Vehicular ferries: Greek islands to Turkey
 

I need help getting from the Greek islands to Turkey's west coast in early June.

We've done lots of homework here and on the web and it appears there are only 2 vehicular ferry routes between eastern Greek islands and the Turkish coastal resorts: Chios/Hios to Cesme, and Kos to Bodram. The other islands of Lesvos, Samos and Rhodes may have vehicular ferries, but either we cannot find reference to them, or they are part of a route that starts on the northern Greek coast (to Lesvos) or from Crete (to Marmaris?), and we aren't travelling to/from these places.

My wife and I would like to visit Santorini/Thira, which we can easily get to from Pireas. The problem is then getting to Chios or Kos - no ferry services. So we are looking at missing Santorini and staying at another island (e.g. Paros or Naxos) that we can then hop from, to either Chios or Kos.

Does anyone have experience that can advise on how to get from Pireas to Turkey via vehicular ferries (without having to tavel via 5 islands)?
Please do tell :helpsmilie:
We leave for the UK in 17 sleeps.
John

Looking at www.gtp.gr I see that there is a ferry from Santorini to Kos every Sunday in June.
It;s a car ferry (Blue Star 2) and the route is
PIRAEUS - SANTORINI - KATAPOLA - KOS - RODOS

Santorini -5:10 Kos 10:00 (sunday morning)
I hope this helps. For any further info don't hesitate to contact me.
Regards
Vlassis

Just saw that the above ferry won't be available until 24 June and you want to be there early June so that won't work.

Why don't you go from Piraeus directly to Chios or Lesvos or Samos (there are daily car ferries from Piraeus to these islands), and from there to Turkey.
All of these are very beautiful islands

For Lesvos photos: ÌõôéëÞíç-Lesvos Island 2006

Thanks vlassishlk. The main reason is a lot of press and guidebooks flogging Santorini as the pick for our type of holiday, so my wife wanted to go there. This exercise has show how difficult it looks to be to do that and get over to Turkey, so I was certainly entertaining other islands instead to make the east-bound trip easier. Your posts have reinforced that idea and my wife is coming around too :thumbup1: .
Thanks. We may be in touch again.
Cheers
John

Hi John,

There's definitely a year round ferry goes from Rhodes to Marmaris aswell as the other two options listed below which I think are seasonal. I'm pretty sure you can go from Santorini to Rhodes, if not then via Crete - these should be pretty easy to find on the web. For some reason inter-island ferries around Greece are all published but info on Greece to Turkey is really sketchy.

Cheers

Richard