Kemer, the tunnels, Beldibi far below — and stays there until Konyaaltı. 140 km and 1 hour 55, and that figure holds to the edge of the city; the only variable is the last quarter of an hour, depending on whether it is the airport, the walled old town or a clinic out on the ring road.

• For a flight, work backwards from the check-in desk rather than from the 1 hour 55 — this road has no fast section on which a late start can be recovered.
• Winter departures begin in the dark and the lanes between the greenhouses are unlit, so give a street and a landmark rather than the name of the pension alone.
• In harvest weeks the crate lorries are out on the plain before sunrise, and a dawn start spends its first ten minutes behind one of them.
• Anyone who found the Kumluca bends hard on the way down should take the front seat going back, because northbound they come in the first half hour rather than at the end.