[2018, April]
This year the 1st of May comes Tuesday and, by adding the foregoing weekend, I can think of forcing a four days vacation as an early season start. I need to go south, towards the regions where the weather is already riding friendly, as I’m really over my head with this cold and rainy spring which is currently tormenting Eastern Europe. While studying the map, my options are rapidly dismissing themselves – Italy is way too far, Greece needs much more available time, therefore Turkey seems to be the only reasonable destination; I can hop over the Dardanelles Strait, follow the Aegean sinuous seashore southwards, then cross the vast Anatolian plateau to Istanbul, where one of the three impressive bridges over the Bosphorus will take me back to Europe. That sounds tempting, so I start calculating the distances, only to come out with a totally unreasonable result: riding more than 400 miles during about 10 hours each day will allow me to go as far as Marmaris – approximately the point on the map where the Aegean meets the Mediterranean – and make the magic city of Istanbul nothing more than an overnight stop, but I’m ok with this, as I’ve already been there as a tourist twice so far. Basically, I’ll get to explore the very core of the late Ottoman Empire, passing by both its birth and death places and also its pulsating heart – the capital of its all-mighty Sultans. Obviously, this one will definitely be a racing tour and I’ll have to settle for seeing everything just on-the-go, but I hope I’ll eventually carry it on troubleless. Let’s go!
Struggling my way onto the Rumelian rolling landscape. 420 miles
I leave home early in the morning, in order to avoid the miles long queue which is usually building up at the Danube bridge toll booths on the occasion of each public holidays. The low city traffic and the almost free highway to Giurgiu both prove me right, so I rapidly cross the border into Bulgaria and uninterruptedly continue riding up to the town of Razgrad, where I take my breakfast break in a gas station café. Considering it’s not even ten o’clock and I’ve already ridden more than 100 miles, I rightfully may hope I’ll get to the Dardanelles quite early in the afternoon, save to any unforeseen events on my route ahead.
From this point I leave the main road leading to the Black Sea coast at Varna and turn southwards to the town of Târgovishte – funny fact: there are two different towns bearing the same name, one in Bulgaria and the other in Romania, then I’m going to cross the Stara Planina / Balkan range in its lowest altitude pass, the 2,132 ft. Kotel. This road is freshly rebuilt and quite free, allowing me to maintain this morning’s alert rhythm, and the landscape is turning more and more beautiful as I’m gradually approaching the mountains. I’m riding along a narrow valley, squeezed between high vertical rocky slopes, which very much resembles the Yantra valley north of the city of Veliko Târnovo, then I start ascending some rolling hills, where the beech forest is alternating with crude green pastures; I pass by few scattered villages and suddenly, while I’m still waiting for some serious hairpins to climb, I come to a minor crossroad where the road begins to descend – that’s the Kotel pass and it is low altitude indeed! The descent on the Balkan southern slopes is quite as pleasant and troublefree as the road segment behind, with the short exception of the small town of Kotel, whose streets are full of wheel-sized potholes and lined by unkempt or even abandoned industrial buildings. Fortunately, it ends quickly and I continue to make good progress until my zen is abruptly shattered by the fuel reserve blinker on the dashboard. However, after I overcome my initial surprise, I realise I’ve already ridden 200 miles since I left home, so naturally it’s time to refuel. Still, there’s not much to worry about, as it seems that today all the odds are favouring me and less than ten minutes later I come to the junction with the main road connecting Sofia to Burgas, where a full service gas station is bordering the roundabout! While I’m enjoying a coffee and a delicious cheese-pie on the terrace, I’m also taking a look at the map and I’m pleasantly surprised to find out that the border crossing at Hamzabeyli is no more than about 60 miles away, which means I’ll be able to get into Turkey as early as one in the afternoon. That’s a true performance, isn’t it? Therefore, half an hour later I confidently set off towards the towns of Yambol, then Elhovo, on the last segment of my route in Bulgaria, where the road is free and neat enough to let me cruise at an average speed of 60+ mph.
