Part 3: Erdogan-Land
Carnet issues and allegiance to the Flag
So let’s take a brief moment to return to where we left off in Istanbul. Just before we had arrived at the Turkish border, Stefan had jumped up from his seat (almost hitting his head against the roof of the car), cursing things in his native German that are better not be repeated here. We looked at each other, Jos with a bit with of a question mark over his head. What is it, he asked? I think I forgot something at home, Stefan said. Oh well, it can’t be anything important, right, we thought about e-ve-ry-thing and checked things through and through, Jos asked. Well no, Stefan said. Jos pulled over the car because he noticed Stefan was looking serious. I forgot the Carnet de Passage in Karlsruhe. No you didn’t. Yes I did. F*ck!!
We confirmed that the document was indeed missing and for a split second contemplated the implications of not having it with us when trying to cross the Iranian border. The Carnet de Passage is your car’s entry document into Iran (which needs to be obtained beforehand for a substantial deposit fee), without it there is not going to be any sights of beautiful Iranian mosques, taste of spicy chicken kebabs and sounds of colorful pretty birds: as in proper f*cked. Are we driving back? No way, not after three days of driving through Europe, that would screw up our time table too much. A few seconds later Jos said: let’s DHL it with express service. Do you think that’s possible, Stefan said? Yep. Jos had already had the pleasure to express mail documents for his work to the US a few weeks back and knew that in 2016 it is basically possible to deliver anything from anywhere to anywhere in the world within 24 hours. Let’s call them, Stefan said, which we did.
We looked for their customer service telephone number in Germany and after a bit of searching (they don’t really want you to call them personally, just fill in stupid contact forms) we found the number. DHL customer service speaking: what can I do for you? Well we need your help because we are proper f*cked, we need a document shipped from Germany to Istanbul within 24 hours, is that possible? Yeah, sure, that should be possible. That will be 75 Euro and will take either 24 or 48 hours, depending on the departure location of the package in Germany. We asked the customer service guy to help us find a DHL address to ship it to in Istanbul (we were unsure which hotel we would be checking into, as we didn’t pre-book that yet), which is where the helpfulness sadly fell short a bit. That is not my responsibility, the DHL customer service agent said bluntly, that is DHL Turkey you need. Ok, so can you give us their customer service number please? No, that’s not my responsibility the service guy said.
Ah come on, Jos said, there must be a way you can easily find that number in your internal DHL contact database? No, the guy said shouting and annoyed, that is not my responsibility! So much for DHL Germany’s customer friendliness.
Ah well, inventive bunch as we are, we googled around a bit and found the number ourselves within minutes. Ring…ring… DHL Turkey speaking, how can I help you? Do you speak English, Stefan asked the agent. Yes I do, he said. Nice! This conversation went a lot more smoothly and before we knew it the agent had provided us with an address, all the additional information we could think of and even offered to send it all personally by SMS.
With some help from Germany we had the document sent to Istanbul and the only thing we needed to do on our end was to pick it up at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, sweet! Well, yes, apart from the absolutely abhorrent traffic jams Istanbul is known for. So basically most our second day in Istanbul we spent in the burning afternoon sun in the clogged traffic cursing and moaning about how bad it was. When we finally arrived at the airport and Stefan had come back out of the DHL office again, he tried to pull a joke that the document hadn’t arrived there, but couldn’t really hide his smiling anymore. When arriving at the car he proudly held up the all-important Carnet: we were in the clear again!
On our last day in Istanbul we decided to take a relaxed stroll through the city, everything being hunky-dory again. We wanted to see the Hagia Sophia, one of the most impressive and rebuilt places of worship in the world. Little did we know that Istanbul has about a dozen or so mosques that are all massive and all look pretty similar to our untrained eyes, with their minarets towering over the hilly city. We found something that looked the part, but found out later that we arrived at the Blue Mosque instead of the Sophia, not too far away from it. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful place where we enjoyed the nice architecture and intricacies of actually getting into this place as staunch non-believers (short pants which show the knees are not appropriate wear for Muslim men in mid-summer, apparently). The Blue Mosque was the site where just 6 months ago 13 people died in a bombing organized by the jolly good old fellows from ISIS, which instilled in us the appropriate amount of retroactive respect for what we just visited. After exchanging some thoughts about it with some local students who were there to help tourists and practice their English skills we headed off to find a nice Pide with cheese and undefined types of meat.
City walk
After having had a decent lunch, we walked further into the city center to shoot some more images. The nice thing about trips like these is that you get into very photogenic situations, be it location or people-wise. Even though there were so many beautiful things to see in Istanbul, we noticed that we were one of the few westerners in the streets and, after having a quick chat about that with one of the locals, got confirmed that tourism had collapsed the past few weeks (except for the ninja’s from Saudi Arabia, who had arrived there in droves). We walked through a small bazaar and tried some of the local delicacies, which, by law, have to be so sweet that they spontaneously make your teeth jump out of your mouth. Not bothered by that too much, we accidentally walked into a side street of the bazaar and noticed what appeared to be a gun-shop, goody!
