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After a really long day travelling south along the black sea coast, we expected to be easily able to cross the boarder into turkey. Unfortunately there are very few boarder crossings with Turkey. The crossing that we ended up using meant that we travelled a few hundred kilometres back west so that we could cross just north of Edirne in Turkey.

The scenery on the side of the road heading towards Edirne Turkey

The scenery was beautiful but in the heat of the day it was starting to get too much doing the additional 250km. Eventually we got to the boarder crossing.. Finally leaving the EU and moving onto the next stage of our trip.. We arrived at the boarder crossing at 6.15pm and ended up leaving after 9pm.. only three hours. At least we now have some idea of what to expect when we go through other more serious boarder crossings.

First of all we exited from Bulgaria, yet again our papers all got checked for the bikes, Then we got checked again by Bulgaria for some unknown reason while they let all the cars just drive on past… We then sat in one of about 30 queues to get through to the Turkish Passport control.. There must been at least 2000 other cars in the queue.. Because the queues moved only one car at a time we pushed the bikes for the 500meters from the first gates to the passport control.. This was our “Fitness Program” of the moment. We would think that pushing the bikes may have been embarrassing.. well actually the vast majority of people were pushing their cars too…At Passport control we had to go and organise our visa’s which cost $20US each… Then we went on to Customs where we had to buy local Turkish third party motorcycle insurance which cost $30US for 30 days (per bike).After that we finally had all our stamps that we required to finally enter into Turkey at the third gate. YAY.. we are now in Turkey and its already dark. We hit the motorways heading towards Edirne where we took the exit to look for somewhere to stay. We found a campsite just outside of town on the D100 called “Omur Camping”.

Omur Camping… well lets just say a few things about this “special” campsite.. Its location was perfect for us to be able to go into Edirne and do some bits and pieces like organise accommodation in Istanbul.. It is by far the biggest rip off campsite that we have seen to date. They charge in Euro even though the local currency is now the Turkish Lira.. Not only do they charge for the tent, bikes and people like most campsites they also charge to use all the facilities.. 5euro to go for a swim, 3euro for a dog, 5euro to use the washing machine etc.. It was all very expensive given that we could have used the pools etc for free at all the campsites we have stayed at previously… No suprises that the place was dead quiet and people only stayed the absolute minimum time possible.. The other value added “feature” of the site was that they a huge population of killer mosquitoes just waiting for you in the showers, toilets, bathrooms, tent, outside, anywhere actually come to think of it…

Having a break in the heat.. with out taking your helmet off..

The temperatures are now sitting around 30-36c which is a big increase to what we got used to in Romania and Bulgaria. The roads in Turkey are much more civilized and people are much more aware of what is going on around them so far… Its a nice improvement but riding in these temperatures is definitely not for the faint hearted. We will need to start planning our days around much longer lunch breaks to take advantage of not being in the heat of the day…

Edirne is a beautiful city which we had to stop at not only for our organisational tasks but we had to have our first Turkish Kebab… How could we resist.. especially after such a long day previously getting out of Bulgaria (10am until 11pm).

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 10:58 am and is filed under Adventure Motorcycling, Black Sea, Bulgaria, Edirne, Food Poisoning, London to Sydney, motorcycle touring, Preparation, Resorts, Turkey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.