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After leaving our campsite very early (before 8am) we decided that we would go directly into Istanbul to our accommodation in the Sultanahmet. We had all our maps sorted so that we could get in with the most ease.. We decided to just ride straight down the D100 all the way into central Istanbul. Well that is what we had planned anyway.. it was not so easy.. Unfortunately the traffic and driving in Istanbul was absolutely nuts. With cars going all over the place with no indication of what their next move, buses pulling out without caring who as coming along, it was very hazardous to motorcycles..

We ended up taking the wrong turn initially (I will not point any fingers though it was not James 🙂 and going through Bakirkoy which appears to be a big shopping district only about 10km from central Istanbul.. After this we managed to find out way back onto the D100 and head on our way.. We finally found the exit that we needed to take unfortunately Heather was busy looking at the truck that had over turned right at the intersection we needed to turn at.. oops missed another turn.. lets look for a place to do a U-Turn.. oops there wasn’t one.. 15kms later and fed-up we ended up having to go and cross over to Beyoglu and did an illegal U-Turn across the tram lines.. At which time there was a police traffic man yelling as he ran across the road for us to stop.. oops we just kept on going pretending not to notice.. oh well lets go back and find that exit we missed before.. After finally finding the exit we started to look for our accommodation.. Well that’s yet another case of easier said than done. The directions and the map on lastminute.com was not only wrong but it was completely wrong. After spending 2hours riding around the Sultanahmet in the 34c heat we managed to get some assistance from some Turkish people who knew their way around and they gave us the real location of where the accommodation was. “Easy”.. we ended up finding the accommodation about 10-15minutes later in the place that it was actually meant to be.. WOW!!..

Relaxing in the heat after arriving in Istanbul

This is where the fun with lastminute.com started. We booked our self catering apartment through lastminute.com but we never actually received any confirmation receipt via email like promised… It turns out that the hotel was double booked for the first night. Our apartment hosts found us another local hotel for the first night and helped us park our bikes on the footpath outside the hotel in the old town… This was more than fun. The gutter up from the road to the foot path was abnormally high.. probably at least 40cm high which made getting the loaded bikes up a four person job.. Thankfully we had help from our hosts. We unpacked all our gear from the bikes and left it at reception while we went and checked into the other hotel..

James trying to fix Heathers mess!

In our Hotel room Heathers special ability to break anything she touches came into force.. The first thing she broke was the room’s curtains when she tried to close them she just ripped them down from the roof.. Rails and all… Then she opened the closet door and broke that too… while she was sitting on a glass table wondering what we should do, to which she also cracked that.. yay.. the triple combo. We then got transferred to another room which was much nicer and she didn’t manage to break everything 🙂 The hotel was basic but the staff really made the stay there exceptional. The friendliest hotel staff we have had to date (and with free internet). For some reason Heather kept on asking for other hotel guests keys because she kept forgetting which room number we had.. YAY!!

waiting for a train to the kazakhstan embassy in Istanbul

In the morning we woke early with the plan to head to the Kazakhstan embassy so that we could finalise our visas.. after taking the train to bakirkoy we then took a taxi to the embassy… Only to find out that its closed on Wednesdays.. YAY!!… Whilst stopped at traffic lights the taxi driver got out, went to the boot and gave us some Turkish wagon wheel like biscuits and drove us back to the station. As the journey progressed the taxi driver was popping pills and was getting more erratic than usual, kept wanting to drop us off at a hotel, we said no hotel, titanic hotel, no hotel, hotel, no hotel, hotel, no hotel we ended up just asking to get out, We ended up getting back to the hotel while the cleaning lady was cleaning up the room.. She had packed up all our stuff into a big pile as it was well after check out time.

This is where we made two trips to take our gear back to our now available apartment.. on the return for the second leg Heather tried to go into someone else’s room because she didn’t check the number and just saw that the cleaning lady was in there.. she had a big laugh at Heather which was rather amusing.. Heathers room number skills coming into force again!! Haha..

The view from our Apartment Istanbul

Finally we had our own apartment and kitchen we could settle into our stay in Istanbul and get some relaxation…The apartment has a good view over the sea and all the boats which gives us a nice breeze in the heat making it all the more bearable at 36c…Its amazing how many ships off the coast would say over 50….

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Adventure Motorcycling, Edirne, Istanbul, Kazakhstan, London to Sydney, motorcycle touring, Turkey, Visa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.