How long is the Sapadere Canyon tour?

The hours we do publish

Three departures, three lengths, every one of them measured from your hotel entrance back to the same entrance. The canyon tour from Alanya runs about 7 hours. The Dim River version runs about 8. The departure from the Side coast runs about 8, and it goes on Wednesdays and Sundays rather than daily.

These are the operator's own figures and they are what you should plan against. Whichever one you pick, block out the whole day. Breakfast at the hotel, back on the coast in the afternoon, nothing booked tightly behind it.

What fills those hours

The shape of the day is the same on all three, and the road is where the difference lives.

• The pickup run. The vehicle calls at several hotels before it turns inland, and yours may be the first name on the list or the last.
• The drive out and the drive back. This is the single biggest variable between the three days — the Side coast sits about 110 km from the canyon, and Alanya centre roughly 40–45 km, the figure moving with the route and with where your hotel sits on the belt.
• The walkway above the river and the cascades at the end of it. This is what you came for.
• The optional cave stop, for the guests who choose to take it, with its ticket paid at the cave.
• Lunch — riverside on the two Alanya departures, at a restaurant in the Alanya region on the Side day — and the free time around it, before the vehicle turns back towards the sea.

Why no figure is printed for time in the canyon

This is the real question under the surface one, and the honest answer is that no such figure exists in the record this site publishes from. The tour has hours. The gorge does not.

The reasons are ordinary. The timber walkway runs about 750 m in and the same distance back out, under walls rising to about 400 m, and a group moves at the speed of its slowest camera. What happens at the pools at the end depends on the water level, on the weather and on what the guide judges sensible that morning. Two groups on consecutive days do not get identical mornings.

A guide pressed for a number would give a plausible one, seven languages would repeat it, and the first group that lingered at the pools would come back thinking the day had gone wrong. A number invented to fill a gap is worse than an admitted gap, so the gap stays admitted here: we will tell you the length of the tour, and we will not tell you the length of the gorge.

What makes one guest's day longer than another's

Two people on the same vehicle can be out for noticeably different lengths of time. Four things account for most of it.

• Where you sleep. The canyon is inland and east of Alanya, so a hotel at the western end of the belt rides longest and one at the eastern end rides least; the distance page takes the resorts one by one.
• Which tour you booked. The Dim River day adds a valley and a lunch over the water, which is why it is the longer of the two Alanya departures.
• How many hotels come before yours on the collection round, and how promptly everybody appears in the lobby. The hotel pickup page explains how your own time reaches you.
• Whether the group takes the cave, and how the stop at the falls goes on the day.

The morning end and the afternoon end

The morning is the end of the day that carries times on it. From the Alanya belt the canyon tour collects inside the 08:30–09:30 window and the Dim River tour at around 08:55; from the Side coast the operator works west to east through the resorts on its own published table. Your hotel's own time is confirmed the day before, not guessed from a web page.

The afternoon end carries no clock, deliberately. A return is a road with a group on it, and both of those negotiate. What can be stood behind is the length of the day, which is why this page is written in hours and why the itinerary gives the stops in order instead of against a timetable.

Still choosing? The itinerary page walks the day stop by stop, while each departure states its own length on its own page: Alanya, Alanya with the Dim River, the Side coast. A group that wants the timing bent as far as the operation allows should ask on the private tour page; once a day is chosen, reserve it — no card, nothing paid in advance.