Lovely quiet night on the beach with all the services to be found in the morning 🤣…tap at the beach shower, portaloos, even electricity, if you can sort out that wiring!
Set off for the border, downloading an E sim for Türkiye along the way from Maya mobile – it has worked perfectly, thank goodness.
Border chaos as usual – it’s quite clear that Greece and Türkiye still have an axe to grind with each other – so many checkpoints and guns around. We followed the lane for motorhomes, passing two closed hatches, then a guard comes across’ Have you done passports?’
‘Err, there’s no-one there’
We then had to go across on foot to the car lane and push in with our passports 🙄
After checking of vehicle documents we get waved through into a lane that had a coach, a van and a car all coming the opposite way towards us.
‘Keep going ‘ the man said, so they all had to reverse to let us through.
The big, wide and smooth empty motorways then lull you into a false sense of security.
We came off in Keşan, just to have lunch in a scruffy car park. A small city but it had all the trademarks of Istanbul. So much stuff happening everywhere.
Crossing the Dardanelles Strait via the new bridge was quite nice, then we came into Çanakkale, where we’ve managed to park overnight for about £4.
Walked through the busy town in the heat. Apple tea, strong fags and Turkish coffee everywhere you look. Through the bazaar, and then out to the calmer waterfront area, where we saw the Trojan Horse used in the 2004 film, Troy.
Had a drink in a bar to cool off – even the stray dogs were wandering in and lying down in the shade.
On the way back to the van, we somehow managed to walk into a slum area. Can’t begin to describe it, but it’s kind of how I imagine the Bronx to be. It wasn’t particularly scary, just full of families who appeared to be living on the streets among mountains of rubbish. In the middle of it all a van was set up playing some strange music from speakers out of the back.
Bit of a baptism of fire for the first day in Türkiye I reckon!