Manavgat → Alanya Transfer

Manavgat to Alanya private transfer

Alanya keeps the things a district town on a river does not. People book this leg for an outpatient appointment at one of the private hospitals or the university hospital, for the offices that handle residence permits and property paperwork for foreign owners, for shops that are still open in February, for a day on Cleopatra Beach beneath the castle rock, and for the excursion boats that leave from a real harbour rather than from a river jetty. Manavgat's own crowd travels the other way for the waterfall; this direction carries appointments, errands and a day in a city that does not close for the winter.

Sixty kilometres of D400, about 55 minutes. The road leaves Manavgat across the river, picks up the highway and runs east through flat farmland: greenhouses, citrus, the plastic tunnels of the banana plots around Kızılot and Kızılağaç. At Okurcalar and Avsallar it comes back to the sea and lifts over the pine headland at İncekum, the one stretch worth looking up for. Then Türkler, Konaklı, and the castle rock standing over the bay long before you reach it. Summer slows the resort villages, where hotel gates and crossings interrupt the dual carriageway, and the last kilometres into Alanya are the worst of it on an August evening.

• Give a street address in Alanya rather than a landmark: the harbour, the hospitals and the castle sit on different sides of the headland and the traffic between them is a journey of its own.
• The castle road is narrow, steep and hard on a loaded car, so if the fortress is the destination say so when you book and not at the foot of the hill.
• For a morning appointment, count backwards from 55 minutes plus the town itself; leaving Manavgat at the hour you would leave for Side does not work here.
• Nearly an hour is long enough to want a comfort stop, and the places to make one are around Avsallar and Okurcalar rather than further east.