They say that devil is in the detalis, is that a true thing or what?! I reach the border exactly at one o’clock, as I expected, only to find myself at the end of an endless line of cars which are mostly staying put; I mean, they advance no more than ten yards once every five minutes! It seems that a lot of people are going to Istanbul on the occasion of the public holidays. OK, there’s a generally accepted common thing here, in the Balkans, for the bikers to overtake lines like this one, so I take the opposite lane and ride on slowly up to the point where an uninterrupted rail starts separing the two lanes; there’s no more room to advance, so I have no other option than wait in the line. It takes me more than half an hour to get close to the barrier, where I discover the reason for the incredibly slow rhythm of the border controls: there is only one booth open, out of the existing three of them, and the Turkish officials are thoroughly doing their job, spending long minutes for each car. First I stop for the passport control and the border police officer, after he barely looks in my documents but takes his time to admire my bike, tells me to overtake the remaining line using one of the closed corridors. I follow his advice and, when I stop for the customs control, one of the officers comes to me yelling and waving me back to the line! I vainly try to explain that his colleague sent me this way, he keeps on yelling that the policeman is not his colleague and I still have to go back. That’s it, I cannot fight a fool in charge, maybe he’s got some suppressed frustrations on his mind, so I answer back with a flood of hard swearing in Romanian while politely smiling to him – to the bewildered ammusement of some other Romanian tourists which are witnessing the scene – and I take my place in the line. Twenty minutes later I come back to the guy, this time on my right turn, and he starts thoroughly checking my luggage, while preaching to me the theory of order and discipline. Finally, he doesn’t miss the opportunity to make a fool of himself once again, and, after having already looked into my saddlebags, he asks me if i’m carrying any alcohol!
No, dude, I don’t!
Are you sure?
No, not quite, don’t you want to look for it again, you smart ass?
He answers with a dumb laugh and waves me off, even my exit is still blocked by two more cars which are currently being checked by his colleagues. Still, I’m decided to give him a bit more of a hard time and, to his despair, I hop over the kerb back to the closed line, then I widely turn the throttle and take off before the idiot gets any other idea!
All that fuss at the border made me lose all the lead I’d gained by making such a good progress in Bulgaria. It’s three in the afternoon now and I’ve got 150 more miles to go up to the Dardanelles, which I have to cross by a ferry I don’t know anything about yet, so I really don’t want to take any chances with further unforeseen delays. Therefore, I decide to skip entering the town of Edirne / Adrianople – one of the last Ottoman strongholds in Europe – and take the national road to Istanbul, then I turn right towards the Gallipoli peninsula. I’ll try to stay away from the motorways here in Turkey, as their toll system proves to be a real pain in the ass – there’s no other way of paying it except for phisically creating an account with the roads operating company, then charging that account with a certain amount of money, the future owed tolls being consequently withdrawn from it; to my disappointment, I’ve tried to comply to this complicated procedure a few years ago, with no result due to the fact that nobody in that office could speak English or any other reasonable foreign language! However, on the bright side, most of the main national roads in Western Turkey are dual carriageways, featuring uninterrupted rails on their centre and roundabout junctions, therefore constantly doing 75 mph is no big thing; moreover, I can’t help laughing at their traffic rule compelling the police to warn drivers about radar controls by placing a sign on the side of the road, at least half a mile before. I really wonder if they ever catch anybody speeding!
My only stop on this route segment is in the small town of Uzunköprü – a frantic beehive of people moving chaotically in its narrow cobblestoned streets – with the compulsory task of getting some Turkish Lira from an ATM, as restaurants, shops and even gas stations on a cash only policy are a common thing in this country. Here I notice an interesting detail, which I’ll encounter later in all the urban settlements – on the nameplate at the entrance in the town there is also written the number of its inhabitants, which in most cases exceeds 100,000, and this explains Turkey’s total population of more than 80 million! Back on the road, the landscape in this area is quite boring – a relatively flat plateau with endless cultivated fields and nothing spectacular or exciting for miles. I find a bit of entertainment playing a cat and mouse game for about 30 miles with a middle-aged lady driving a Peugeot, whom I’ve fugitively met during a short coffee break before, being left behind on the road’s straight lines, only to repeteadly overtake her on the twists and turns. About one hour later I part my temporary companion at the junction with the road coming from Istanbul and, to my surprise, as I’m reaching a hill’s ridge, the crude blue colour of the sea suddenly appears in the distance ahead of me. Quite soon after that, the road descends right on the coast, narrowing itself to only one lane and sneaking between the pine trees and the rocky shore; it’s half past five and I’m rapidly approaching the village of Kilitbahir, where I’ll be embarking on the ferry to Asia.
