Dunfermline to Istanbul and Athens, then back home - daily report

[Simon Brooke]

OK folks - this is a challenge to me as much as anything - this Saturday, 27th June, I'm setting off from Dunfermline to drive to Istanbul, then on to Athens, then back to Dunfermline in my Superb 2.0TDI 170 DSG estate.

 

What I'm going to try and do is post a daily diary of my trip, and the fun I've had.

 

The last time I did a similar trip was in 2004, in a BMW 318Ci convertible; the only major difference from that trip is that I'll be driving back from Greece, rather than taking a ferry to Italy.

 

To kick off, I've done some research on the internet to make sure I'm up-to-date and have....

 

1 - A first aid kit

2 - 2 warning triangles (two required for Turkey)

3 - A spare bulb kit

4 - 2 hi-viz vests

5 - A proper GB plate

6 - Tyres checked by a well-known tyre fitting company

7 - A CD with Eastern European nav data for the Columbus SatNav system - I've checked that it works OK (I checked it in Germany last Autumn)

 

I then checked the motorway toll requirements and bought (from Tolltickets) the necessary vignettes for the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia. 

 

With some difficulty, I paid the online fee for Hungary, which has an electronic toll system.

 

I already had the transponders for France and Italy, and have a vignette for Switzerland for 2015.

 

Tolls for Romania and Bulgaria are also by vignette, but they are only available at the border. For Greece, Serbia and Croatia, they are payable at toll booths, so I'll just have to get out of the car and walk round to the toll booth :-(

 

Tolls for Turkey are a problem - it appears that there is an electronic toll system, and a vignette is available from Shell petrol stations and from Post Offices - it's not a simple system, but there appears to be a Shell station, just after the border crossing from Bulgaria, at Edirne so I'm hopeful....

 

If I get my act in gear, I'll check in from my first night-stop - in Coquelles, at the French end of Eurotunnel - on Saturday night.

 

Cheers

 

Simon

[Simon Brooke]

Oh yeah - I nearly forgot - I also have a green card to confirm the extension of my insurance cover for Turkey.  No cost from my insurers and it took a week to come down.

Edited 25 June, 2015 by Simon Brooke

[domhnall]

Good luck! Business or pleasure?

Sent from my XT1039 using Tapatalk

[ColinD]

Just popping out for a bit... great drive! You have a nice car to make it in as well.

 

Enjoy Turkey, in case you've not been before, the road rules are a little open to interpretation. Quite liberating after a few days to drive anywhere to bypass traffic, roadworks, junctions Not like Morocco where it's fairly normal, except it's clear that size wins and fuel is best delivered in water bottles...

[FUBAR]

Essential viewing before the off is:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CymAuZx4G1U

[Simon Brooke]

OK - Let's change daily to weekly :-)

 

Saturday was Dunfermline to Folkestone, down the A1, then the Channel tunnel to Calais for the night.  A good run down the east coast, with the only surprise being the new payment set-up at the Dartford Crossing.  News of this hadn't reached my corner of Scotland ;-) It seems to have made a noticeable difference - just a pity that it took me 3 hours to log into the website to pay the fee!  Eurotunnel was as slick as ever (in my experience) - 20 minutes from check-in to on board the train, and - being disabled - I was last vehicle on board.  Train staff were, as ever, professional, cheerful and helpful.

 

Sunday was from Calais to Luxembourg.  I decided to take the slightly longer route through Belgium, to stock up on cigarettes for the trip :p   Unfortunately, about 20km north of the border, there was a serious accident on the motorway.  I don't know how long this occurred before I got into the stationary queue, but within 15 minutes of my arrival, the Belgian Police had closed off the preceding junction, were turning the stationary traffic around and directing them up the on-ramp of the junction, where they were doing an excellent job of feeding the diverted traffic onto a diversion route.  Great job by the police.

 

Other than some slow road-works between Gent and Brussels, it was an easy run through Belgium - being Sunday lunchtime, even the Brussels Ring was in a fairly benevolent mood.   The highlight of the run was passing a convoy of Czech VWs - three Beetles and two split-windscreen Kombis, then passing a Belgian registered RHD MGB.

 

Yesterday was a short day, from Luxembourg to Frankfurt.  It seems that Germany is having dig-up-Autobahns season - yesterday and today there has been an endless succession of road-works on Autobahns.  Fortunately, the speed limit through most of these is 80 kph/50 mph, so they rarely caused much of a hold-up.

