Transfers across the Kaş area

The Kaş region is the Lycian end of Antalya province, where the coast stops being a line of beach hotels and becomes cliffs, coves and hill towns. Kaş itself is a harbour town built down a slope, with a Lycian sarcophagus standing in the middle of a street and the Greek island of Meis close enough to make out the houses on it. Some twenty kilometres further west, Kalkan climbs the hillside above a small harbour, its upper slopes covered with villas and private pools. Between and beyond them lie the beaches people drive out for: Kaputaş in its gorge and Patara behind its dunes. Diving, sea kayaking and boat days replace the all-inclusive band.

Every transfer from Antalya Airport uses the D400, and the second half is nothing like the first. The road runs south past Kemer, Kumluca, Finike and Demre, then leaves the shore and crosses high, thinly settled country in long loops before dropping back to the sea at Kaş; from there to Kalkan it clings to the cliffs high above the water. The band is 190 km to Kaş and 210 km to Kalkan, roughly 155 and 170 minutes. There is no motorway on this corridor, so the time is set by the shape of the road rather than by traffic, and it barely changes between July and January. Night arrivals cross the unlit upland in the dark.

The two towns are not interchangeable. Kaş is a place you walk: the harbour, the market lanes, dive boats leaving early, and swimming from platforms and pebble coves rather than sand. Kalkan is steeper and quieter, built around self-catering villas above the bay, with rooftop restaurants, a small shingle beach and beach clubs reached by boat or shuttle. Families who want sand drive out to Patara. For a transfer that means giving the villa or the Çukurbağ peninsula road as well as the town, since the final approaches differ more than the map suggests, and booking the return at the same time: a summer departure means leaving the coast close to six hours before take-off.