Compared to the past few days today is a relative breeze as far as time in the car. Sunny Beach to Istanbul is only 375 km or 5ish hours – far better than the 8+ we’ve been driving. It was fun driving along the coast of Bulgaria, there’s a nice breeze and surprisingly not humid at all. Then the landscape turned into something very reminiscent of driving through the Ozarks in Arkansas. Long windy roads up and down hills. Google was taking us to a smaller border crossing into Turkey which was awesome because the day before a lot of teams said they were waiting 2+ hours to go through one of the larger ones. We ran into about 5 teams at the border. It’s always really cool to come across one of the other people doing the trip. There are only around 350 teams doing the rally and there is no set route or timetable, so it’s pretty crazy to run into someone on some random road at some random point in time. This has happened a lot, so even across 10,000 miles it’s a small world sometimes.
We didn’t have a lot of time to chat at the border because we were in and out in about 10 minutes. I’d be willing to bet all the other teams were there for an hour, which is really pretty funny that we made it look that easy. The primary reason was that I had our insurance already in order. USAA is badass and gave me a foreign insurance policy that is good in A LOT of countries, Turkey being one of them. Turkey is a country where you have to buy insurance as soon as you cross the border unless you already have a “green card” i.e. insurance. USAA sent a nice little green slip of paper that has Turkey listed on it, so they took a quick look, stamped us good to go and bob’s your uncle off we went. Apparently the system that grants insurance went down and when it got rebooted the price of insurance magically went up 40 euros – from 90 or so to begin with.
Getting into the area neat Istanbul is cool because all of a sudden the Aegean Sea is right there. As seas go it is quite big and quite blue. Then Istanbul starts, and as we’ve heard from a lot of people it is pure madness. It’s bigger than Houston and it is just highrise after highrise and smaller apartment type buildings because there are 14 million people that live there! I really haven’t seen anything like it before.
Aggressive doesn’t really do the driving style justice. It’s like everyone is playing a video game weaving in and out getting dangerously close (especially taxis and buses, they are insane) and always has their hand on the horn. There are also people everywhere, it is amazing how people aren’t being hit non-stop. A taxi speeding down the road would miss clipping a pedestrian by a second and it’s totally normal. Ryan was the unlucky one to be driving, and handled being thrown into the fire pretty well until we had to get off the main roads. That’s when everything went to shit very quickly.
The side streets all become a web of one way alleys of varying degrees of incline, and there is little or no indication of which way to drive down them. Also there’s people walking through them too so it’s absolutely bananas to navigate let alone find somewhere to park your car. Most of the alleys are only one lane and most of the locals seem to just pop 2 wheels up onto the curb and half park in the street. Ryan booked us what ended up being a badass hostel – Hanchi – in this lively restaurant area and we got 2 private rooms for $28 a piece per room. They ended up being nicer than every hotel we stayed at in the UK for sure. Especially since it had amazing a/c which is a serious luxury. Anyway getting to the hostel proved quite difficult. Google maps wanted us to immediately turn drive down a street filled with people dining. There definitely wasn’t going to be parking so when we were a few blocks away where Ryan could briefly keep the car out of the street (remember it’s only 1 lane everywhere) Mitch and I hopped out to walk over to the hostel, check in and see if there was any parking. While walking down the little side streets on the way back we accidentally found a parking lot a couple blocks down the street from the Hostel. Little did we know that we were leading him down a one way street, which we learned pretty quickly when 3 cars showed up at once and started to jam everyone up. So poor Ryan had to try and reverse this big stupid car filled with stuff and poor visibility down the alleys to get out of the way. People start getting out of their car and yelling, and unfortunately during these reverse evasive maneuvers the car ended up a curb at a wrong angle and we got our first flat tire. He was able to get the car into an area close by that didn’t seem to have any traffic so we got out to check out the damage. Turns out the tire would probably be fine but the actual rim is totally fucked from escaping and bent.
So then we got to change a wheel in the street which was unfortunately considerably more difficult than something like that should be. We should have bought a floor jack but forgot, and the tire was so flat that the jack we had purchased couldn’t lift the car up enough to put the spare on. After a considerable amount of finagling and finding some random bricks to prop the suspension up with Mitch was able to get the spare on. Of course it being an Italian car then managed to screw up the process of how the lug nut system works making it way more difficult to get the wheel lined up to go back on. We weren’t exactly in the nicest part of the city so we had a couple locals pop out and walk over just watching us work without really saying anything. Kinda creepy. Once we got it fixed we skedaddled out of there asap to figure out how to get to the parking lot we had found.
Thankfully we were able to get to the parking lot, and double thankfully the guy said it was ok for us to pick up the car 2 days later. There was no way we were leaving that lot unless utterly necessary. Once again in a weird coincidence there was another rally car in the same parking lot.
Once we packed up everything from the roof into the car a much needed beer was had at the bar in the downstairs of the hostel. Turns out Istanbul isn’t a super religiously Muslim city – though an overwhelming majority are Muslim – so that means bars are fewer and far between. We decided we would just walk down the street outside our hostel and pick one of the dozen restaurants that looked fun and more importantly served wine. Unfortunately for me we were in the seafood district, but at this point it was kind of a whatever I’ll find something to eat. The restaurant was a lot of fun, there was a little band walking around playing some upbeat Turkish music and they let Mitch take a picture with them holding their violin.
After dinner we decided to go check out the city center and see if there was anything cool to go check out. At this point it’s something like 10pm or so, so we headed to Taksim square to see if there was a place we could post up and meet up with a few other teams that were also in Istanbul. It ended up proving incredibly difficult to find a bar. The weird thing though was the streets were absolutely filled with people. Reminded me a lot when you’re walking around the sidewalks of Las Vegas on a busy weekend. Thing is all those people are on their way to go gamble or drink or both, and since none of that was going on we could not figure what everyone was doing out. Thousands of people just walking around not really doing much other than buying the occasional street corn.
We eventually found an Irish pub to have a drink, then another Irish pub to have a drink, and finally were able to meet up with our friends from San Francisco on the Beats Without Borders team. Around 2 Ryan and I decided to grab a taxi and go back to the Hostel. Holy shit was that an experience. Both of our phones were almost dead and we didn’t have a great way to describe where we needed to go. In London those drivers are required to know every street there is. Here? Pfffffft. The guy gave us his phone to put in the location and we were off. The ride back was genuinely bonkers, absolutely crazy. This guy was speeding through these little streets and alleys going well over 40, I swear it was like we were in a Mario Kart game or something. He seemed to know what he was going though and it ended up being an incredibly fun ride. The bar in the hostel was still open so we decided to grab one last beer. There were a couple local Turkish people hanging out with the bartender, I guess the only people allowed to hang out there are guests of the hostel or friends of the bartender to keep them entertained. The locals spoke little English, and I had a blast sitting around with them trying to talk to each other for a good while. Thankfully the bartender was able to translate occasionally so we made it work. Time flies when you’re having fun though. Next thing you know it was around 4am. Holy crap, bye Turkish people it’s time for bed.
