Day 191 Tues 24 April 2007 Istanbul, Turkey

Back in Istanbul, after breakfast in the lovely hotel garden, its down to business and we face the onerous job of reclaiming our car which we hope has arrived on Saturday and now that the holiday is over, should be available to be cleared through Turkish Customs and driven away from the container port – all very straightforward.
No such luck! First, we must contact the shipping company who say that due to the holiday backlog, they cannot let us have our Carnet and keys until 2pm and only after we pay them large amounts of Lira. This done, we rush off to the port, discovering the 50 kilometres is full of traps for the unwary but the odd detour or three don’t make us too late to find the container port operators and the shipping company rep at the dock who tell us, in Turkish, it is too late to deal with Customs and we must return the next morning.

To commiserate ourselves we have a blow out dinner at a very pretty little restaurant nearby.