Update Istanbul

We've been chilling (if you can apply that word to 30 deg. heat) in Istanbul since Friday. I was supposed to get my Iran visa from the Iranian Consulate Friday morning but the necessary reference number had not arrived from the Ministry so we have had a relaxing (except for some anxious emails to try to figure out where my reference number went) few days of sightseeing and shopping. Tom bought a very nice traditional Turkish cotton shirt that no one in Istanbul actually wears and I bought a $10 Ralph Lauren knockoff, which is what everyone wears. Highlights for me: Hagia Sophia, Cistern, mosaic museum, spice market, view of Blue Mosque and harbor from hotel dining room/balcony. The Grand Bazaar is a bit ugly - everyone aggresively hawking the same questionable merchandise. The Market behind the Blue Mosque is much nicer. Today, Monday, went back to Consulate and reference number had arrived so the visa is being processed as I write and I expect to have it later this afternoon. Will depart for Eastern Turkey this afternoon.

Back to the Future

Back to the Future

Out of date maps have been  the bane of travelers as long as cartography has existed (minus the time it took the first map to become obsolete).  Street names change with the political winds, bridges are erected and collapse and rivers redefine their course through the landscape. Typically maps are out of date because they are old. We seem to have discovered a new twist on this timeless inconvenience. In belated preparation for the trip we picked up at the Dover Ferry Launch a road map of Europe – the 2011 edition of the AA Route Guide covering, in 93 full color pages all of Europe, East and West, as well as the Baltic states Ukraine, Western Russia, and Turkey. Can’t get more up to date than 2011, right?

Our itinerary Thursday involved completing our transit through southern Serbia, driving southeast through Bulgaria entering Turkey and arriving Istanbul late Thursday night. Our map clearly indicated that a major, four lane highway, the A1, runs from Sophia in northern Bulgaria to the Turkish border with a fork midway, the northern branch of the A1 heading northeast to Stara Zagora and the southern branch, the A3, making a beeline for Turkey. Indeed, south of Sophia, we find the highway and are making excellent time. Then we see a sign that says exit for Istanbul, which we take thinking this is the anticipated fork in the highway. But instead it leads to a small meandering two-lane road. That can’t be right so we figure it’s just an alternate (out-of-date?) route to Turkey and backtrack to the highway. Continuing on we see another sign suggesting exit to Istanbul via another road that from the map has to be another alternative meandering two-lane road. We’re not fooled this time and continue on, certain that the fork to the A3 highway to Istanbul is just up ahead. Except now we are passing towns on the way to Stara Zagora that should be well past the fork. Maybe the last exit to Istanbul really was the exit to the A3 to Turkey. We backtrack, at a cost of an hour travel time but to no avail. As predicted,  the exit leads to a two-lane highway punctuated by farming villages of rusting tractors and corregated hay lofts.  Our frothy confidence in our ability to navigate by map collapsed, we stop to ask the proprietors of a local bistro the road to Istanbul. They explain in gesticulation and infantilized Bulgarian that we are on the correct road. We thank them, push on – no other choice it seems –  and, with each intermittent opportunity to pass a  truck belching up a hill in 2nd gear blocked by an oncoming Mercedes gliding homeward with spent german children, our expected arrival in Istanbul retreats into the early morning. Then, as we approach the Turkish border we begin to see signs in Bulgarian that look suspiciously like the advertisements for highway projects one sees in North America. Then one appears in English. It explains that a highway from the Turkish border to the A1 has been funded by the EU with projected completion in 2011.

 

How many Ralliers does it take...

You anticipate, you prepare, you know it’s only a matter of time and then it happens – the first vehicle failure.  For us that moment occurred as we were driving through downtown Belgrade. The dire message appeared on the dashboard “FAILURE: left side lightâ€Â  (yes, the Panda communicates in English sentences rather than flashing oil can icons that people only recognize from having seen The Wizard of Oz) .  Not a fatal error but an issue of concern. Anyway, no place to stop on the highway –must press on. Then the second, truly hair-raising message “FAILURE: brake lightâ€. Multiple system failures in a matter of 20 minutes – are these symptoms of an underlying O-ring type major malfunction or has the Panda turned HAL and decided to get us out of the car so it can lock the doors and complete the trip to Mongolia without us? Either way we must risk going  EVA. We pull off at the first highway service station. Bright lights, clean toilets, happy German childern playing in the outdoor cafe – clearly not a place to linger. So, being careful to jam the door open – just in case – Tom uses the new tempered steel screwdrivers we bought at the Toom  in Darmstadt (after an embarassingly long debate over the merits of buying high-end tools to be left in Mongolia, followed by ten minutes of silent indecision, followed by “screw it, let’s just get themâ€)   to begin disassembling the left tail-light housing while I keep a wary eye out for friendly passers by lest they try to help us. No the Panda has not gone rogue – both filaments of the tail-light bulb, one normal and the other, brighter filament for braking,  have suffered catastrophic failure. Tom deftly replaces the bulb from our stock and re-attaches housing. Tests confirm both side and brake light function are fully restored. We resume normal operations confident in the knowledge that we can change a light bulb.

