If you only have room for one big day out, here is the honest split. A boat trip is the easiest and the most sociable, rafting is the biggest adrenaline hit, a jeep safari shows you the mountains and the villages, and a dive day is the one that most people still talk about a year later, because it is the only one where you do something your body has never done before. A dive day with us costs 43 to 50 EUR and runs six to eight hours including two guided dives, all equipment, hotel transfer, lunch and insurance, which puts it in the same bracket as the others on price and time.
Effort and energy
Diving is far less physical than it looks. You are neutrally buoyant, you move slowly, and the whole point is to breathe calmly and waste no energy. Rafting is the opposite: you paddle, you get thrown around, and you finish tired in a good way. A jeep safari is not physically hard but it is a long, bumpy, dusty day, and a standard boat trip asks almost nothing of you at all. The catch with diving is mental rather than muscular. The first few minutes ask you to trust equipment you have never used, which is why our instructors take three to four divers at most and stay within arm's reach. Beginners stay at five to eight metres on the first dive and go to about thirteen metres maximum on the second. You can read the whole sequence in our first-time guide.
Weather dependence
This is where the comparison gets practical. A jeep safari is happy in almost any weather and simply becomes muddier. Rafting depends on the river rather than the sky. Boat trips and diving both depend on the sea, and diving additionally cares about visibility, which is generally at its best in late spring to early summer and again in autumn. Sea temperature runs from around 17 degrees in winter to about 28 or 29 degrees in late summer, and you dive in a wetsuit, so cold is rarely the deciding factor. Rather than publishing a calendar we would have to hedge, message us for current availability and we will tell you what the water is actually doing this week. Our page on visibility in Side goes into more detail.
Memorability
Boat trips, rafting and safaris are all excellent, and they share a quality: you have a version of them at home, or you can imagine one. Diving is genuinely new. Breathing underwater is a sensation with no dry-land equivalent, and the Side Underwater Museum, with around 110 sculptures standing at about 12 metres, adds something you cannot see anywhere else on this coast. That combination, an unfamiliar sensation plus a landmark, is why the dive day tends to be the story people tell when they get home.
Pick this if
- Pick a dive day if you want the strongest single memory of your holiday, if you are curious about the sea rather than just being on it, or if you have always meant to try diving and never had a good excuse.
- Pick a boat trip if you want a relaxed, sociable day with swimming and sunbathing and no learning curve at all.
- Pick rafting if you want adrenaline, noise and laughter, and you do not mind being soaked.
- Pick a jeep safari if you want scenery, villages and mountain roads rather than water.
- Combine them across a week, but never dive on the same day as a long mountain drive, and remember you must not fly within 24 hours of diving.
The mixed-group problem, solved
Most groups are not unanimous. One person is desperate to dive and another cannot be persuaded. On our trips the non-diver can come along as a boat visitor at a reduced rate, spend the day swimming, snorkelling, eating lunch and watching the bubbles, then go home having had a full day out with everyone else. That is often the neatest answer to a group that cannot agree, and it works well for parents with children too, since try-dives start from about age ten. See our snorkelling option for how the surface half of the day works.
Honest caveats
Diving is not for everyone on every day. You should not dive when pregnant, or with severe asthma, heart or respiratory conditions, and anything flagged on the standard diving medical questionnaire needs a doctor's sign-off. We are not doctors and we will never tell you your condition is fine. If you have any doubt, our article on diving with medical conditions is the right place to start, and our FAQ answers most of the rest.
How to decide today
Reserve free online, pay on the day in cash or by card, and cancel free up to 24 hours before pickup, so choosing a dive day costs you nothing until you actually go. Pickup is in the morning and we confirm your exact time the evening before. Browse all our trips, start with discover scuba diving if you have never dived, or tell us your group and your hotel through contact and we will give you a straight recommendation.
And if the comparison tips you toward a land or sea day instead, our umbrella brand Atalay Tours lists every excursion that departs from Side.
