Our first night in Turkey was great – sat by the sea in our chairs enjoying the warmest night’s camping for months, drinking a nice bottle of wine (amongst the piles of rubbish left by previous occupants – sigh.)
From there on, however, the rain kicked in and didn’t let up. I’m not sure if our tactic is best, but when the weather is grim and the landscape becomes invisible we hit the gas and drive, which is the way things went in Turkey. One night we thought the car was going to blow over as we were battered all night by wind and rain whilst the thunder and lightning raged overhead – it was easily the loudest (and most persistant) thunder either of us have ever heard!
4 sleeps later we were checking into a nice hotel in Istanbul where it wasn’t raining 🙂
Istanbul has been a bit of culture shock for us – after months of either being in the middle of nowhere, or in the cities of friendly countries like Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, it was a bit of eye opener to suddenly have people in our faces every 10 steps trying to rip us off or get us to do something we didn’t want to do – time to toughen up and remember our street smarts! That aside Istanbul is a fascinating place to spend time wandering around.
Our statistics followers will be fascinated to hear that our highly accurate in-car thermometer recorded it’s lowest temperature thus far here in Turkey – a whopping -14ºC.