(Daniel) Today we said goodbye to the staff at the Side Hotel, the waiter upstairs gave me a present of a bag of apple tea, which I had particularly enjoyed each morning with breakfast. After the goodbyes, we walked down to the car park and cleaned out the Wolf, then drove back to the hotel where we packed the truck, and then on to the fish market on the seafront. Rowan sprang into action then as he often does when food is involved and bought three sole and a Bonita. We had to haggle hard with the stall holder, who tried to use the tea trick. It’s very cute all this tea, but far too often it comes across as a ruse to get customers to sit down, or make them feel endeared to the person supplying it. Perhaps there is some tea culture confusion here, but it strikes me as odd when we are often offered tea by complete strangers, and the sceptic in me doesn’t like it. With our newly acquired fish in the fridge we tanked up at the next fuel stop and headed out across the city to the highway.
The drive through town was pretty slow, as traffic was a nightmare. After an hour of changing lanes and pushing through gaps we finally approached the Fatih Bridge, a huge suspension bridge which I showed in an earlier Photo of the Bospherous boat trip. Driving onto the bridge, we enjoyed the views as we travelled across high above Istanbul. On the other side we encountered the unavoidable toll booth. I thought that I had picked the correct lane but as we drove into it realised that this was the auto toll, which required a transmitter to be fitted in the windscreen of the vehicle, all sorts of alarms went of as we passed through, but seeing no police or authorities I drove on, deciding that if it was a problem we would find out soon enough. (As I write this. I am now in Iran, so if there is a fine out there somewhere, I am not sure that it will find it’s way to me! @ Mum or Dad, if it turns up there, just pay it and I’ll sort it out when I get back!)
After this mini adventure we drove on for many hours, into the night and into the mountains, however, Gabby was now complaining of feeling ill, and didn’t look like she would benefit particularly form bush camping in the sub zero temperatures. She seemed to know that it had something to do with the kebab that we had eaten at lunch the previous day, and who was I to argue? In England most people give the Doner a miss, in Norway the kebab restaurants don’t have these, so Rowan and Gabby seem to have been going out of their way to eat them!
Rowan and I decided on two possible courses of action. 1, to continue driving until we found a Motel, which there hadn’t been one for several hours, or 2, to continue to drive through the night to Cappadoccia, and hope that we could find a suitable place there. As we were trying to make this decision, we were climbing higher and higher into the mountains, until we drove over the cloud line, and then back down into it. The visibility got steadily worse and worse until even the huge fog lights only afforded us around ten meters, we continued to search for a motel as we traveled on another hundred miles, and I started to get very tired.
Luckily for all of us, a Motel did eventually appear, and several hundred kilometres from Cappadioccia we stopped for the night. Rowan and I went to eat some dinner in the restaurant while Gabby rested in the room. The man at the desk had so much trouble understanding us, that he gave up and checked us in under local names!
Later that night, while we talked in the room, we had an argument. It was all my fault. A combination of low blood sugar, and a disagreement on a very petty comment, blew up into a situation which ended with hotel staff and other guests knocking on the door of the room. Unable to resolve the tempers, I ended up going to sleep downstairs. It was a silly situation, but as we all have to sit for hours each day, in a cramped Land Rover together, such things have the potential to cause huge issues. I worried that we would all fall apart, and as I lay awake, I questioned whether Rowan and Gabby would stay the course of the expedition.
Distance driven 370miles