The main ferry services which are crossing the Dardanelles Strait, connecting Europe to Asia, are based in Eceabat, which is welcoming me with a miles long line of cars and coaches waiting to embark. The explanation for this mayhem is that the town is also the starting point for the tourist tours heading to the area where the World War I military cemeteries and memorials are situated, nearby the ANZAC Cove. Here, at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, took place the eight months long battle wich opposed the allied forces – British, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, Indian and French – to the defending Ottoman army. Ended by the formers’ withdrawal, the campaign is considered one of the greatest Ottoman victories during the war and, paradoxically, the final moment for the once mighty empire, followed several years later by the birth of the Republic of Turkey, its very founder and first leader – the honoured President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk –rising then as a prominent commander. Anyway, April 25th, the date of the landing – ANZAC Day, is the occasion when an awful lot of people, both Turks and foreigners, are coming here to pay their respect to the war heroes and today – three days later – it’s obvious that they didn’t leave the area yet. I try to filter my way in the narrow and steeply inclined town streets, paved with an incredibly slippery tarmac which gives me the chills for several times, encouraging myself with the hope that things may be better in the smaller port of Kilitbahir. Nonsense! The line there starts about two miles ahead of the tiny pier, so I have to shamelessly overtake it on the opposite lane right up to its front; the employee directing the traffic first gives me an angry look, but then he condescently waves me on and I find a place to stop and wait for the ferry to dock. About fifteen minutes later here it is, not quite a ferry but a rusty old and small steamer which can take no more than maybe 40 cars for each crossing. Luckily, this is the strait’s minimum width point and it doesn’t take it more than twenty minutes to sail to the town of Çanakkale, on the Asian shore; meanwhile, I climb to the upper deck and I admire the flaming sunset over the two twin fortresses on the opposite shores, which were built during the Ottoman period with the purpose of guarding the maritime access to Istanbul.
The port of Çanakkale is situated right in the center of the town, therefore in less than five minutes since I’ve set my foot in Asia I arrive at the hotel where I’ve booked a room for tonight, despite the crazy evening traffic. The receptionist shows me a hidden place in the back of the building where I can park my bike, I spend some time chatting with a couple of boys working at the nearby restaurant, using a strange combination of English, Turkish and Romanian, then I go upstairs to get my room – this is the smallest and most cramped one I’ve ever seen, there are like two steps to go from the bed to either the door, the window or the bathroom, but eventually it’s enough for an overnight stop! I spend the rest of the evening out in the streets, admiring an open-air classic cars exibition, walking on the crowded sea-front avenue and having for supper a delicious kebap which I’ve been dreaming of ever since morning.
Kotel pass
The Dardanelles strait
Çanakkale, classic cars exibition
Çanakkale, the seaside promenade
Racing along the opposite shore of the Aegean. 390 miles
Getting out of Çanakkale proves to be more complicated than I imagined, because I have to wander a bit in the still deserted streets of the outskirts before I find the right exit, but once I get on the causeway to Izmir I’m making good progress, gaining back the lost time. The road is first mildly climbing some hills covered by intensely smelling pine forests, then a steep descent suddenly takes me right on the shore of the Aegean Sea; my plan for today is to follow it southwards as closely as I can, all the way up to Marmaris, where the Anatolian coast turns east, along the Mediterranean. As Greece is generally my favourite destination, therefore I’ve already explored every mile of the Aegean western seashore, I’m genuinely curious how the opposite one looks like, while also hoping I’ll enjoy it quite as much.
