A warm night.
On the road by 11am with 385 k’s to reach Samsun, our chosen destination for the day.
The camp is 30k’s inland and starting to climb up into the clouds. According to Jen’s phone it was raining hard. Ah huh! Luckily we missed it. It wasn’t till we got down to the town of Macka that rain had certainly been happening.
Retracing our steps down to the coast and rejoining the main arterial route. Traffic was moderate and apart from pesky traffic lights, we were able to maintain a steady progress at around 84kph. The sat-nav now back in action and a very welcome aid.
Poki purring beautifully. What a joy to drive and certainly the more expensive Euro diesel makes a difference on performance and mpg.
The Black Sea
The Black Sea on our right, starting to be whipped up by the strong westerly we were heading into. Bulk carrier ships plying the coast not far offshore. The coastal strip is heavily populated for much of the journey. One is mindful of the battle going on on the opposite northern shore, of Crimea. Ukraine crippling Russia’s ghost fleet of sanctioned oil exports and now, imports, in the Black Sea.
Turkey is an industrial powerhouse with a population just under 90 million and GDP of US $ 1.64trn making it 16th globally, and current annual growth of 3.4%. GDP per capita of US$19,018.
Refilling with diesel and at around 4pm we are starting to look for a place to camp. A likely looking tree’d section between the road and sea, turns out to be only for proper camper vans and the officials on the gate would not let us enter. A little further on, some bare land, but it’s uninviting. What appears to be a private camp beside it, is more appealing, so we convince the owners to let us camp amongst locals.
A walk along the beach after dinner, passes some time before bed, on dark sand with a sea more settled. There is marginal wifi provided through my phone but it’s not strong enough to write the blog, so I’m typing it in Pages, to be copied and pasted tomorrow night, perhaps? As mentioned earlier, Turkey will not allow foreigners to purchase a SIM card, so there are going to be days with no wifi.
Tomorrow we head further west along the coast. It’ll take us two or three days to get to Istanbul, the Bosphorus and back into Europe.
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