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The first travel month has passed, a month full of overwhelming impressions, experiences and most of all getting used to the idea that the past month is the
first of a maximum of 6 months. Now after a month we're starting to get the hang of it, traveling as a (temporary) way of live. With 5500 Km behind us, almost 94 hours behind the wheel and just 7 fuel stops (thx to
the big fuel tank) we feel like we've just started.
Our daily live till can be summarised by the following; Wake-up by either the sun or the call for prayer followed by deciding who will get out first. Since
our camper is small we have to move loads of stuff to get a bit of space for breakfast. Our bed during day-tim is the storage place for anything not stuffed away in one of the closets. An important thing is checking
the situation outside, which can be a surprise each morning again. Sheep, cows, cars, cats, dogs and all sorts of daily live like markets, curious people and so on. Not to forget what is moving around our camper at
night :-)
Next is breakfast which is in most cases a bit of bread with jam, honey or 'puistella' (commercial name is Nutella), coffee or tea. Also a good moment to discuss the things that have to be done that
day (shopping, money matters etc) and things that are optional. Merging these things into our route for that day is a normal day to day breakfast activity. Next is packing up, which is packed with many many checks,
specially if things are properly stowed away to survive a bumpy ride. Ignoring this will in most cases backfire on us, like ending up with crushed fruits, vegetables, a nice honey carpet in the closet or simply
shower-gell all over the floor.
Driving is far most the adventurous part of the day, dealing with drivers trying to take-over at any time even with (incredibly) close oncoming traffic. People almost crashing
their cars, bicylces, motor-cycles, tractors and donkeys into eachother while looking at our stange looking camper.
Shopping is daily surprise party, the quest of finding fresh food for a reasonable price is
not always so easy. Either the 'fresh'or the 'money' part goes bad somehow. Big supermarkets are not a real problem since everything has a fixed (and general higher) price, but at least shopping is more relaxed and
you can get away without having to drink tea with the owner. The local shops are the bigger challenges. No prices listed at all, lots of stuff out of date and ofcourse at least 4 very friendly people there to help
us all at the same time. And if something is not in stock, it is rushed from another local shop which is ofcourse located next door. The whole ceremony is ended with the transfer of the magic turkish lira's
(ofcourse in millions) in nice round amounts. Every random selection of products always seems to come down on 2, 3 or 4 million lira's. A miracoulous system, even with bargaining the nice round amounts still pop-up
at random.
Navigation has almost become our second nature now, signs are sometimes none-existant and a few times we had to hook up our GPS to a digitized map to see where the hell we are anyway. But on
average we always get to the places where we wanted to go, sometimes surprised by random interresting sites not mentioned in any guide or map. But again we can still read the script in turkey, the arabic script in
the rest of the countries will definatly prevent us from reading any sign at all.
Traveling normally ends around 4pm while looking for a place to stay. This means sampling a few campings, archeological digs,
the parking lots of supermarkets or just somewhere in the wild. The latter however is something to be carefull with, people show-up nearly everywhere at any time. And not to forget the occasional wild sheep-dog
showing us his ultra-white teeth :-) Sometimes we don't manage to find anything before dark, which imposes a heap of stress because driving will become even more dificult. The biggest example was the search for a
camping in the centre of Adana. The traffic is hellish overthere and to make things more worse, everyone seems to start to driving around sunset. What a treat that was. But again we magically found a some sort of
guarded camping, which was a huge relief again. Specially the guarded part was nice since the neighberhood looked like kind of like Beirut.
After Greece and Turkey we're also preparing for a new episode in
our trip, entering the Middle-East with Iran as the first country to visit. The eastern part of Turkish Anatolia is a bit of a prelude and kind of slowly prepares us a bit for approximatly a month in Iran. But again
we know that personal freedom in Turkey is large compared to Iran. We guess getting used to a system which limits our freedom (and specially Janine's) won't be easy.
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