D+93 Istanbul (Turkey)

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Well phase 1 of our trip is almost complete. We are now in Istanbul waiting to fly to India which we will do on Wednesday/Thursday next week. Our plans slightly changed when we entered Turkey. Instead of heading south towards Gallipoli and then getting a ferry into Istanbul we decided to throw the bikes on a bus and head straight towards the city. The main reason for this was that the weather changed quite quickly for the worse during the last 3 days in Greece. It started to get cold and we faced very strong head winds which made our progress slow. This, coupled with the Turkish road conditions, made our decision easy. It was never our intention to cycle into Istanbul - nearly everything I have read on the subject strongly advised against it. If we had taken the ferry we would have landed about 1 mile from Sultanahmed - the old part of the city where we intended to try and find some accommodation. For some reason I expected that the Otogar (bus station) would be in the centre of the city but when we arrived there we found that it was on the outskirts which left us with a 7 mile cycle to Sultanahmed. The hardest part for us was initially getting out of the Otogar - it was a massive place. I had no street map of Istanbul just a copy of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Turkey. A taxi driver gave us some general directions and off we cycled into the city. The highway that led to Sultanahmed was like a very busy motorway. How we got there without an accident I don’t know. I never seen Joy peddle so fast - not wanting to lose me in the traffic. Eventually, when we got near Sultanahmed, I decided that we had tempted fate long enough and headed into the back streets. It wasn’t long before I was completely disoriented. We passed a little shop that I noticed sold street maps so we stopped to get one. Whilst I was inside a man approached Joy to ask if we wanted any help. When I came out he introduced himself as Hikmet and told us that he owned a small hotel just around the corner. We decided to go with him and check it out. The Lonely Planet guide stated that cheap hotel accommodation in Sultanahmed is hard to find and that rooms are often tiny with many having to share bathrooms etc. Hikmet’s hotel was perfect. We got a very large room with aircon (not needed at the moment), en-suite bathroom with western loo, TV and included a small kitchen. The price was within our budget and the hotel itself is only about 200m from the Blue Mosque - right in the centre of all the tourist attractions in Sultanahmed.
Istanbul itself is a magnificent city and we are both having a great time exploring it. The only real problem we have had is trying to sort out the Indian visa and flights. The Indian Consulate wouldn’t accept our visa application without a formal letter from the British Consulate. This cost us 60 pounds!!!! on top of the $100US for the visas. Luckily for us they allowed both our names to go on the one letter otherwise we would have had to pay twice as much for it. Apparently this is normal practice for anyone applying for an Indian visa outside their own country. Anyway we are due to pick up our passports this afternoon so fingers crossed there will be no other snags. We have booked our flights with Air Arabia one of the new cheap airlines operating out of the Middle East. We got the flights for about 200 pounds each but expect to pay additional baggage charges. Despite sending all our camping equipment back to the UK - we have only used the tent 3 times since Hungary and we can’t see ourselves using it again - and ditching a lot of unused kit our baggage and bikes still weights a lot. We just hope they are not to strict at the check-in.

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