Actually, the creepy thing is that the Panda not only knew that the tail light bulb had burned out, it knew which filament of the bulb was fried. I expect it will soon alert me to a suspicious polyp in my upper colon.

 

Beware the Serbian Insurance Vortex

As you may have noticed, the most direct route to Istanbul is through Serbia. However, looks can be deceiving especially if money is time and you rescale your map to reflect the cost of getting to your destination. We bought car insurance which covered many wonderful, exotic and even not-so-long-ago troubled locals like Tunisia and Bosnia. It didn’t cover Serbia. It so didn’t cover Serbia that among the little boxes with counrty symbols on the insurance form - crossed out to indicate a country is not covered – Serbia doesn’t even appear. Forget it. Serbia is a non-entity to the insurance company. What to do. Not having done our home work on Serbia per se, we reasoned we could show up at the border and buy temporary insurance as can be done at many borders. No problem says the Serbian border guard, I’ll just hold on to your passports and you can cross the border and pull into to that Agrobank building and buy Insurance there. Yes, we will sell you temporary car insurance says the helpful lady inside the Agrobank building, 100 Euros...cash (or 19,700 Dinara if you happen to have it on you). What if we don’t have 100 Euros cash? No problem, at next booth you can get money. Proceed to next booth: I’d like a cash advance on on my credit card. No problem... present passport please. But the border guard has my passport. No passport, no money. Perhaps you can exchange money at next booth. Next booth: yes we exchange... Euros or US Dollars? Can we exchange pounds? No. Can we turn around and go back to Hungary? No (anyway you have no passports).

In the end we managed to find enough change beneath the seats of the car to buy the insurance, walk back to the border guard's booth, collect our passports and continue on our way. We will be in Serbia  ~18 hrs.

Czechout and Beyond

After spending much of Monday driving around Germany in search of supplies, particularly materials to rig up some kind of roof rack, we made our way to the Chechout party.  Happy to say, the revelry was still going strong at 2AM when we arrived. In the morning discovered that we were camping next to Three Blondes, another Canadian team. In the morning we finished tricking out the Panda, adding the rest of the decals and rigging up our roof rack. Made our way, after a couple unintentional detours, to Gyor Hungary and got the first decent nights sleep in nearly a week at charming hotel with vaulted cielings in the bathroom and internet access (or you wouldn't be reading this).

We are off

Launched more or less as scheduled. Tom had to pick me up on the way to Dover because of various flight delays  - to long to detqil here. Caught the ferry Sun morning, caravned with Max and Tom and made it as far as the German border. Biggest excitent so far was stopping to help Ghengis Goddess who broke down in Belgium. Help is maybe q strong word. We watched them adjust the valves on their 57 year old firetruck and saw them on their way after the engine, to my astonishment, started. On to Czechout party today.

Visas are Cool

Visas are cool. They are shiny and crisp. They come in a variety of colors and they are written in strange and exotic languages using strange and exotic alphabets. They appear on random pages in your passport, popping out unexpectedly to beckon you to lands cinematic and dreamlike. They are backstage passes to a band you’ve never heard because they are too cool to perform (Really, I’m cool enough to hang with Kazakhstan? Cool!).  They have holograms.

But what I like best about visas is that getting a visa reinforces the impression that humanity is basically the same everywhere – more specifically, the bureaucracies created by humans in their own image reflect the universal need to adhere to a set of rules more ritualistic than utilitarian.

I went to pick up my visa from the Russian consulate today. When I dropped off my application - for the second time (omit boring story about confusing consular website) -  the consular official, who sits in a white room the size of a phone booth and receives documents slipped under the meter high protective plexiglass, gave me a receipt printed on a dot-matrix printer that shares his booth. I forgot, or didn’t realize I was told, that when I returned I should exchange the receipt for my passport. Upon arriving to collect my passport the consular official, in a manner both conscientious and laconic that struck me as uniquely Russian, suggested that, instead of the receipt I didn’t have, I could produce a piece of identification. So, curious, I gave him my driver’s license. Sure enough he examined the picture on the license, confirmed the name and gave me my passport, Russian visa inside (Cyrillic alphabet, hologram).

Don’t  misunderstand, the consular official did me a square and I’m grateful. He was within his rights to make me go back home and find my receipt, in which case I would have shuffled off without complaint. It’s just a delightfully queer interpretation of the chain of evidence leading to the conclusion that I am the owner of my passport. It’s almost overkill to note that, as a US citizen residing in Canada, to get my driver’s license I had to produce a valid ID, which was…my passport.