 

Today, the Superb came home :-)  Frankfurt to Olomouc, in the Czech Republic.  777 km.  The long run from Frankfurt to Nuremburg gave me plenty of time to load the Eastern European CD into the Columbus SatNav.  Apart from German road-works, all was well until I had passed Prague on the newish ring road.  On the D1, the motorway between Prague and Brno, there were some spectacular delays - fortunately, going the other way.  The first one was caused by a 2-car transporter which had shed its load of cars onto the hard shoulder - the ensuing tail back was about 5 km.  Next was an HGV which appeared to have broken down in a long contraflow around road-works.  Because the lanes were so narrow, only cars could get past.  This would have kept the light traffic moving if the driver of a camper had not misjudged the available width of the outside lane and wedged his camper between an HGV and the central reservation crash barrier - that was about a 10 km tailback.  The last one was on the outskirts of Brno, where there had been, by the look of the damage, a near head-on collision in another contraflow.  I reckoned that tailback as 14 km - and my side suffered a delay of about one hour.

 

What really struck me was how quickly the tailback grew.  Outside the road-works, the traffic appeared really light.  Think M6 in Cumbria at night, but with only two lanes. Yet as soon as there was some blockage, the line of HGVs grew at an incredible rate.

 

Highlight of the day?  Being overtaken by a new-looking Ukraine registered Bentley Continental.

 

Of course, the Superb is great for long motorway trips - wind it up to a good speed (I tend to cruise at around 120 kph/75 mph on European motorways), plug in the cruise control, and off it goes, and goes.  The only problem it's suffering at the moment is dead flies

 

More soon

Cheers

Simon

Edited 30 June, 2015 by Simon Brooke

[Simon Brooke]

Oh boy - talk about forgetting :-)  Sorry people....

 

OK - so I was in the Czech Republic.

 

From Olomouc, I wandered down through Skoda land into Slovakia, visiting several aviation museums and ending up in Kosice in south-east Slovakia - apart from a few km of motorway, much of this was on reasonable main roads, with lots of towns and villages with 50 km/h speed limits. This wasn't one of my better days as I hadn't realised that the battery on my mobility scooter was flat, until I hoicked it out of the back of the car to visit the first museum,  Bah humbug.

 

The next morning - via the museum at Kosice airport, I set off towards Hungary and Bucharest in Romania, with a night-stop planned en route.  There was a new stretch of motorway from south of Kosice to the Hungarian border, where a couple of car transporters carrying Ladas were being inspected by the Hungarian border police - I was waved through without stopping.  Having already paid the Hungarian motorway tax on-line, I carried on across north-eastern Hungary where driving conditions were much as I remembered from previous trips - good main roads with a few town and villages, and a fairly long stretch of excellent motorway.

 

Then the fun started :-)  Officialdom at the Hungarian-Romanian border was minimal - just a quick (leaving Schengen) passport check.  First stop was at one of the currency exchange booths at the border to buy some Romanian Lei and to buy the permit to drive on Romanian roads.  At this point I didn't realise that the Romanian (and Bulgarian) vignettes are required for use on all main roads in those countries - not just motorways.

 

I was talking to my local Skoda dealer a few days ago - his parents lived for a time in Romania and he knows the country well - we had a good chat about driving conditions there.  You are really now into defensive driving country.  As yet, there are few motorways in Romania, and the main one, the last 100 km of my 500 km drive - is well worn.  The motorway system is slowly being extended, but the road in between the stretches of motorway is predominantly well-worn two-lane black-top, often following the course of a river through a gorge.  Romanian drivers tend to be tail-gaters, and are quite happy to overtake on a sharp bend or the brow of a hill.

 

Having said that, I was highly amused when I was passed - just before the brow of a hill - by a British registered Maserati.  A few miles later, I passed the Maserati at the side of the road, and saw the driver having a heart-to-heart chat with the local constabulary - who drive Dacia Logans!  I was truly impressed that they'd stopped him :-)

 

So, eventually, I arrived in Bucharest, for a couple of nights of rest before the final run through Bulgaria to Turkey.