Faithful to my strategy to keep as close as possible to the sea, few miles further, when I get to the little town of Akçay, I leave the highway, which makes a large detour inland, and turn right on a narrow road along the gulf’s outline, only to discover a striking difference to what I’ve been used to on the opposite seashore: over there, most of the roads are approximately in the same maintenance condition, regardless of their status, while here almost all the local ones are really dreadful and badly kempt. This one is bumpy and paved with cracked concrete slabs, which don’t let me exceed 30 mph, and also its roadsigns are totally missing, causing me to get a bit lost in some one-way streets and consequently lose more than half an hour of my precious time today. When I eventually get back to the highway, I make a promise to myself that I won’t repeat this mistake any more, although I do know very well I won’t be able to resist the temptation of taking the road less travelled at least one more time later on.
Soon after I pass by the seaside town of Ayvalik I have to briefly stop at a gas station for refueling. Well, briefly I thought it would be, but I was wrong, because the overly kind and extroverted service guy here, who doesn’t seem to be discouraged at all by the language barrier between us, starts thoroughly inquiring me, first on the common issues – what’s my bike’s engine displacement, where am I coming from and going to, do I like Turkey (he looks a bit upset when I tell him I like Greece more), then on more personal ones – where do I live, how old am I, why am I travelling alone, why don’t I bring my family for a vacation in Turkey and so on. Moreover, after he fills my tank, he offers me free coffee and a cigarette, then he invites me to sit and have a snack with him and his friends, who were hanging around at a table in the shade. That’s how I add another half hour of delay to my already tight schedule for today, but, eventually, I don’t feel sorry for this one, because meeting and getting to know simple, common people along my route is one of the most valuable achievments of my trips.
Back on the road, about 60 miles farther I notice it’s already twelve, the increasing traffic gives me a hint I’m getting closer to Izmir and I feel unbearably hot! Therefore, somewhere along the elegant looking seafront promenade of the small town of Aliağa I pull over right next to a busy park, I take off some of my clothes and allow myself a nice and relaxing prolonged break on a bench overlooking the Aegean Sea and the Greek island of Lesbos, which lies just 20 miles offshore. Rested and cooler this time, half an hour later I get back on track and, after I wander a bit in the wrong direction due to missing a turn while trying to keep off the motorway, I finally approach the outskirts of Izmir, which proves to be quite a metropolis – actually it is Turkey’s third largest city, home of more than 4 million people! I’ve been initially planning to stop for lunch somewhere in the city centre, but at the sight of the insane traffic, the countless junctions with packed boulevards and the imposing row of skyscrapers lining the seafront I realize I’d lose several hours doing that, so I stay on the avenue heading to the airport instead, then I turn right on a secondary road towards Kuşadasi; I reckon I’ll have to settle to a simple snack in a gas station for lunch, just the same as I already did yesterday.
When I get to the seaside the landscape is once more spectacular, the road winding through dense pine forests alongside the high steep cliffs. Constantly monitoring the dashboard clock, I tangentially skip Kuşadasi – which is more than the well-known resort, but a full-size city itself which is hosting about 200,000 people, then I merge the four-lanes highway climbing the bald rocky hills neighbouring the huge Bafa lake. The views over here are really worth some pictures, but I feel I cannot afford any more breaks, so about 50 miles further on I reach the busy town of Milas, where I once again take a secondary road running along a narrow forested valley which eventually takes me back on the Aegean shore nearby Oren. This one is nothing more than a bigger village squeezed between the rocky cliffs and a quite dull beach, so I’m not wasting any of my precious time here and I set on towards Akyaka, via a road which is figured so thin on Google Maps that I somehow doubt it’s actually fit for my bike. Nevertheless, I don’t have any other option to follow the coastline eastwards, so I carefully go up and down a series of terribly steep gradients, passing by some tiny villages whose blatant poverty appears in striking contrast to most of the places I’ve been to so far; the smoking factories and the agricultural machinery, the newly built apartment blocks and villas in the suburbs and the cheap but rather new cars in the streets are being replaced here by small plots of hardly cultivated land, dilapidated small houses and donkey dragged wooden carts, as if I’d miraculously leapt back in time a couple of centuries. On top of that, the road gradually deteriorates and narrows down until the tarmac becomes just a trail of gravel mixed with some slag and tar, so I’m starting to expect I’ll have to turn back right after every other bend. On the other hand though, my spirits are lifted by the stunning landscape that’s surrounding me: the steep rocky mountains covered by an endless deep green pine forest, the glimpses of the white pebble beaches far below and the intense blue sea stretching towards the horizon are composing the most spectacular view I’ve encountered so far during my trip.
