Amazing Memories

Turkey has imprinted some great memories onto our brains, and we are both very glad that fate took our trip in the direction of Turkey. But to get into the country we had to cross our first real border, not an easy peasy EU border, but a proper border with 10 different people to speak to and staff who try and make it as difficult to complete the mission as possible. Once we had completed a section it would be impossible to find the next person to review our documentation, usually because they were outside having a fag or a tea, and if they were at their desks often they would ignore us until we virtually plonked ourselves on their laps. In the end it was only about 90 minutes of paper chasing, but it seemed longer (tip - always eat before you head to a border!), and soon we were driving in Turkey!

Our first mission in Turkey was to head to Istanbul and try and locate the Turkmenistan embassy, as we had not had time to acquire this visa before we left. I can already hear people asking how we didn't have time with 3 years planning, well all I can say to that is with visas give yourselves as much time as possible, and then double it! Our plan was to drive to Istanbul and set up camp for the night, as we had 3 campsites in our Lonely Planet guide book (7 years out of date!), and then hit the embassy in the morning. Well, I'm sure you can guess, none of the campsites were now open., and with the sun setting fast, and the Istanbul traffic becoming more and more ferocious, we had no choice but to check into a hotel and try and find a campsite on the internet. We won't mention the brand of hotel or the price, but needless we the only overlanders in the extortionately priced business hotel.

That night we slaved away and found a campsite 70kms back the other side of Istanbul, but it was on a beach with free wireless access.We also found out that the Turkmen embassy wasn't open for two days, so it was time for some beach side lazing til t-day arrived.

 

The most stupendously beautiful moment of the trip so far, happened at 5am whilst we were camped by the sea. Dino was parked so our tent window was directly overlooking the beach and the sea, and one morning we were gently woken by the rhythmic and mesmerizing call to prayer, and looking out of the window we could see the crescent moon, with star next to it, exactly as in the Turkish flag. Not only that but in the background we could here the waves gently brushing into the shore, almost in time with the call to prayer. A beautiful and long lasting memory of a beautiful place.

Amazing People

As I mentioned above the Turkish people are incredibly friendly and hospitable, and it didn't take long before we had people helping us out, guiding us through tricky situations or just generally trying to show a friendly face. The only real two exceptions to this were at he border and also the Istanbul traffic. Because of this we decided not to drive the 70 kms back to Istanbul, but to catch a bus (or two or three ....). So, when it was time to go back into Istanbul and apply for our visas we got ourselves up at 6:30 am (not normal!), ready to catch a bus at 7. Our campsite was a ten minute walk up the hill to the bus stop, and before we had even made it this far we had a car pulled up and opened it's door. The driver could not speak English and we most certainly could not speak Turkish, but it seemed he was happy to give us a lift we thought, but we could not tell if he was a taxi driver or just being friendly. Both of us decided to jump in and so the longest, but not necessarily the most successful, game of charades began. All we really found out about our host was that he was a Liverpool supporter and his name was Aragon, although we don't think he was son of Arathon, Maz!

Eventually we ended up being dropped off (for free) 10 minutes from the embassy and soon we had completed the forms and were told to ring up on Monday for the results! We then spent the rest of the day wandering around and admiring the beautiful sites of Istanbul

Later that evening we had our first of many presents of food, a huge plate of freshly caught and cooked fish. This arrived shortly after we had already finished a massive barbeque, and because Jenny is a vegetarian I had to keep our honour by finishing off the scrumptious fish. This was caught, cooked and finally donated to us by our neighbours in the campsite, a great Turkish family who were spending the weekend holidaying in a bus. They were Hizir, his wife Birsen, their daughter Beste and grand daughter Bilge. To top this off they also cooked us a huge breakfast the next day. What a lovely bunch of people ...

 

Amazing Food

I couldn't write this update without mentioning how great we found the Turkish food - even Jenny, which is incredible considering the stock dishes are pure meat! We found that the food is made with the freshest ingredients, and are generally simple yet delicious. Our favorite meal by far is Turkish breakfast, khavalte, which is based around a humongous pile of fresh and fluffy bread. Served with this is a mixture of jams, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, honey (in combe!), olives and eggs. Of course this is washed down with endless glasses of Turkish tea, cay (pronounced chai), which is served in a hourglass glass and always (don't read this Geth) with at least two teaspoons of sugar. Yum Yum!

From a meat eaters position Istanbul is also heaven, and the variety and cheapness of the delicious kebabs is enough to make me consider living there one day!

T-Day

As well as eating and meeting nice people we filled our time reading and chilling on the beach, including getting the boat out for another outing. But in the back of our minds we knew that we had a big piece of news coming up, something that the rest of the trip depended upon. If we didn't get our Turkmen visa, we couldn't get into Central Asia, where we had already lined up 4 other visas, but also our China visit could not happen and we had already paid out a considerable amount of money for this. We were nervous, but we were confident that we had done everything correctly. Surely it was just a formality?

So, the time came to ring the embassy and find out their decision and I had drawn the short straw to do the talking.- time for the posh Ollie telephone voice. But even my poshest accent couldn't win this guy over, and before I had said anything worthwhile I had be told that my visa request, and anyone else's would be turned down because of swine flu! Wow. we weren't expecting this bad news, and we weren't really aware what swine flu was. Damn, our plans were in tatters and we thought we had no other choice than to cut out Central Asia and China and move straight from Iran to Pakistan. This left a bitter taste in our mouths, as the 'Stans was one of the places were were keenest to travel too, and a lot of our route was based around this.

We decided at this point to give a call to the renowned expert in Central Asia a call, David at Stan Tours. Perhaps he would have an idea. ......

We leave the blog a this cliff hanger and will continue our next blog with the rest of Turkey and also the decisions we make regarding central Asia.

Love

Meat and Veg

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