Day 7 of Turkey Vacation: Side on August 25th, 2016

Last day in Antalya.
The plan of the day was to visit Side, an ancient Greek city on the Mediterranean coast East of Antalya. On the way back there were two other major attractions, the amphitheater of Aspendos and the ancient city of Perge. But these two sites were all off the major D400 Route, that plus some difficulties in finding the right bus in Manavgat meant we only managed to visit one of them.

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By the way, I should have mentioned in the previous two posts that us unable to find a rental car and not satisfying with the quotes from the travel agents meant we would manage our visit of Side and Aspendos and Perge on our own, otherwise it would be a totally different worry-free experience.

So in the morning of August 25th we checked out of our hotel room, took the tram back to Antalya Bus Station, stored our bags in the giant left luggage facility at the bus station (with a small fee though), and took the bus to Manavgat.

The bus to Manavgat first ran around the city of Antalya picking up people along the way. (We didn’t know this at first, and there’s no way we would know its route inside the city of Antalya in advance, so we took the safe way of getting to bus station first.)

This practice particularly annoyed me because most of the pickup points of our bus seemed to be on intersections with an overpass (like the one on the previous photo). It wasn’t very nice to wait for traffic lights under an overpass that we could otherwise take.

So after roughly 90 minutes the driver dropped us off near a roundabout just outside the city of Manavgat, where he waived down a minivan that served as a free shuttle to the bus station of Side. (Luckily some local ladies were also travelling to Side, so the bus stopped and we were transferred onto that minivan. Otherwise we would probably have ended up in Manavgat.)

From Side Bus Station there’s another local shuttle bus that ran between the bus station and Side’s pedestrian street next to Roman theatre. But since we would love to enjoy the ruins along the way, we decided to go on foot.

Our first stop of the day was actually Side Museum (because it’s covered in our museum passes). We began to enjoy the wonderful gift of aif-con after walking in the blistering sun for even only a few minutes.

Then we visited Side’s Roman Theatre. Again, it’s covered by our museum passes.

I think Side’s Roman Theatre was the only amphitheater I’ve been to that’s got this passage in the rear enabling people to enter the sitting area from beneath, which was a standard feature in most of today’s stadiums. Pretty forward-looking.
On a second thought, maybe other amphitheaters (like Aspendos) also got this feature. Maybe it’s just closed to visitors for preservation purposes.

After leaving Side’s Roman Theatre, we continued walking towards the Apollo Temple on its coastline.









It was noon when we got to the Temple of Apollo, not the best time to take the most astonishing photos. (The best time should be dust or dawn, with the gradient of colors on the horizon.)







It’s after the hints of my parents that I found the people of Side just grew these fruits in their frontyards.

This time, we took the shuttle bus from Side Roman Theatre to Side Bus Station (1TL per person if I remembered correctly), then a Side local bus minivan to Manavgat, hoping to catch the bus from Manavgat to Serik to visit the ruins of Aspendos.

The problem was that, I was searching for Manavgat Bus Station on my Google Maps, and for a while the minivan to Manavgat seemed to be going away from Manavgat Bus Station (although we checked with the driver that he’s heading for the Bus Station, but with the language gap we couldn’t be sure about that). In hindsight, it’s perfectly normal as the minivan would be running around Manavgat dropping off people before heading back to the Bus Station, but at that moment we just went super-uneasy and felt there’s something wrong and decided to get off the minivan.
So we were teleported right to downtown Manavgat, with people around us speaking a totally different language. Luckily, some local gentleman that spoke English helped us out and told us the bus from Manavgat to Serik also passes through downtown Manavgat. So with his help, we successfully got on the right bus to Serik.

Well, I should have taken a few photos of downtown Manavgat to celebrate this adventure. I think I was too freaked out that I didn’t.

So after getting off the bus at the edge of Serik town, we took a taxi to the ruins of Aspendos. With meter-based negotiation (yeah I know that’s a strange notion, but that’s what happened to us on that day), the driver agreed to take us there and back for 80TL.

Again, the ruins of Aspendos was covered by our museum passes.
The whole Aspendos site consisted of a roman theatre that’s in wonderful shape (and served several summer concerts even till this day), and the ruins of the rest of Aspendos town that weren’t in good shape.

I’ll mark it here. There should be a pano shot to be uploaded.












Apart from these, there should be some ruins of ancient Aqueduct that’s farther north of these, that I didn’t visit.























On the way back the driver took a small detour to the Aspendos Bridge, which was built in the 13th century.

After getting out of the taxi, we just waited on the side of D400 Route. We didn’t wait long before getting on another bus back to Antalya.

At Antalya Bus Station we retrieved our bags, finished dinner at a restaurant hidden in the corner of the bus station (so it wasn’t an expensive meal at all), and waited for our bus to Goreme.

There wasn’t much to talk about of the Metro bus ride to Goreme. I remembered to book the wider “1+2” seats, but the seat pitch (which is what matters if one wants to sleep well) wasn’t any better. That’s all.

END

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