Getting to Turtle Beach by Boat: Iztuzu Timings and Tips

Iztuzu has no road running along it and nothing built on it, so reaching it is a small logistical question rather than a matter of walking out of your door with a towel. The usual answer is a boat, and the boat happens to be the better answer as well as the usual one.

What follows is not a printed timetable, because there is no timetable here worth printing. It is how the departures behave across a day and across a season, and how to arrange your own hours around them so that you leave the sand because you have had enough of the sun — not because somebody is waving at you from the jetty.

The river is the older road, and still the better one

Two directions lead to Iztuzu. The water was there first and it remains the one worth taking. Half an hour of flat green channel with the reeds standing higher than the wheelhouse is a considerably better preface to a beach than a lay-by full of parked minibuses, and it costs you nothing except the half hour.

There is a practical argument underneath the sentimental one. Boats land at the river-mouth end of the sandbar, where the kiosks, the lavatories and the shallow, bath-warm water are. The road arrives four and a half kilometres away at the far end, and the only thing joining the two is soft sand and a good deal of time. People agree to meet on the beach without agreeing which end, and then find out at some length how far four and a half kilometres is on foot.

So the choice of transport is really a choice of which beach you get. Both are the same protected sandbar. They are not the same afternoon.

The timetable is a shape, not a grid

Boats cluster in the morning. The early ones go while the town is still at breakfast, the frequency holds through the first part of the day, and it thins around the middle as the boats that went down earlier work their way back up. By late afternoon almost all the traffic is heading in the other direction, which is exactly when people discover they should have asked a question at nine o'clock.

None of this is fixed in print, and anybody handing you an exact grid in April is guessing at August. The number of boats running follows the number of people who want them, which follows the season, the weather and the day of the week. In high summer you will rarely wait long for anything. In April, or in the second half of October, the whole business can reduce to a few sailings a day.

The sensible habit is to take the hours from the quay on the morning you are actually going, rather than from any page written months in advance, this one included.

Work the day backwards from the boat home

• Establish the last departure before you buy anything at all, and then treat that hour as the fixed point around which the rest of the day is arranged.
• Check it against the boat you are actually travelling on. Two boats moored side by side at the same quay do not necessarily finish at the same time.
• Allow a quarter of an hour to walk back to the landing, and rather more if you have wandered off along the sand looking for space.
• If you want the water before the umbrellas fill up, take the first sailing rather than the convenient one. The difference is an hour of sleep against most of the good part of the morning.
• Small children rarely last from the first boat to the last. Going down early and coming back at lunchtime is a perfectly respectable use of the day and nobody is marking you on it.
• Carry cash. The kiosks and the umbrella hire want it, and there is no cash machine anywhere on a sandbar.

The one hour that matters is the one you are least likely to remember at half past two with your feet in the water.

How much beach you actually end up with

Journey times are those published by Turkiye's national tourism portal. The last column is the shape of an ordinary day rather than anything promised.

What to settle before you step aboard

• The last departure back, in hours and minutes, from the person selling you the ticket rather than from the person standing beside him.
• Whether the ticket is a return, and whether it ties you to one particular boat or is honoured by the others in the same fleet.
• Whether there is proper shade on the deck. This matters far less at nine in the morning than it does coming back at three in the afternoon.
• Whether the boat runs straight down or calls somewhere on the way, because those are two quite different lengths of morning.
• What the arrangement is if the weather turns. This is a river rather than a sea, so it is rare, but rare is not never.

A boat that answers all five without hesitating is usually the boat to take, whatever the answers themselves turn out to be.

What the sand allows, and what it does not

Iztuzu has been protected since 1988 and is a loggerhead nesting beach, which is the whole reason it looks the way it does: no hotel, no road along it, no line of buildings creeping up off the dunes. The rules are short, they are posted at the entrance, and wardens enforce them.

• During the nesting season the beach is closed between 20:00 and 08:00.
• Nests are staked and signed. Do not walk inside a marked area.
• No umbrella and no sunbed on or beside a marked nest.
• No powered speedboats within one kilometre of the beach.
• No lights and no flash photography on the sand after dark.

The dates of the season shift a little from one year to the next, so the signs at the beach are what count on the day rather than anything written here months in advance.

Turtles, since you were going to ask

You may well see a loggerhead in the river mouth on the way down, and the crossing is one of the better chances of it that anybody gets without a boat of their own. Some mornings the water is full of them. Some mornings you arrive having seen a great deal of reed.

Nobody can promise you a sighting and we are not about to start. What can be said is that the animals are genuinely there, that they are wild and have somewhere else to be, and that a skipper who guarantees one is guaranteeing something well outside his control.

If anybody offers you a handful of food to throw to them, it is worth declining. Fed turtles learn to hang about near boats, and boats have propellers.

Which hour, and which month

In July and August the early boat is the right boat. You get the sea before it is busy, the sand before it is hot enough to be unpleasant underfoot, and the shaded side of the deck on the way down. The middle of the day out there is a serious proposition, because there is no natural shade anywhere along four and a half kilometres of beach and the umbrellas at the river end are spoken for early.

September and the first half of October are the best of the year, to our mind. The sea has spent the entire summer warming up, the light has softened, and a good proportion of the crowd has gone back to work. Spring is lovely on the water and perfectly honest about being cold in it.

If you have exactly one day and you also want the rock tombs and the thermal pools, take the full day trip instead and accept that Iztuzu gets two and a half hours of it. We would not attempt both on a shuttle ticket in a single day, and we have watched several people find out why.

Who we would talk out of it

The shuttle is not a tour and has no ambition to become one. There is no commentary, no lunch, no swim stop in the channels and nobody explaining the tombs as you pass beneath them. If what you want is a day with a shape imposed on it by somebody else, the shared day boat is the correct purchase and this one will feel thin by comparison.

It also asks you to sit still for several hours in a place that offers a river on one side, a sea on the other and nothing else whatsoever. That is a wonderful thing if it is what you came for and a long afternoon if it is not, and we would rather say so here than have you work it out at the halfway point.

Which boats are running this week, when they leave and what each of them charges all sit with the trip listing on our sister site, because those are precisely the things that move while a page like this one stays where it is.