DAYS 88-89, Tue APRIL 27TH TO Wed APRIL 28TH 2021 – A Hell of a trip
One the Morning of 27th we left the hotel and took a bus towards Antalya. We tried to book the bus tickets already from Istanbul to Sofia, but the online service was buggy and did not work. Weather was good and it was sort of sad to watch the beautiful mountains and sea that we were leaving behind.
We were on the run from Corona restrictions and the whole lockdown of the country. Still I could feel hope and happiness in me as I knew I would not need to stay locked in anymore. From Antalya we took a train, but half way to the airport some locals convinced to leave the train as it was supposed to be the wrong train. Interestingly some people joined the talk saying it was the correct train, so my advice is to make sure you enter the right one as the locals seem to be confused but also full of advices.
You can see the correct route from the front of the train. The thing is there seem to be 2 trains and we did have to skip the next coming train as it was clearly the wrong one. So we entered the train after that still a bit confused if the locals just advised us wrong and why. Seems part of the culture is not to say that you don’t know something but rather just say something even if it is wrong. Well we got to the airport finally and did not get Corona tests here as we were reading only Turkish citizens can check for the status online.
In Istanbul we went for the test and found out we could have done the test in Antalya and did not need to wait for the results. The bag I bought from Istanbul broke on the flight back, so in total it lasted for 2 flights. I was hoping if would have lasted until Germany, but what can you do. As I don’t want to carry or drag lot of stuff with me I really was not planning to carry it with me to Antalya originally, but to travel light and leave all the heavy shit in the bag to some friends place in Istanbul.. now I was travelling with a broken bag which was even less fun and sadly I did not even notice it straight away, but only after leaving the airport when I noticed the bag was making strange sounds.
After the Corona tests we left the airport and were still trying to make a plan how to get tickets for the bus to Sofia. We would need to find office of the bus company, but I was starting to panic a little as we could still see online that there were less and less tickets available. Last night there still were 27 tickets available, then 13 in the morning and now there were only 3 double seats left with few random seats around the bus. It would take us some hours to get to the bus station where the bus was leaving and maybe by that time there would be no seats left, which would really suck. So we found one office closer to the airport and went looking for a bus that would take us there. Google maps was showing incorrectly that the bus would leave outside of the airport some hundreds of meters away, so we dragged our bags on the sideway to there as the taxis passed us honking their horns trying to get our attention. More confusion at the bus stop as we saw many busses coming here straight from the airport (the exact path we just took) but ours was not coming. We were just about to walk back to the airport and take a Hava bus to Taksim and to a bus company office there. This would take us 1 to2 hours and maybe all tickets would be sold by the time we were there.. then our bus finally came.. Of course my Istanbul card was empty and there was no way to load it at the bus stop.. driver told us to load it online, but that service did not work… luckily our stop came soon and we jumped off without me paying.. from there on our luck got a bit better. Another Jordanian guy (who’s name this time was not Ahmad) walked with us and showed where to find the office of the bus company.
Luckily there were room in the bus and we got the tickets and headed to find Marmaris metro. It was another quite sweaty walk, but we made it with some help of the locals. I am happy I have someone with language skills with me.. The Marmaris metro took really long as it goes through the whole city and also under the sea for quite long. Sadly it is a tunnel and you don’t see any fishes 😊 When we arrived to the bus station the curfew was already on. It is a large place with crazy amount of small bus offices. We found our stop and went to the central house that had lot of restaurants and shops which were still open and full of people. We were both tired and hungry and finally found a place to sit and get food. The food tasted really good, maybe because I was so hungry, but maybe also as it was pretty much same dish as the Finnish dish called Karjalanpaisti (Karelian hot pot), which I like. We walked around for a while and returned to the house for some tea. At this point we still had roughly 2 hours before the bus would leave at 23:00 and the place started to have less people. Still restaurants were open and there were other customers. We were starting to feel we will make it after all. After 2 teas we started to leave when first 2 guys entered the restaurant and soon after they were followed by 3 policemen. The police asked the papers of the guys as we were just about the leave from other door, when they called us… what would happen now… we both had the same thought in our mind.. will we get fucked at the very last moment.. they checked my passport and this time went through it and checked the stamp from my entrance to the country.. only few days left until I have been 90 days in the country.. he passed the passport back to me and said it is ok, then it was Gamze’s turn.. he looked at her German passport.. stared at it.. asked her name.. then looked at her and asked “Turkish?” and looked at her confused as she said, no I am German.. after some very long second he passed the passport back to her and said ok.. we left the restaurant both a bit shaken and looked each other knowing we were thinking the same.. huh.. now to the bus and out of here..
The bus left some 15min late and first went to get gasoline. Our seats were the first row of the bus so we had nice visibility when we finally started driving towards Bulgaria. The way to the border was not without some thrills.. as we started to drive there was almost immediately a police stop where they were checking cars and busses. When the police was checking ID:s in the bus they just passed us without even taking our passports.
We knew already at this point we were not the only ones trying to escape the country. The bus was full, but to our surprise the highway towards the city was totally blocked for several kilometres. Police was checking also the cars getting in. Don’t know how many cars there were close to midnight on those 2 or 3 lanes of the highway, but there were many. The city lasted for long, but finally the view outside was not full of lights anymore. There were few more stops by police and several stops for toilet as there was none in the bus, but finally we made it to the border. Pedro had already made the way the previous night and told us he made it, but that the border was crowded and it had took them some 4 hours to get through. Luckily for us on the Turkish side there was only 1 bus in front of us.
It still took long as we unloaded the bus, went through the passport check which had only one person working until we loaded the bus again and drove to the Bulgarian border control. There were more busses and they checked each bus inside a garage. While the busses were checked we were standing in a line to show our passports and corona test results. Once through we had to wait for someone who’s papers had some problems.. luckily this did not take 4 hours, but maybe closer to 2. We woke when the bus was in some city we thought was Sofia. Sun was up and we looked around a cute looking city that to me looked like a place from 70’s or something. Soon we found out we were still 2 hours away from Sofia. We talked about the city we saw and made plans to maybe pay a visit there… In Sofia bus station we still had some problems as my phone died totally when I entered my Finnish sim and Gamze’s still had her Turkish sim that was not working at all. Using a bus station Wi-Fi we managed to get her enough data to work out our way forward. We took a metro and drove to our friends. Lara was friendly enough to come get us from the metro and walked the tired travellers to their place..
We did it, we were there after 26,5h of travelling.. sun was shining,
people wore masks only in the public transports, restaurants were open.. I felt
free and happy
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