Day trips in Rhodes

A day out from Rhodes takes one of three shapes: a boat to a smaller island, a drive down your own, or a crossing into another country. They cost you very different things, and only one of them involves a passport. Sort by shape before you sort by scenery.

Symi, which is the one people mean. A day trip to Symi is two crossings and whatever the boat leaves you in between. That is the honest way to describe it, because the crossing time belongs to the vessel rather than to the island: a fast catamaran and a conventional car ferry are two different journeys over the same water, and an organised excursion is a third thing again, sold as a fixed round trip. The boat also decides what you actually see. Symi gives it two places to put you, and they are at opposite ends of the island: Gialos, the horseshoe harbour stacked with pastel neoclassical mansions, and Panormitis, the great monastery at the southern end. A day that calls at one is not quietly including the other. Ask which before you book, because that single answer is most of what you are buying.

Lindos, a day out on your own island. The village sits far enough south of Rhodes Town to be a day rather than an errand, and the acropolis above it is a stepped, unshaded climb through the lanes. It fills a day properly: the village, the rock, a swim below it, then the drive or the bus back. Go early, for the heat and for the coaches both, and resist planning it as an afternoon bolted onto something else.

The onward hops, which are two different animals. Kos is the next big Dodecanese island to the north, and Halki and Tilos are the smaller, quieter ones in the same chain. Those are island hops: one country, one ferry network, one boat. If you are weighing Kos as a stop in its own right rather than a squeezed day, the head-to-head is in Kos vs Rhodes. The Turkish coast opposite is not the same kind of trip at all. It is a border crossing, so what governs the day is your passport and whatever entry rules apply to your nationality, not the sailing schedule. Settle that with the authorities who set it before you buy anything, and treat it as the day where the paperwork is the hard part and the water is the easy one.

You will not find a crossing time, a fare or an operator name anywhere on this page. Excursion companies on these routes change from season to season, which is the shortest possible argument for not building a page around their names, and a printed duration goes stale the first time a vessel is reassigned. Read the time on the operator’s own booking page, for the specific sailing rather than for the route.

The number that really decides a day trip is the return one. Find the last boat back before you commit to the outbound, then build the day backwards from it. Whatever is left of the evening belongs back inside the walls, which is what Rhodes Old Town is for, and the island around all of this is on the Rhodes guide.