Day 6 - Across the Turkey

Scout Tour: From Venice to Shanghai (July 24th to August 19th)
28.07.2017
Erzurum/Turkey

We were driving all the night, since we left Istanbul yesterday. The turkish highway D-100, which crosses all the country from Istanbul to Iran boarder has 2 lanes in each direction and a very good asphalt pavement, so there is no problem to keep a good speed and not to have any problems with intensive traffic. The next morning after having a breakfast we continued driving to the Eastern part of Turkey and were very glad to see lots of natives, who were interested in our tour, saying something nice to us. But the most surprising thing was our sudden meeting a nice couple from Great Britain, who were driving 10000 miles journey on a fully electric Nissan Leaf from England to Mongolia. The main challenge for them is to find power outlets near the road and to wait for recharging of the battery. Usually their daytime range is about 100-120 km with the speed not more than 80 km/h and then they have to wait about 8 hours for a full recharging of the battery. So we made some pictures together and went further. The highway, we are going on, is full of small cafes with tea ovens – that`s the way, how turkish people like to drink tea from small glasses, called «armudan» here. After visiting one of theese cafe we made some car by car shots of our Volkswagen Tiguan on the road and then met another interesting person – a guy, who was walking by foot from Trabzon to Istanbul and Ankara. That`s more than 1600 km, so he need more about 60 days to cover this route. There was a funny situation, that this turkish piligrim didn`t know English, but he knew Russian, so that was our internatinal language for conversation. We gave him some bottles with cold water, because it was too hot outside the car and wished a good luck. The last part of the day we were filming, making some nice pictures on the sunset and washing our car. The final interesting meeting was at night, when we saw in the Eastern part of Turkey a Nissan Micra with two Norwegian guys, who were going to Mongolia across the Europe and Middle Asia. They were complaining, that fully loaded Micra with 60hp small enigne is too slow for the mountain roads and sometimes they can go only on a 2 gear, not higer. So our day was full of really interesting meetings, impressions and discovers.

Author: Peter Bakanov

#Shanghai2Venice

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