Istanbul

Istanbul is hot, crazy, full of history and culture. But I will spend tomorrow finding a BMW service garage while Jess tries to get us transit visas for Russia. Have found a great boutique hotel where we negotiated the price down to the same as the hostel round the corner. Bargain!

There are loads of tourists obviously, but it is not as bustling as it should be. There are a load of UK registered cars here, all without exception in the process of haring their way to Mongolia on the Mongol Rally 2009. So lots of chats about routes, trip experience and general blokey stuff. Trying to keep it to a minimum for Jess's sake. She has begun to really enjoy the trip after a bit of a shock on the first few days. The temperature yesterday was 40 degrees C. Too hot really for a passenger to sit in all that gear with constant twisty roads with crowding trees blocking the view. Then the Bulgarian border into Turkey took an hour, was actually pretty painless but consisted of 3 barriers to get to an office where I visited three different departments then went outside to buy insurance, and then at least 2 more barriers, each of which needed to see our passports and bike documents. I thought that kind of bureaucracy was reserved for Central Asia... which bodes badly for the up-coming border crossings to Russia, Kazakhstan and the other Stans.

We are here until we can get the bike sorted and passports ready for Russia, then aiming to be on the ferry to Sochi by next Sunday. If we can see some of the south coast and the Taurus mountains and those giant stone heads then we'll be very happy.

 Trip map being updated by Jon Cattling (thanks Jon!) : click here for the map.