Istanbul

So we made it to Istanbul last night at about 9pm. Over the last few days we have experienced the crtaziest driving ever. We thought Romanian's were going to be the worst after several hundred miles of everyone overtaking everyone and seeing numerous near-crashes in front of us. Then we got to Turkey!

Turkey is ridiculous. On the way into Istanbul there are up to 5 lanes of traffic all doing about 70mph with no road markings. It was dark, our lights barely illuminated the road ahead and we were being cut up by massive trucks and buses. You feel a little vulnerable driving such a small car in situations like that.

Our hostel is in the old Citadel of the city within 5 minutes of the Blue Mosque. We spent an hour driving Italian Job style with team 'Ghenghis Can' and 'Pedal Faster' in our red, white and blue cars. Several wrong turnings up one way roads and crazy moments of missing lights, but we managed to navigate it succesfully and without getting inany trouble with the police.


We will be setting off from here tomorrow morning, heading up towards the north coast of Turkey on our way to Georgia. We still don't know if they will let us into Turkmenistan. Hopefully it will be okay!

Tim and Tom x

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Covered some serious distance yesterday, crossing all of romania. It's 7.30am and we're just about to cross into bulgaria. Turkey by evening hopefully.

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Just passed budapest, sitting in a layby cooking on our stove. Our first cup of tea in eastern europe is on the way! Covered about 1400 miles so far. Tim

Alriiiight!

We got to Prague at about 3pm today, having made several detours through the German countryside and into the mountains. Once a lovely couple who ran a local pub had sent us in the right direction we managed to find the main road to the Czech Republic. When we got there we were surprised to find that we were the first ones to arrive. We think some teams must have bypassed the stop-off in favour of getting a head start on the rest. It won't do them any good though, the Pandas and Minis are the fast cars out there!

Sad to hear that some teams have already suffered in England, we saw the hearse on the A20 on our way to Dover. Would have stopped but we would have been no use to them. omically, on the way from Nurnberg to Prague our electrics went a little crazy and we had no fuel guage, engine temp, indicators, horn or stereo. Less comically Molly has started to emit a high pitched rattle from underneath our feet whenever we accelerate.

Loads of teams are parked up in the underground car park in the centre of Prague so we're all going to have a few drinks and sort out who is doing which routes. Thankfully, some chap caled Rich thinks that he has daignosed both our problems as non-fatal (dodgy earth connection and something to do with the exhaust manifold). Probably fix them tomorrow.

Tom drove us through the centre of Prague earlier and I navigated. It was a disaster. Not quite as bad as our attempts to get out of London, but still pretty funny. We think we've driven down every street in the city leaving a cloud of fumes and the resonance of our squeaky brakes behind us as we went.

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Day two, we're about 40k's from frankfurt on the A3. Tom's done a pretty massive driving shift overnight to get us here. Proper update to come soon, tim.