Day 5 of Turkey Vacation: Bus from Kaş to Antalya on August 23rd, 2016

The plan of the day was simple, took a bus ride from Kas to Antalya through Turkey’s beautiful coastal route of D400, and got settled in the Antalya hotel room.

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Before the trip, I wasn’t sure whether there would be a ton of things to do in Kas besides the boat trip to Kekova Islands. If there was, for example paragliding, then we would depart late. But we found out there wasn’t, so we got up early, and aimed to some more activities in Antalya.

Before the trip, I knew there would be plenty of buses between Antalya and Kas. By the time we checked out of our hotel and arrived at the bus station, one bus for Antalya was actually leaving. So we jumped onto the bus, literally not wasting any seconds.

Our bus left Kas at 10 in the morning, which was the same time most boat tours left Kas. So on the way out we saw those spectacular views of boats heading to sea.








The bus stopped at several local bus stations along the way. But to honest, none as charming as the little town of Kas on the Mediterranean Sea. It seemed to be that the other towns were all too populated.

Then we passed some sort of Mediterranean Inlet East of Demre, which was essentially a walled-off portion of Mediterranean bay. But since there’s a tiny opening connecting the town to the open water, it’s officially part of Mediterranean.

































So 4 hours later, our bus was at Antalya Bus Station, where we purchased tickets of an overnight bus to Goreme 2 days later, and headed for the tram station.

I shall say the Antalya Tram Otogar (Bus Station) Station was simply next to the bus station, which meant one needs to walk around the perimeter of the bus station in scorching sun, then down a lengthy underground passage to reach the tram station (all with trolley bags). Not the fanciest way though.

In the tram station, we purchased a reusable ticket at 10TL (0.8TL for card and 9.2TL in deposit) that can be used by multiple people simultaneously. I’m not sure whether there were other options for single-ride cards available, but the salesman was pretty determined to hand us this card upon seeing all three of us. One thing to note (that we later found out) that the soft-card he handed us could only be popped up over a counter, not on a self-service machine, which caused us some trouble later in the day.
One good thing was that, we popped an additional 10TL into the card later, and 19.2TL was exactly the amount of money for the three of us for 4 rides (1.6TL*3*4).

Having settled down in the hotel, we called a few travel agencies asking for quotes for their one-day tour to Side, Aspendos and Perga, the cheapest of which was 40EUR given that we had our museum passes. We tried to reach for a few car rental companies for a one-day rent to take us to Side, unsuccessfully. We even followed Google Maps to one of them, turned out Google Maps wasn’t so accurate in Turkey.
Some Notes:
1. At last, we did the trip to Side and Aspedos on our own.
2. There are some car rental companies on the threshold of Antalya old town. But since we lived out of old town (mainly because the online comments suggest noise problem for almost every hotel in the old town), we didn’t go there on the first day.
The good thing though, we bumped to an incredible grocery store called A-1, which supplied us bottled water and juice, two important necessities in Turkey for us.


Our next stop was Antalya Museum. We planned to go there by tram (we would love to ride the coastal old tram of Antalya). But since we couldn’t managed to pop up our Antalya tram card, we decided to walk instead. That’s 2 kilometers, in the sun, thank God we got ample water supply from that visit to A-1 Grocery Store.
By the way, later we found out that the old tram of Antalya ran on pretty long intervals, so maybe it’s not that much a bad idea to walk that distance to the museum among local residents.









No backpack was allowed inside the Antalya Museum, as the guard kindly led us to a storage room and taught us to use the PIN-based storage blocks. Pretty awesome, and free of charge.
Again, Antalya Museum was included in the Turkish Museum Pass.






























We spent about 90 minutes in the Antalya Museum. After that we walked towards the nearby Konyaalti Beach.




Then, with the sun setting and Konyaalti Beach on our side, we decided to finish dinner (Oh, we skipped lunch all together given the wonderful views on coastal Turkish Route D400.) in a cliff restaurant facing Mediterranean Sea. Is there any better way to get rid of the day’s exhaustion by embracing in gentle breeze from the sea, while watching sunset?
Oh, sadly, one thing to spoil that wonderful dinner environment was the incredible amount of flies.


After dinner, we sat down on the Konyaalti Beach for a while, watching the stars and distance city lights, listening to the waves, so on.

The good and bad thing about Konyaalti Beach is that it’s a pebble beach. Good thing about pebble beach is that for casual visitors like us, we didn’t need to change our sneakers; bad thing about pebble beach is that, for true beach fans, pebble wasn’t something comfortable to walk on barefoot.

Finally when we had enough of this, we headed back. There were taxies waiting directly outside Konyaalti Beach, and one driver offered to drive us back to hotel at 10TL for a distance of 2.54km, and that was the end of the day.
END

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