 

 

More in another three months :-)

Edited 10 October, 2015 by Simon Brooke

[Simon Brooke]

My hotel in Bucharest was next to the airport (there's a surprise!) so I had to the choice of going around the truly awful ring road, or straight through the city centre.  As it was a Sunday morning, I chose the city route.  The main road south of Bucharest to the Danube crossing at Giurgiu was a vast improvement over my last visit in 2004.  A charming lady relieved me of the 3 Euro fee for the bridge across the Danube.  At the moment this is a nightmare, as the road surface of the bridge is being replaced so there is a contra-flow in place.  Sadly the local drivers do not accept this - especially as the contraflow traffic lights are over-ridden by a police officer with a large gun :-(

 

So, I was at the front of the queue - the lights turn to green - the cop waves his baton at me to stay in position.  You could almost tell the origin of the cars behind me by the tone of their horns - they could see the traffic lights, but not the cop!  I ignored them all :-)

 

On arrival in Bulgaria, once we'd been allowed across the bridge, I set off towards the Turkish border.  As I was not intending to use motorways, I hadn't bothered to buy a vignette.  Fortunately, many moons ago, I learned some Russian at school, so am able to read the Cyrillic alphabet, and soon realised that the road I was using required a vignette.  Soon a petrol station appeared wit a "vignette" sign, so I stopped and bought one - not expensive, just an irritation.

 

So onwards towards the Turkish border.  I had been looking forward to Bulgaria after Romania as my previous visit had suggested that Bulgarian roads were much better - sadly this does not apply to the road between Ruse, on the Bulgarian side the Danube bridge, and Kapitan Andreevo on the Turkish border.  It got worse, and worse, and worse.  At its worst, I was entering a village just as it started to rain - the automatic wipers came on and smeared the windshield at the worst possible moment, so I didn't see the deep, foot wide, gully in the road until my front wheels crashed into it.  Fortunately they crashed out of the other side, too, so I was able to carry on, bit this cost me a couple of tyres :-)

Edited 10 October, 2015 by Simon Brooke

[Simon Brooke]

OK - here's the one pic I have of my Superb - at home after it survived the trip....

 

[Simon Brooke]

Now, where was I - oh yes, Bulgaria outbound....

 

This is the ultimate result of Romanian and Bulgarian roads.  A couple of days after I got home....

 

 

 

[Simon Brooke]

So - the Turkish border - much improved since my last visit.  It only took 90 minutes to cross from Bulgaria to Turkey.  Lots of car traffic - predominantly ex-pat Turks coming home, with German and Austrian registered cars - but a fairly efficient departure from Bulgaria and arrival into Turkey. As on my previous visit, the Turkish customs stamped my passport with the details of the temporary car import - without the car, I would not be able to leave the country....   Once clear of the border crossing, I stopped at the Shell petrol station as I needed to refuel, and it was alleged (by the official Turkish government website) that this was the place to buy the motorway toll transponder which is a must in Turkey as all tolls are electronic.

 

Great start - only V-Power Diesel (the most expensive fuel of the trip outside the UK) and no motorway thingy.  Ho hum :S

 

As it turned out, the main (non-motorway) road from the border at Edirne to Istanbul was pretty good - mostly 110 kph dual carriageway - so this was not much of a problem.  However, I would need the thingy to cross either of the bridges over the Bosphorus from Europe to Asia as they are both toll bridges, but only for eastbound traffic.

 

When I left my hotel on the European side of Istanbul I asked the Radisson Blu reception staff how to get the thingy.  They had a quick chat with the hotel minibus driver and told me to go for it - with the volume of traffic over the bridges, the authorities are unable to monitor non-payers.  I don't like doing so, but I went for it, and safely crossed to Asia, so my Skoda is now a two-continent car    On the return journey a couple of days later there was no such problem, as driving from Asia to Europe is free.

 

From Istanbul, I headed toward the Greek border (Yunanistan in Turkish), where the border crossing out of Turkey and back into the Schengen area was much quicker as there was virtually no traffic.  The border checks were still comprehensive, and the heavy military presence on the border stood as testimony to the historical tension between Turkey and Greece.

 

From the border to Thessaloniki was an easy motorway run, with three or four toll booths.  As I had no clever way of paying Greek motorway tolls, these were get-out-and-walk-around-the-car tolls.  I wasn't sure how things would be in Greece, as this was at the height of the country's financial troubles, but I had plenty of Euros in cash, and as it turned out, there was no problem paying for fuel, hotels and food on on plastic.  After a night's rest outside Thessaloniki I set off southwards towards Athens.  This was all motorway apart from a couple of short breaks of maybe 10 miles, but included no less than 13 toll booths.

 

More to follow (eventually)....

Edited 6 December, 2015 by Simon Brooke