Manavgat → Belek Transfer

Manavgat to Belek private transfer

This is the direction the coast's own population travels. Manavgat is where a good share of the people who work along the golf belt live, and where a flat can be rented by the month, so Belek at 43 kilometres is commuting distance rather than an excursion: a shift, a wedding at one of the resorts, an appointment at a hotel hairdresser, a child taken to the theme park for a birthday. Add visitors who come to see family and are driven out for a day on the wide beach behind the pine belt, and the few who change hotel halfway through a fortnight, from the river end of this coast to the golf end.

Westbound the turn-offs come in the reverse of the order a guest remembers: the car crosses the river, picks up the D400, and passes the Boğazkent exit first, then the Kadriye one that serves the courses. Forty-three kilometres, about 40 minutes, and the honest part of that figure is the middle. Early in the day it is the field roads that are busy rather than the highway — tractors and pickups coming out of the orange blocks, mist still lying on the cut ground. The last five kilometres leave the dual carriageway for the pine belt, and the final two are inside the grounds, where the signs stop naming places and start naming hotels.

• Say which bank of the river you are on, because crossing it in the centre is the slowest part of leaving town.
• For a tee time or an appointment inside a resort, it is the name of the hotel or the club that gets the car past the barrier, not the word Belek.
• If the day is to be spent on the sand, ask for the public beach road rather than a resort entrance.
• Going out for a wedding or an evening event, fix the way home at the same time: the highway is quick after dark and the lanes in the golf belt are not lit.