Day 4-7: Turkey

Day 4: Bulgaria – Turkey, shotgun shooting

Today was a bit of relaxing day. We had breakfast-lunch at Deans place and took out the thermostat from Radek’s scooter. Then we set out to the Turkish border with a plan to oversleep somewhere at the border. In the last city of Bulgaria we met a lovely boy and guys from Poland travelling on big bikes. We had some beer with them and decided to join for the night. This was brilliant, in the nature, behind the border with Turkey.

The guys were pretty cool, travelled a lot, so they told us some stories and gave several advices. Then came some local guy with a shotgun and started to shoot in the air for fun by the midnight 🙂

Day 5: Istanbul, simcard

In the morning we are driving direction to Istanbul with the plan to buy a simcard first, to have a map and internet available. This proved to be almost impossible, as there are several troubles with simcards in Turkey, it has to be registered to the person, you cannot get them everywhere etc.. Finally, in the 5th shop we visited we were lucky to get one, althought it was activated the next day. Istanbul is huge, I mean really huge. You drive 50 kms through the city and you are still not in the centre. Acoomodation was nice (Rhythm hostel), but we had to find extra parking. In the evening was a short visit of the centre and we went to bed afterwards getting ready for the next day.

Day 6: Through Turkey

In the morning we were supposed to leave istanbul. After 100kilometers it finally seemed that we left the city. Really huge.. During the day the scooter from Radek started to be again overheated. But why? Whole yesterday everything was totally fine. I touched the radiator and it was cold. Did again the procedure to get the air from the circuit, which worked, but we were not able to fill more fluid, as it was still pretty hot. Dinner was on the petrol station, same as the shower, which helped after 500kms and we started to look for a place to sleep. Right in the first village we saw a group of men, so Radek started his communication skills and we were given a place on the field next to the mosque.

day 7: Through Turkey II

Mosque made us pretty scared in the morning 🙂 At 4:45 started to play the prayers very loud and we had no idea what is going on, jumping out from the bed. See the movie..

Then we could not sleep anyway, so we set out on a journey soon in the morning. Today was supposed to be long, optimistic version was 600kms, which we were successful to accomplish. Again, we have to cope with overheating and again after several hundreds of kilometers. Again getting the air out, which Radek used to practice his conversation skills in Turkish 🙂

From Radeks scooter starts to hear some knocking, still not that obvious but hearable. Let’s hope the engine will make it until end, we are only in a third of our trip. Radek does not waste his time and look for a replacement bike. This model seems fine, he would not get bored by driving as it has speakers, unfortunately there is only one song on the playlist 😀

In the evening we are finally getting to Trabzon, where we booked some dirty ho(s)tel for 37 Euro, which is really horrible, very noisy and smells, but they let us to give the scooters inside. Mosque next door seems to be fine as we already got used to the prayers. Going to bed and tomorrow comes Georgia.