After some consideration we decided to go in and get ourselves a brand new shiny Kalashnikov rifle, for protection against the Russians of course, which sadly didn’t quite work out. In his best English, the shop owner explained that, somehow, it was not such a good idea to have western tourist strolling Istanbul’s streets with a Kalashnikov, a week after the coup-d’état had taken place. A little disappointed we walked out again, as empty handed as we came in. But hey, look at that, Stefan said with a twinkle in his eyes pointing into another small side street of Istanbul’s labyrinth maze of streets. Jos looked and saw what he meant; a little bare-bone concrete shop with nothing but a whole bunch of colorful balloons and what appeared to be a rather serious looking BB-gun. Intrigued as we were we decided to shoot a bit, which kind of compensated the disappointment we had felt earlier. After that little adventure, in which we were encouraged by the shop owner to “shoot more, shoot more”, we headed back to our hotel, driven by another one of Istanbul’s kamikaze taxi drivers, who would have definitely won the main part in one of the films in the famous “Taxi” series, had he applied for it. This guy knew his Fiat, revved up what must have been a tuned-up little engine just the right amount to keep it in the appropriate gear and power bands at the right time on the track and cut corners over sidewalks like a true Schumacher.
Happy we had arrived at the hotel safely, we paid the taxi driver his fee including a good amount of “extra speed tax” and had some dinner on the outside terrace, where at a certain point we got into a conversation with the owner of the hotel and his Swiss-German speaking Turkish business partner (man, did he challenge the linguistic part of our brains and laughing muscles). Until deep into the night we discussed politics and the state of affairs in Turkey at the moment. One of the owners, Erdemir (a self-declared Atatürk-ist, if that’s a word), explained to us that in Turkey, roughly 25% of the people voted for Erdogan because they love his political views, 25% of the people voted for Erdogan because he is a strong (strong as in Putin) leader and, although the other 50% didn’t vote for him at all, he won the elections because Turkish democracy apparently gives more votes to the “winning” party, providing the universe with the pleasure and honor of his leadership once more. However, the later it got (or maybe the more he smoked of whatever was in his water pipe) the conversation went from factually questionable to realistically challenged to downright weird, where in the end he philosophized that Erdogan was brought to Turkey by aliens to save the country. Time to go to bed and get some well-deserved rest.
The next morning Jos went off to find some new lenses for his camera, as the trip he made with Katharina to the Sahara just a few weeks before had messed up the auto focus ability of his current lens a bit. After having found some alternatives he came back to pick up Stefan for the next part of the journey: central Anatolia. One last stop at the (phenomenal) Baklava shop (where we saw how ninja’s feed in public, about which we won’t go into in detail, please use your imagination) we did a last fine-tuning of the cruise control and headed off over one of the Bosporus’s bridges, onto the Asian continent.
At the first gas station we found we filled up our little Terrano one last time and raised the Turkish flag we had found earlier at Taksim square using the rear antenna of the car. We had no idea what kind of response we would receive from the Turks, but we soon found out it was nothing short of hilarious: it felt as if we were of one of them now. Everyone (including their mother) we met further down the road was ecstatic with happiness about us carrying their proud red and white, but more on that later. Jos went into the gas station office to pay for the petrol and when he glimpsed outside, he saw Stefan sitting in the car a bit uncomfortably. Once outside again he asked Stefan what was going on. Look, Stefan said, they washed our car, the Turks did it again! Indeed the car did look significantly shinier than before because one enthusiastic Turk felt it was time to wash it, without any invitation from our side. And this was not the first nor would it be the last time that it happened either!! There was no way we were getting that authentic dirty rally car look we were looking for while driving through Turkey, these people simply love to clean (and when we say love it we do mean it).
When driving the following days we were surprised time and time again about the quality of the roads. In that sense, if there is one visible piece of evidence of what Erdogan did to make his faithful followers so enthusiastic and proud, it would be the shiny new roads through the Anatolian heartlands, which were a pleasure to drive. In that sense, it (almost) seemed appropriate that the big leader was visible on meters-tall posters throughout the country: there was not a single village we crossed, however small or remote, that didn’t have at least a couple fan-picas standing proud next to the red and white flag. And praise where praise is due, we’re pretty sure minstrels will sing songs about the awesomeness of his mustache a thousand years from now. We humbly accepted the honor bestowed on us of viewing his image over and over again on the Anatolian roads and accustomed ourselves to hailing the great leader every time we past one of them, which didn’t seem inappropriate at all (at the time).