Eventually, about 30 miles farther, the last of them entirely gravel and dirt, I get to Akyaka – a touristy small town, settled right at the end of the long Gökova bay which is separating the mainland from the Datça peninsula, where Marmaris – my destination for tonight – is situated. Here I merge again the four-lanes super highway and I get a treat with the icing on the cake of my today’s route: two series of seemingly endless bends – up and down the peninsula’s ridge. Sadly, it’s quite late and I think I’ve got no more than half an hour of daylight, so I’ll have to skip the remaining 50 miles of the spectacular D400 road to the tip of the peninsula, but I’m trying to console myself that maybe I’ll get the chance to ride it some other time. I enter the city at seven in the evening, I easily find my hotel, I take a shower and change my clothes, then I go for a walk on the seaside promenade under the moonlight. Later on, I take a late dinner in a terrace restaurant, in the midst of a euphoric atmosphere created by hundreds of Galatasaray soccer team fans who – flags, torches and drums equipped even they are more than 400 miles away from Istanbul – are celebrating a new trophy won by their favourites!
Aliağa, the seaside park
The Aegean coastline beyond Kuşadasi
On the road to Oren
The Aegean coastline beyond Akyaka
Marmaris in the moonlight
Crossing the vast Anatolian plateau. 470 miles
This morning I have my coffee and breakfast in a surprisingly relaxed mood, considering the monstrous route to Istanbul that awaits me and the inherent evening traffic jams which I’ll have to deal with in order to get to my hotel situated in the Kadiköy district, right in the heart of the Asian half of the metropolis. Consequently, I move on at a quite late hour for my usual routine, but at least I start the day with a large grin on my face, induced by riding the alluring twisties on the road back to Akyaka. Moreover, the road to Muğla reveals me another impressive climb of more than 2,000 feet elevation gain in just a few miles and a spectacular view over the whole region at its end, forcing me to conceive some more of my precious time in order to take a couple of pictures.
Not much farther, I leave the crowded highway which is heading to Izmir and I turn right on the D330 in the direction of Denizli, another four-lanes road which proves to be one of the nicest parts of my route today: 60 miles of low traffic excellent tarmac traversing a mountainous area at an altitude of more than 3,500 ft., flanked by steep rocky walls alternating with dense pine forests. After I’m out of the mountains and passing through several villages as I’m getting closer to the city, the way people are looking to me makes me notice something new compared to the previous days I’ve already spent in Turkey – once I left the touristic corridor which is stretching for more than 500 miles along the seaside from Kuşadasi to Antalya and beyond, there are very few foreigners coming this way. And indeed, my feeling is confirmed later on, during my first prolonged break today, in a gas station where I stop right after exiting Denizli. Almost all of the employees gather around me and assault me with a lot of questions about my route, my bike, the country where I come from and so on; and their reaction, especially the women’s one, of astonishment and delight when I tell them I’ll get to Istanbul by tonight is really priceless! In this place as well, I also get a strong scare when their POS refuses my card payment even at the second attempt; normally, this wouldn’t be such a big problem, as I always carry some cash exactly for this kind of situation, but what am I going to do from now on if I won’t be able to use my card anymore? Luckily, they’ve got wi-fi internet inside, so I get to access my bank’s app, check that everything seems to look ok and I feel a bit relieved. However, I’ll still be a little nervous until the next time I’ll have to use the card!
