Manavgat → Side Transfer

Manavgat to Side private transfer

Manavgat is a working town, and the sea is not at the end of its streets. This is the ride for people who live or stay in Manavgat and want the coast: long-stay guests in town apartments going down to the sand at Kumköy and Sorgun, families taking visitors to the Temple of Apollo at sunset and dinner at the harbour afterwards, and — most often of all — travellers who have just stepped off an overnight coach. The buses from Konya, Ankara and Istanbul set people down at the Manavgat bus station with their suitcases, eight kilometres short of the hotel in Side they actually booked.

The eight kilometres are the easy part; getting out of Manavgat is not. That means crossing the river and working out to the D400, which on a market morning is the slowest quarter of an hour. Then a couple of kilometres west on the highway, and the Side turning drops south through the hotel strip toward the peninsula. Fifteen minutes door to door, and barely two of those kilometres are highway. Here the pinch is at the far end rather than the near one: in July the access road queues at the hotel gates, and cars are barred from the old quarter in season, so a hotel is a much easier address to deliver to than one among the ruins.

• Coming off a long-distance coach, give the bus station as the pickup point and the driver waits there with a name sign rather than among the buses.
• Say whether the hotel is on the Kumköy side or the Sorgun side: the two strips are reached by different turnings, and the wrong one adds a loop past every gate.
• Off a night bus you arrive long before check-in, so ask the hotel to hold the luggage and treat the ride as the arrival rather than the wait.
• Evening drop-offs in Side are made at the car park on the edge of the old quarter rather than at a restaurant door, so leave a few minutes for the walk down to the harbour.