Two continents, one country. Here is what to book in each.
Which Bosphorus cruise actually serves you dinner. What a dawn flight over Goreme costs when you book it yourself. Whether Ephesus repays the drive from a cruise berth at Kusadasi. Reviews of every tour you can book in Turkiye.
A dinner cruise, a dawn flight, a ruined city and a white terrace.
The four bookings a first trip to Turkiye is built around. What each one costs, and what the people who went say about it.
01Night one, on the waterBosphorus Dinner Cruise with Show and Private TableDinner under the bridge lights with both continents going past the rail. Ask for a table on the upper deck when you book.
02Airborne before sixGoreme Hot Air Balloon Flight at SunriseBaskets leave Goreme before six, while the air over the valleys is still cold and flat. Take the first morning of your stay.
03Ephesus before the shipsFor Cruisers: Skip The Lines Private Ephesus Tour & On Time ReturnMarble street, library facade, a theatre for twenty-four thousand. A private guide gets you in before the ship groups reach the gate.
04The travertine hillPamukkale Hierapolis and Cleopatra’s Pool Tour with lunch from AntalyaHot mineral water running over a hillside of travertine, with Hierapolis and Cleopatra’s pool above it.
The best of the Turkish coast has no road to it.
A dinner boat under the Bosphorus bridges, a gulet anchored off Orak Island with the ladder down at noon, a kayak over the sunken houses at Kekova. Three kinds of day afloat, what it costs to board each, and which coast it belongs to.
Istanbul first. Then pick your Turkiye: cave country, ruins or coast.
A city on two continents, a valley of fairy chimneys flown at dawn, the best-preserved Roman street in the Mediterranean, a hillside of white mineral terraces, and the long turquoise run of the south coast.
Cappadocia runs on the first hour of daylight.
Baskets lift out of Goreme before six, and by nine the valleys belong to walkers and horses instead. Everything here is planned around that hour: the flight, the sunrise viewpoint, the quad tracks through Love Valley.
In Istanbul the queue is the enemy. Buy the entry before you land.
All the Istanbul days →
Sultanahmet holds four of the country’s biggest sights inside a ten-minute walk, and every one of them sells a timed ticket. Get those in the bag, then spend the evening out on the water, where the city looks like the postcard.
Hagia Sophia, the Cistern, Topkapi
Three separate tickets, three separate queues, and in high summer the one on the square has no shade at all. Book the slots the week before and walk past the lot of them.
Dinner with Asia off the port rail
The cheap boats hand you a soft drink and turn around at the second bridge. The ones worth the money serve a real dinner, run to the Asian side and put a band on the top deck.
A marble slab and a cloud of foam
After a day on those hills a hammam is not a luxury, it is maintenance. Sweat on the heated marble, take the kese scrub, then tea in the cool room afterwards.
The days out more travellers book than anything else in Turkiye.
Every tour in Turkiye →The bookings that outsell the rest of the catalogue, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Bosphorus Dinner Cruise & Show with Private Table
Spend three hours aboard the Mega Lüfer, sailing between Europe and Asia while dining at a private table. You’ll see Dolmabahçe Palace, Ortaköy Mosque, Rumeli Fortress, and Maiden’s Tower, with Turkish folk dance, flamenco, dervishes, belly dance, live music, and a DJ. Staff members such as Devran, Talip, Murat, and Fatih are often praised for attentive service.
From · $34
Our review →
2
Daytime or Sunset Sightseeing Cruise & Audio Guide
from $8
3
For Cruisers: Skip The Lines Private Ephesus Tour & On Time Return
from $39
4
Basilica Cistern Fast-Track Entry and Audio Guide
from $44
5
Cappadocia Hot Air Balloon Ride / Royal Balloon
from $133
6
Hagia Sophia Skip-the-Line Ticket & Museum Option
from $33
7
Hodjapasha Whirling Dervishes Show & Exhibition
from $32
8
Antalya/Kemer: Suluada Island Small-Group Boat Tour w/ Lunch
from $21
The Turkish evening is a fixture, not an afterthought.
A sema ceremony in a stone hall, a hammam that ends with tea, a dinner boat under the bridges, a coffee read from the grounds left in the bottom of the cup. Book these the way you would book a table.