After this unexpectedly long break I finally move on towards the towns of Çivril, then Uşak, still riding on good and quite free roads, the landscape being the only one that changes to some gently rolling hills, featuring an intense red soil which is cultivated with all kind of vegetables and worked with heavy agricultural machinery. I skip entering Uşak by taking a shortcut on a secondary road which proves to be as bumpy and narrow as the ones I’ve ridden yesterday, then I have to face some really heavy traffic on the D300 highway connecting the Aegean port of Izmir to the capital in Ankara. Luckily for me, my route soon turns left in the direction of Kütahya and I’m once again alone on the road as far as I can see in the distance. Meanwhile, the air starts feeling really hot as the temperature has risen above 30°C and because it’s about lunch time I stop in another gas station nearby the town of Altintaş, to have some crackers and a cold drink. Interestingly, for as long as I’m stopped here, most of the vehicles being refuelled are just scooters and tractors!
Half an hour later I vigorously resume my race across the seemingly endless Anatolian plateau, as there are just a bit more than five hours of daylight left, while Istanbul is still about 250 miles away. After I merge onto the main highway coming from the southern big cities of Antalya and Konya the traffic is once again busy and quite chaotic, bursting with cars, vans and big trucks. All this madness seems to charge me with a boost of energy and adrenaline and, also being stimulated by the quite short time left until dark, I ride faster and faster until I realize I’m doing almost 100 mph! That’s definitely not what I’m in for, so I take a short break in order to reset myself to my usual cruising speed, then, luckily, close to Bilecik the road follows a steep and winding gorge on the Sakarya river and the spectacular landscape distracts me from speeding furthermore. Out of the gorge, the valley suddenly broadens and the D650 highway turns east heading to Adapazari, where it meets the D100 which is going westwards to Istanbul; therefore, I decide once more to take a shortcut on a secondary road crossing the 5,000 ft. high Kartepe mountain range directly to the town of Izmit, which is almost halfway to my tonight’s destination.
At first, I wander a bit in the streets of the Baciköy village until I’m able to find the right exit to my chosen route, then I start climbing a series of incredible steep hairpins which shortly take me to the ridge, where I get the treat of a wonderful view southwards over the vast Anatolian plateau. Up next, about 25 miles of narrow and twisting road through a dense beech forest consume too much of my time which is inexorably running out and even make me lose my sense of direction. Eventually, I suddenly come to a descent even steeper than the previous climb, forcing me to keep the engine mostly in the first gear, and once it’s over I’m already in the outskirts of Izmit. This town, set on the shore of the Sea of Marmara and also on the main commercial route connecting Istanbul to Ankara, is Turkey’s richest municipality, with a GDP as much as double than Istanbul’s one, being heavily industrialized and therefore attracting a lot of people working in its factories. That seems to be the reason for the insane traffic in its streets, which makes me lose a lot of time until I get to the D100 highway. I don’t get to benefit too much of its four-lanes carriageway, however, because once I start passing by the 60 miles long row of towns aligned on the seashore – Derince, Körfez, Gebze, Darica, Çayirova – the road gets more and more crowded, even if it runs parallel with the O-1 motorway. It all culminates with the entrance in the great metropolis of Istanbul, where the boulevards are even ten-lanes wide on some segments and still packed with endless lines of cars, a multitude of motorbikes and scooters finding their way in between!
Well, now it’s time to use my long-practiced home traffic skills, so I boldly follow the local bikers and start filtering and overtaking hundreds of cars which are barely moving forward and eventually, right at the time when it’s getting dark, I gladly spot the Kadiköy exit sign. I pass by the Fenerbahçe football stadium, brightly illuminated in all its four corners even today isn’t a matchday, then I turn left on a one-way boulevard which resembles a slow flowing river of cars and at eight o’clock sharp I reach the ferry terminal on Rihtim Caddesi, 200 yards away from my hotel. I find a tight spot to squeeze in my bike in the back of the building, get my room, then I go out for a short walk in the pedestrian commercial area amidst a true human beehive composed of both locals and tourists as well. After I’m done walking, I have an iskender and an ayran in a small restaurant, then I hardly crawl back to the hotel. I feel really exhausted, tonight I’ll have a dreamless sound sleep!
