salutations from sunny istanbul, yes we are finally here at last after 119 days and 4572 miles of sweat and toil on the highways and byways of eastern europe... the road from sofia to istanbul was pretty relentlessly straight flat hot and full of trucks, and with the so called september heatwave in action we recorded 54 degrees in the sun.
we had a fairly uneventful 7 day journey here, camped at the worlds worst campsite with a dusty patch of burnt up grass at the back of a restaurant with resident barking wild dogs. managed to find reasonable cheap hotels most of the way, some even with mtv and one with a mini bar, thats what i call luxury. camped at the side of the road a couple of times, but had no problems generally. we arrived at the bulgarian/turkish border with trepidation, ready to pay our traffic fine, and after going thru 3 passport checks noone seemed to have noticed, and on arrival at the 4th check the guard spotted the stamp and asked 'traffic police'. we nodded and as he looked at our bikes he proceeded to roar with laughter and gather his mates round shouting 'traffic police' and pointing at our bikes. soon the whole group was enaged in much merriment, as they seemed to think we had been given a speeding ticket.
after the laughter died down, they invited us to procede, and seemed to think that we deserved not to pay the fine. so we escaped scot free from our transgression of the law, and the irony of the whole thing turned out to be that we had saved 20 bulgarian leva for the fine, and when we got to turkey noone would change it for us, so we got stuck with useless bulgarian currency. we're hoping someone in greece might change it for us. after shelling out ten quid for a turkish visa, we arrived in turkey and found everyone to be very friendly, it's a nice place except they drive like lunatics, and we feared for our lives several times. after a couple of days we hit the outskirts of istanbul about 30km out and whilst unsuccessfully looking for a hotel, we were accosted by a turkish girl in car, who very helpfully found us a hotel, and then invited us out to burger king where we met her and her sister, who was incedentally amazingly beautiful, but anyway, we chilled out with them and it turns out we had wandered into the suburb of istanbul that had been affected most by the earthquake, and there were a stack of people in tents, too worried to go back into the apartments.
it also turned out that there had been an aftershock the night before we got there of 4.7 on the richter scale. we were 70km away at the time, but didnt feel anything. it was at 3am and our sleep then is very deep i believe! after ice cream, we went to their apartment, and they showed us a nice big crack in the building fron the original earthquake, and went to get their mother from their tent. she wanted to sleep outside again, but they persuaded her it was ok inside.
we ended up watching a movie, and drinking lots of tea and coffee and didn't end up getting to sleep til about 5am. luckily it was just a short ride into the city the next day. and so here we are trying to figure a good way out not involving cycling too much for the next 2 weeks, and at the moment we are looking at a train to athens perhaps. we staying at hostel here jammed full of australians, but its quite nice and has a free pool table. so, standby for the official awards and statistical report...... paul