Mongol Rally 2007 - Windmill Giants official blog

I can’t explain it, but sleeping in the car always leaves us surprisingly refreshed.  It could just be the delirium that comes with stepping out into the cool morning air after a sleep broken periodically by the sound of cars coming and going.  Maybe it’s the call of the open road that would have us sleeping in the car in the first place.  Whatever the reason for the extra ounce of bounce, we felt renewed that morning as we realized that everything ahead of us would be entirely new for us both.  For the first time on the Mongol Rally, we were setting out into the unknown.

 We gladly left behind the most heavily trafficked road in Turkey between Istanbul and Ankara, and turned North and East at Gerede heading towards the Black Sea.  The roads were fantastic and scenery better as we drove for hours through golden grassy hills.  Turkish hospitality showed itself again at the gas stations, where we were always offered complimentary coffee or tea.  One friendly station attendant was eager to practice broken English with us and seemed genuinely happy to greet international travelers in a part of the country that doesn’t see many foreign visitors.  We filled up our tank, did the math converting liters to gallons, and Turkish lire to US Dollars, and realized that gas was costing us about $10/gallon!  Turkey is a big country and we would surely be filling up again before we left, so this strech was going to cost us a lot more than we had thought.  Word of advice to next year’s rally-goers – fill up your tank and jerry cans in Bulgaria! 

As good as the roads and scenery were, you can get too much of a good thing.  Ten hours in the car had been too much already, but still would not be enough to get us where we needed to be before we could call it a day.  When we reached the Black Sea, we took about 20 minutes to stretch our legs along the rocky coast before getting back in the car to push on to Rize in the far northeast corner of Turkey.  We were incredibly pressed for time to cross Turkmenistan on our three-day transit visa, and ironically enough, we were a day behind schedule because after spending a day in Istanbul waiting for that same visa.  We had to reach Baku, Azerbaijan on July 31st at the very latest to catch a car ferry to Turkmenistan.  Even if we did catch the ferry, the gods would have to smile on us if we were to have any chance of making it through Turkmenistan by the time our three-day visa expired on August 2^nd.  

At roughly 6pm on July 28^th, and we still had 400 mostly mountainous miles ahead of us in Turkey before we reached the Georgian border.  There we faced the great unknown in the form of border crossing delays, which could take up many hours both here and then again crossing from Georgia into Azerbaijan.  Aside from these potential border setbacks, we had 400 miles of ground to cover between the Turkish border and the ferry port in Baku, and a friend had told us that the Caucuses had the worst roads he had ever seen.   Any car trouble beyond a flat tire would likely end all hope of reaching Turkmenistan before our visas expired.  We pressed on in spite of these obstacles and more.

 We had been keeping a list of the worst drivers by country so far, but it didn’t seem fair to include a few speedy Belgians and high-beam-happy Czechs on the same list as the Turks.  Time and again, we were stunned as yet another driver attempted some ridiculously risky stunt for no apparent gain or reason.  Getting behind the wheel of a car would transform the otherwise friendly, hospitable, welcoming Turkish people that we met into a bunch of malicious, spiteful, reckless SOBs.  The heaps of twisted metal that we often saw on the side of the road were a regular reminder that driving in Turkey is just plain dangerous.  Drive here at your own risk. By the good graces of some benevolent force, we avoided several close encounters with carnage to arrive in Rize around 10pm.  This somewhat seedy port city was not easy on the eyes but was a welcome sight nonetheless after 14 hours on the road.  We managed a quick meal of bread and soup in a restaurant just as it was closing, parked on the street near the hotel, and tried not to think of how likely it would be for the car to be stolen and how screwed we would be if it were.   We spent the night at the Hotel Milano, which at $70 was double the price listed in Lonely Planet.   Since it was the first lodging we had paid for since leaving London, and we were utterly beat, we decided to shell out.  After much needed showers we turned in and tried not to dream about driving.