Overview to Akyaka and the Datça peninsula
On the road to Denizli
Overview to the Anatolian plateau from the Kartepe mountain range
Istanbul, Kadiköy rooftop view
Istanbul, the Bosphorus strait
The long way home. 430 miles
While having breakfast, I’m dreadfully thinking of the 400+ miles I’ll have to ride for one more day in a row; I feel tired and I realize I’ve quite went over the top when planning the route for this trip. On the other hand, the stunning view over the Bosphorus I get from the hotel’s top floor restaurant helps brightening my spirit a bit, so I can build up the right mood for a good ride.
Luckily, the morning traffic in Istanbul is extremely low due to the fact that today is the 1st of May and it seems that everybody has got their day off. My first target is the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge over the Bosphorus, which will be my gate back from Asia to Europe. Its toll system is quite interesting, you have to pay only when crossing in the opposite direction to the one I’m going to, so for me it’s free this time. However, I wouldn’t be able to pay even if I had to, because the HGS system which is used also for the motorways in Turkey it’s almost impossible for most tourists: you have to open an account with them and charge it with a certain sum, then you get a sticker for the car’s windshield or the bike’s gas tank, which will be scanned by the toll cameras in order to deduct the appropriate fee; the downsides are that the initial amount of money is not small, so you won’t get to use all of it during two or three days of travelling in Turkey and they’re not offering you a refund, plus you can only open that account in certain selling points where nobody is speaking anything else than Turkish. Some Turkish experienced fellow travellers whom I’ve been chatting to online told me to carelessly ride by the toll gates without the darn sticker, because nothing will happen except that the alarm syren will go off, but I wouldn’t be chased by the police or busted later at the border! Anyway, I didn’t get to check if their advice is working or not, so I still don’t have a clue about that until next time, maybe.
The first part of my today route is on the D100 highway up to Edirne, a four-laner of course, running somewhat parallel to the O-3 motorway. The traffic being constantly low I’m riding quite fast, in fact I think I didn’t go below 60 mph ever since I’ve left the hotel and it still takes me about half an hour until I leave Istanbul. The thing that really shocked me indeed is the enormous area occupied by this fascinating city; there are more than 30 miles from the centre, where I slept last night, to the sign which is marking the city limits and yesterday evening I’ve rode another 20 miles from the opposite one. However, there is a reasonable explanation for this unusual size: there are more than 15 million people living here, which is almost 20% of Turkey’s total population. In fact, Istanbul is Europe’s most populous city and the world’s seventh! Lucky me that I got to cross it on a holiday, isn’t it?
Well, after few hours of a tranquil morning ride, now it’s almost eleven and I’m getting close to Edirne, the historic town of Adrianople, which played an important part in the events preceding the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It’s time for a break in a roadside café, in order to have a snack and spend my last Turkish Liras; I pull over and head to the entrance when, out of the corner of my eye, I take a glimpse of an unusual image of the back of my bike. I turn around to look better and … bang! There is no license plate!!! The whole plastic frame is missing and there are only two small pieces of it still clanging to the bike’s steel bracket. I’m in shock! I try to rewind today’s movie inside my head and figure out what had happened: in the morning, when I mounted my saddlebags on the bike, the license plate was definitely in its place, otherwise I’d surely have noticed it missing; later on, when exiting Istanbul, I refuelled, so I still had the plate because I’ve noticed that in every gas station in Turkey they first write down your license number in a notebook and only afterwards they fill up the tank; except for that one, I haven’t stopped in any other place today, so the only possibility that remains on the list is that the frame broke when I hit a massive pothole I haven’t been able to spot in time, somewhere around the town of Çorlu, which is more than 60 miles backwards. Fair enough, I remember I’ve heard a loud noise at that moment, but I thought it was just the back suspension topping out, so I didn’t stop to check anything, especially that I felt that the bike was still running faultlessly. That’s it, there’s no point of turning back in search of the lost license plate anyway, because the presumed spot is too far behind and the chances to find it are scarce, so I’ll better have my coffee and think about how I’ll get away without it. Let’s see my options: I can improvise a hand-written license plate, but there’s no place to get neither a cardboard, nor a permanent marker on the side of the road, so I’ll have to pass this one; I guess the only solution is to go to the border and tell the officers the truth about what had happened, it’s not like they’re going to confine me in Turkey for not having the license plate on my bike! And I don’t worry at all about the Romanian border, I’m sure I’ll be able to deal with them easily.