Tu-urkey is the greatest…!!!
Cappadocia and heading east
Given that we wanted to spend some more time in Iran, we basically raced through central Anatolia without stopping too much. We took the southern road, near the Syrian and Iraqi border, which was surprisingly peaceful given the horrors that must have taken place on the other side of the borders whilst we drove past them. After having visited the unexpectedly uneventful stalagmites of Cappadocia we noticed slowly but certainly that this was not Europe anymore (fewer and fewer European cars were on the road here for example). The landscapes changed from fresh solid green to dry brownishness, the donkeys stood more in the middle of the roads than in the middle of the fields and the men, even though still sitting outside drinking tea and complaining about their women like their more western counterparts, got more and more impressive eyebrows and mustaches as we drove further into the country.
Camping proved to be a blast in central Anatolia, as we were always able to find some idyllic spots, thanks to the wonders of GPS, whether it was a magnificent hilltop overlooking small cities or a farmers field where we were waked up at seven in the morning by hordes of happy grazing cows and goats. Every time we put up camp we were struck by the insane amount of stars we were able to see in the sky (living in European cities kind of prevents that), and we had some nice photography sessions on our way as a result.
Although we sometimes enjoyed the deliciousness of our canned meatballs or sausages in the evenings, we noticed that Turkish cuisine has a lot to offer as well. Whether it was a well-grilled lamb kebab, pizza-like Pide or Gozleme pancake with cream cheese inside, not once were we really disappointed by what the Turks were able to dish out. Sure we had some curious culinary moments, where we asked for a bit of bread and were served an all-inclusive 5-course dinner with soup, kebab, baklava and what not, but all in all it was fantastic to be a guest in Turkish restaurants.
When driving further east, we sadly noticed that our cruise control didn’t have its best day on the roads, which went from uphill to downhill and back again (like a thousand times). Given that the cruise control was throttle instead of speed based, we had to drive more and more by using our actual feet, which seemed like work! These hills also made our little Terrano show its real thirst (sometimes about 1 liter every 7 km or so) for the first time, so much so that we almost ran out of petrol near the lake around the eastern Anatolian city called Van. Luckily a bit of fuel efficient driving (and karma, naturally) allowed us to make it just in time (and were able to haggle the very last few drops of petrol from the empty fuel station) so that we could fill her up again just enough to continue our tour. We were astonished by the sheer size of this beautiful lake, which was so big that it would literally take about a day to drive around it. In the early evening we arrived in Van, were we quickly took our last Turkish exit, into the mountainous regions to Iran.
Allegiance to the Flag
On these roads we had our first issue with the car. Enthusiastic as he was about going to Iran again, Jos drove about a 100km an hour over a newly constructed gravel road, which, as it turned out, was just enough to puncture one of our tires. We noticed the issue immediately, as we were greeted with a distinct flop-flop-flop sound from the car’s left rear end. No problem at all, Stefan said, I know what to do: “half an hour maximum”. And he was right. As we gathered our tools and figured out how to get the car up in the air, a car stopped next to ours to help us. As we were in the process of changing the punctured tire for our spare one, the guy noticed the Turkish flag on the back of our car and immediately chose to have a little romantic affair with it. He kissed the flag three times and cuddled with it like it was his mother. After he and his flag had had their undoubtedly mutually satisfactory moment, he invited us over for dinner at his place, sadly something we had to decline because of our tight travel schedule. Little did we know that we were not going to cross the border that night anyway, so looking backward we may as well have had accepted this last warm Turkish show of hospitality.
The thing was, when we finally arrived at the border we were greeted with black silent nothingness, the border had closed a few hours earlier. The contrast with the Turkish-European border couldn’t have been greater, this place was abandoned and silent. Jos suggested to drive up the hill next to the border, just to check whether we accidentally took the wrong exit. Stefan agreed and we crawled up the small road up the steep hill in first gear to see what was going on there (there was still some light on top of the hill). There we were met by a group of young Turkish soldiers nervously waving their locally licensed and produced G3 carbines around in the air. After a necessary bit of de-escalation and Google translate we understood that we were about to drive right into an active military base, bull-bar and big lights first and all. We were told that the border crossing would open at 8AM the next morning and were kindly asked to drive down again and set up camp somewhere else. Of course we listened to the armed and serious looking chaps and did just that, although apparently in the wrong spot. Given that we kind of ignored their shouting through the camp megaphone (which we didn’t understand, we thought it could have been a shout for praying time as well), the base captain took it upon him and a few of his foot soldiers to walk all the way down the hill and send us away. After sharing some delicious canned pea soup and raviolis with them we packed our stuff and parked right in front of Iran’s front door, waiting excitedly for what was about to come the next morning…
