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| Alexandroupoli Camping Ground |
A man stopped to talk as
we were getting Mabel ready for the road. He was Peter Gazzard, a South African
who, unbelievably, is cycling round the world. His journey started in Stoke-on-Trent in the UK, His route to date has brought him down through the Netherlands,
France, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania – he didn’t intend
to go there but he wasn’t allowed in to Serbia. From Romania he went to
Bulgaria and now Greece. From Greece he is heading to Turkey, Iran and then
Pakistan. He said Iran and Pakistan are reasonably safe because military
escorts are provided through the dangerous areas! He then wants to go to China
and south east Asia before moving on to Australia and then New Zealand which he
plans to reach in 2016, or maybe it will be 2017. Peter’s age was difficult to
guess, but he is probably in his late 50s, early 60s, We exchanged details and
wished him well, hoping to see him in New Zealand. For those that are
interested he has a blog at:
gazzieontour.blogspot.com
We passed a couple of Peter's contemporaries making slow progress uphill. It must be really hard work cycling in the low 30 degrees that Greece turns on every day.
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| Mabel Gets Her Screen Washed When We stopped To Fill With Diesel |
We left Alexandroupoli on
a poorly maintained local road which took us to the main east-west motorway
after about an hour. After 6km on the motorway we reached the border between
Turkey and Greece. Leaving Greece was simple, a quick glance at our UK
passports and we were waved on our way. We parked at a large duty free shop where
I thought I might be able to obtain Turkish Lira. I couldn’t, but was told there was
an ATM at a similar facility on the Turkish side of the border. I consoled
myself by buying some duty free booze.
The physical border
between Greece and Italy was a dry river bed crossed on a long multui-span bridge.
Armed Greek soldiers stood at the west end of the bridge and gave us friendly waves
as we passed. Their Turkish counterparts at the east end didn’t.
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| We Arrive In Turkey |
The first
check point was a booth at which a man wanted to see our vehicle documents. He
gave them a cursory glance and waved us through. Beyond was a large marshalling
area with a duty free shop. We parked and I visited the shop, it was a much
dowdier affair than that in Greece which would have passed for a good airport duty
free. A wide central corridor contained shops and money exchanges, the duty
free area was at the end. I found an ATM which wouldn’t accept my BNZ card but
I was able to get lira on my Visa.
We joined the queue of
vehicles for the next check point which was passport control. I handed over our
New Zealand passports as NZ citizens don’t require a visa to enter Turkey. That
was pretty painless, our passports were stamped and we crawled with the queue
to the customs booth. There a multi-lingual sign asked us to produce, vehicle
registration documents, green cards (insurance certificates) and passports.
That proved problematic. The issue seemed to be Mabel’s non-standard
registration document. I wasn’t sure because the customs officer spoke only
Turkish which might just as well have been Klingon as far as my
understanding was concerned. The customs officer conferred with a colleague who
had a gun strapped to his waist. In the middle of this another customs officer
wanted to look in Mabel’s ‘cupboard’. Satisfied it wasn’t full of illegal
immigrants, although we could have had half a dozen in the bedroom, toilet and
shower behind Mabel’s closed bedroom door, I was allowed to return to the booth
where the man seemed to be shuffling all my paperwork which I had carefully
arranged in separate plastic sleeves. After much typing on a computer, stamping
and writing in passports he handed the papers back in a messy pile, followed by
the plastic sleeves and our passports with an "OK". Back at Mabel I spent 5
minutes sorting out our papers and making sure everything was there. There was
a final booth where a camera was trained on Mabel’s number plate. The man typed
into his computer and frowned. He left the booth and looked at Smarty. On his
return he looked at Jane and said “Jane Perrott?”. Jane said “yes”, the man said
“OK”. That was it, we were in Turkey, It had taken about an hour, but it was
relatively painless. Jane commented the man had pronounced her name better than
most people in New Zealand.
We drove slowly eastwards
on what our atlas showed as a motorway, but was a dual carriageway in terrible
condition. Shortly after leaving the border a flock of storks took off from a
nearby marsh and climbed slowly over us, they seemed very ungainly as they
worked to gain height.
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| Storks |
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| More Storks |
After a while the road improved as work was going on to
reconstruct the road. Turkey seems to be the sunflower capital of the world.
There were fields full of them, sometimes stretching as far as the eye could
see.
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| Our First Impression Was Turkish Roads Are Not Well Designed With Deep, Unfenced Drainage Channels In The Median and Verges |
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| Road Workers' Smoko |
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| Family Transport |
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| Walking A Long Way From Anywhere |
At Keysan we turned south
east on a dual carriageway that varied in condition between good and terrible.
Jane wanted to drive more than half today’s trip as she was trailing me in
terms of kilometres driven. She decided she had enough when we reached a
filling station with lots of room to park away from the pumps. Almost as soon
as we had stopped a car drew alongside, two men were staring at Smarty. They
got out to have a closer look, I joined them. They had very little English, but that was significantly better than my non-existent Turkish. As
always, they wanted to know how Smarty steered while being towed. They thought
the electric cable connecting her to Mabel was something to do with it. I tried
to explain it wasn’t and showed them that Smarty doesn’t have a steering lock.
Eventually one of the men phoned someone on his mobile and then handed the
phone to me. The man on the other end had good English and questioned me about
Smarty. I handed the phone back, the man listened and nodded a lot, passing
information on to his colleague. Eventually, they were satisfied and we shook
hands.
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| Inquisitive Turks |
After our usual lunch of
bread, cheese and salami Jane took lots of photographs of sunflowers in a
nearby field. As feta is her favourite cheese, so sunflowers are her favourite
flowers. Here's a couple of the many photographs she took.
The road followed the
west coast of the Gallipoli peninsula for a while before crossing to the east
coast – the Dardanelles, the narrow
strait that connects the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea
beyond. The straits were busy with shipping, mainly bulk carriers. We stopped
to look at a Turkish cemetery and memorial to the first world war. As far as we
could understand the cemetery was on the site of a field hospital and
the graves were those of soldiers that had died there. The memorial referred to
them as martyrs.
We crossed back to the
west coast of the peninsula to reach our camping ground at Kabatepe, a short
distance south of the sites of the Gallipoli landings that we were planning to
visit tomorrow. Although the camping ground which was attached to Hotel Kum was
spacious, pitches were not deep enough to accommodate Mabel’s length so we had
to park her side on taking up a couple of pitches in the process. There was just one other camper van there. All the other vehicles were caravens and appeared to have been there long term, rather like Sue and Richard's caravan in Dorset.
As she usually does whenever we arrive at a new location Jane went off to explore returning with a good report of the beach and restaurant, as well as wildlife she had seen on the way. Here's a couple of her photographs.
Jane made a very good
baked feta starter which was followed by the remainder of the rice dish she
made the other day. The power to Mabel went off as the microwave finished
heating the rice. I found the circuit breaker in the camp’s supply pillar had
tripped. I reset it but no power was getting to Mabel. Remembering the problems
we had in Italy, I checked Mabel’s circuit breakers they were fine. I returned
to the pillar a couple of times without any joy and tried another socket, again
without success. A man from a caravan parked nearby had spotted I had a
problem. He rummaged in one of his caravan’s lockers and came over with a
multi-meter. He spoke in Turkish, I think. The socket I had been trying was
dead, he found one that was delivering 220v and that got Mabel up and running
again.
We settled down for our first night in Turkey.
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Today's Trip (166km)
The Greece/Turkey Border is the black line passing through Feres.
Kabatepe, our destination, is actually on the west side of the peninsula, not the east as shown on the map |
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