I take off with that decision set up in my mind, then I leave the main road nearby Edirne and head to the border crossing at Hamzabeyli, the same one I entered Turkey at a few days ago. Still, the missing license plate continues to bother me. What if I meet a guy as stubborn as the one I had argued to when I came in, or even the same one, worse? And suddenly, the redemptive trick seeds into my mind: why don’t I shut up and act normally? At the border point they’re going to see my bike from the front and sideways, when and if they’d look at it from the back and possibly notice I’m missing the license plate I’ll have already crossed the border into Bulgaria and they wouldn’t be able to stop me anymore! Yeah, that’s how I’ll do, and if I’ll have the bad luck and they’ll notice it before I get to cross the border proper, I’ll play fool, wonder myself even more than them and swear I had no idea about missing anything!
One hour later I’m at the border, which it’s absolutely free and I cross it in five minutes without any problem at all. Exactly how I’ve imagined, nobody noticed my missing license plate. The fun thing is that the Bulgarian officers took their time to check my VIN number on the bike’s frame, but they didn’t think about checking the license number too :) I feel really relieved, so I continue my ride fast and efficiently, as I take the incoming route backwards this time and have no worries about getting lost. I stop for lunch at the same gas station nearby Yambol, then I vigorously bend on the Kotel pass twisties and keep on speeding towards Razgrad. Well, as worriless as I could possibly be, several miles after I’ve passed by Omurtag, I almost go on the opposite lane while taking a plain bend, due to over speeding. No damage done there, though, but I say to myself I should be a little bit more careful. Few miles farther it happens again, this time I’m close to miss a left bend, for the same reason! Wtf, I’m not riding so fast and I remember three days ago I was able to do at least 50 mph on these bends, while coming from the opposite direction!? But … the road seems to be somewhat narrower than I recall. I pull over, take a look on the map and, yes, back at Omurtag I went to the wrong direction. Now I remember there was a junction where I saw a sign towards Varna and, as I’m not going there, I instinctively took a turn onto the other road, which had no sign at all! This one appears to be a poorly maintained backroad heading to Popovo and that explains the bends being tighter than I expected, the debris on its sides and the extremely low traffic. Now what? I’d lose too much time turning back to the damn junction, so I decide to go on and take some more backroads up to the main road somewhere halfway from Razgrad to the border at Ruse. Eventually, this one will prove to be a very bad decision! Aside from the fact that I have to ride much slower, that is merely 40 mph, the road gets worse and worse, to the extent that on its last miles I basically have to dodge in and out of some enormous potholes. When I finally reach the main road to Ruse, I’m so happy it’s over that I almost forget I’m going to cross another border without a license plate!
Half an hour later I’m overtaking the huge line of cars at the border bridge toll booths – bikers’ privilege here! – and I even get some help doing it from a kind lady police officer, then I hurriedly cross the Danube and stop for a serious break in the very first gas station on the Romanian side. I really feel exhausted, but at the same time I’m glad for escaping the stress caused by my license plate problem. A bit later, I ride like I’d be in a trance for the last 60 miles and at seven sharp I’m finally getting home.
It was nice riding in Turkey, but also overly tiring due to the definitely too long route I’ve greedily chosen; it totalled almost 1,750 miles during only four days, I’ve ridden for about twelve hours each day on both flawless highways and broken backroads as well, I’ve passed through crowded cities on the seashores and isolated villages far away into the mountains and surely there were many other interesting places and views that I’ve missed. All in all, this was a delightful experience and I’m already looking forward to the next one!
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