Antalya Airport to Land of Legends transfer
The Land of Legends is a theme park and water park at Kadriye, just inland from Belek, arranged around a themed shopping street with its own hotels on site. On one side are rides and family attractions, on the other a water park with a wall of slides, and the street between them fills up in the evening for the show. It is a destination in its own right rather than a half-hour stop: from a hotel in Belek or Kadriye it is a few minutes away, while from Side or Antalya the drive each way is what shapes the plan.
Belek and Kadriye are on top of it — five to ten minutes from most of those hotels, which is why families there often split it over two shorter visits instead of one long day. Kundu is about twenty minutes away, Lara about half an hour, Side and Çolaklı thirty-five to forty-five, Kemer an hour and a quarter. From Alanya it is about an hour and a half each way, a great deal of car for children who will be exhausted by the evening. The site fills the day on its own. A coach leaves when the coach leaves; your own car goes when the children are up and returns when they are done.
Straight from the terminal it is 27 km and about 30 minutes, on the turning every Belek transfer takes, so on paper it fits an arrival day. In practice a full day of rides after a night flight rarely ends well, and you would be arriving with the cases still in the car. It reads better in reverse: on a departure day with a late flight, a morning here and then the airport.
Visiting Land of Legends
The two halves of the site do not mix well in one pass, so most families take them in blocks: the rides while everyone is fresh, the water park through the hottest part of the afternoon, and the themed street in the evening once the light has gone and the show fills it. On the dry side the queues lengthen towards the middle of the day; on the wet side they build after lunch. Everything between the two is walked, and it is further than the map at the gate suggests — small legs cover a surprising distance here before anybody has been on a single ride.
Underfoot it is hot paving, then wet tile, then hot paving again, and anything carried between the two sides ends up damp. One bag you do not mind soaking and one that stays dry is the arrangement that works, with something on your feet for the walk between them. Shade falls in patches and not over the queues, and sun cream applied at the hotel will not survive the first slide. The finishing hour belongs to the youngest child in the party whatever the adults intended, and it usually arrives earlier than the evening show does.
This is the one place in the region where the right answer is not a car that waits. A driver parked outside for ten or eleven hours is time nobody uses, so the sensible booking is a drop-off in the morning and a pickup agreed for late in the day — late meaning after the crowd rather than inside it. Tickets are not ours to sell: we bring you to the gate and come back for you, and what happens between those two is between you and the park. The water side does not run in every month, so if the slides are the reason for the trip, ask before the day is fixed.
- Take the dry side first: those queues are shortest at the start of the day and worst after lunch, which is exactly when the water park is the better place to be.
- It is further between the two sides than it looks, so anyone who tires easily should have a long sit planned into the middle of the day.
- Carry two bags, one that can be soaked and one that must not be, because everything you own will cross between wet and dry several times.
- Sun cream put on at the hotel is gone after the first slide, and the queues on the dry side stand in as much sun as the water park does.