Day 5: Turkey!

Arriving in in Istanbul at 3am had its positives, the traffic wasn’t too bad. That said, I really didn’t like Istanbul. Felt like any other large city without a soul. The only part that seemed to have a soul were the roads, which were insane, even at 3am. Once I realized that the best way to drive was to bully other drivers, Istanbul became almost boring. Traffic didn’t scare me anymore, and attempting to drive into other cars was losing it’s charm.

So when we finally got to the hotel “with secure parking”, we weren’t too impressed to be told that the secure parking was so secure it was closed… and they couldn’t open it for 4-5 hours. Helpfully, they offered to park bluebird in a dark alley behind the hotel, which we equally as helpfully declined… and offered to take our business to the competition. Long story short, bluebird ended up sleeping in front of the hotel lobby – proudly sitting as a mascot for the hotel!

Minutes after we got to sleep, Istanbul’s morning prayers woke us up. Not too impressed and a little grumpy from the lack of sleep, we packed our things and headed to Cappadocia. What we hadn’t taken into account was the lack of petrol in Southern Turkey. After driving what felt like days, and running (very low on fuel), we saw a sign for Adana. Adana, for those without a Neocore Tablet with GPS is pretty darn close to the border with Syria, and pretty darn far out of our way. A quick U-turn (which on Turkish motorways is quite common, even popular I would say) and we headed north again before we found a turn for a small road through the hills for Cappadocia. Luckily for us, this new route was through farming communities. After a few helpful exchanges with toothless farmers, we found three elderly men crowded around a petrol pump with “petrol”. He couldn’t tell me the RON rating, if it was petrol or diesel or ethanol, but he kept smiling and took mastercard with a mobile phone payment machine… so we filled up our tank and prayed.

You know what? That was the BEST fuel we had in bluebird… ever! She got to 70mph and in no time we were in Cappadocia. We ended up staying three days in Cappadocia, so that will be an update of it’s own.

Next update in a day or two…

M.