- 1Bosphorus Dinner Cruise & Show with Private Tablefrom $34
- 2Hodjapasha Whirling Dervishes Show & Exhibitionfrom $32
- 3Private Turkish Bath, Massage, and Spa in Old Cityfrom $53
What a day out in Turkiye actually costs.
Every tour on the site, sorted by price. A great many of the best Turkish days land under the price of dinner at home.
Bazaar walks, entry tickets, hammam slots and the short boat runs out of the resort harbours.
The full days: Ephesus with a guide, Pamukkale and Hierapolis, the Kekova kayak, a gulet with lunch aboard.
Balloon baskets at sunrise, private guiding, the tandem flight off Babadag and the once-a-trip splurges.
Three Turkish things with no equivalent anywhere else.
Beaches and ruins run right round the Mediterranean. A valley flown before sunrise, a city cut eight floors down into rock, and a bath house where a stranger scrubs a layer off you do not.
The Goreme dawn flight
Baskets leave the ground between five and six, when the air over the valleys is cold and still. Twenty people to a basket, the burner throwing heat on the back of your neck, and for an hour the fairy chimneys turn from grey to gold underneath you. The civil aviation authority caps how many fly each morning and wind cancels roughly one day in five, so take the first morning of your stay and hold the second in reserve.
- 1Cappadocia Hot Air Balloon Ride / Royal Balloon★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 6,829 reviews
- 2Goreme Hot Air Balloon Flight at Sunrise★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 4,924 reviews
- 3Cappadocia Hot Air Balloon Ride/ Turquaz Balloons★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 3,330 reviews
Derinkuyu and Kaymakli
Thousands of people lived under this plateau, in cities cut down through soft rock with stables on the top floor, kitchens and wine presses below, and ventilation shafts running the full depth. Round stone doors sealed each level from the inside. The passages are low and narrow in places, and the temperature sits in the low teens whatever July is doing on the surface.
- 1Full Day Cappadocia Tour( Red Tour + Underground City )★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,862 reviews
- 2Green Cappadocia Underground City and Valleys Tour. Lunch incl.★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,103 reviews
- 3Green Tour – Ihlara Valley & Underground City★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 378 reviews
An hour in the hammam
You sweat on a heated marble slab until the attendant decides you are ready, get scrubbed down with a kese mitt, then buried under a cloud of olive-oil foam. It is not a massage and it is not gentle. An hour later you are drinking tea in the cool room feeling like a different person, which is why this has been the end of a Turkish day for five hundred years.
- 1Private Turkish Bath, Massage, and Spa in Old City★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 3,225 reviews
- 2Private Turkish Bath, Sauna, and Massage★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 1,306 reviews
- 3Istanbul Gedikpasa Historical Turkish Bath with Privacy Option★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,285 reviews
Four Turkish bookings that run on somebody else’s clock.
Most of this country can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on sunrise slots, prayer times and ticket caps that take no interest in when your flight lands.
- 01Cappadocia Hot Air Balloon Ride / Royal BalloonSunrise is the only slot and the number of baskets allowed up each morning is capped. In season the good operators are full a fortnight ahead.
- 02Hagia Sophia Skip-the-Line Ticket & Museum OptionEntry runs on timed slots and the building closes to visitors for each prayer. Without a slot you are on the square in full sun.
- 03Hodjapasha Whirling Dervishes Show & ExhibitionA sema is a ceremony on a fixed evening schedule in a small hall. There is no standing room and no second sitting.
- 04Paragliding Oludeniz – Fethiye, TurkeyFlights off Babadag go when the wind lets them, and the mountain road takes a set number of jeeps a day. A calm morning is gone by the night before.
Turkish afternoons in July are for going underground, not for ruins.
Inland summer runs past forty degrees and the marble at Ephesus throws it straight back at you. Local practice is simple: the sights before ten, then somewhere with a roof and thick walls. Rock-cut cities hold about thirteen degrees all year, caves are cooler still, and the hammam was invented for precisely this.
By place, from the Bosphorus to the Lycian coast
By kind of day: deck, ruin, bathhouse or dirt track
Istanbul, Cappadocia, Pamukkale, Ephesus, then the coast. The route most first trips take.
FethiyeThe latest reviews out of Turkiye.
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