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That was actually yesterday. This trip to Istanbul wasn’t planned too much in advance. My mother suddenly decided to visit the city along with one other family and insisted that I come. Even though I have a lot of important projects that I need to finish this month and such a journey didn’t thrill me, I accepted the offer.

And so we went on a 11 hour bus journey from Constanta (Romania) to Istanbul (Turkey).
Of course, the actual journey was quite hard to take. We left my hometown at about 2pm and headed for the southern border with Bulgaria. Outside it was extremely hot (around 38 degrees Celsius) and the AC was barely noticeable. The good thing is that we had no traffic jams until the border.

At about 5pm we left Romania through the checkpoint “Vama Veche”. The first 20-30KM in Bulgaria were made on a completely empty road with at least as many bumps and holes as the Romanian road. For 30 minutes or so we didn’t encounter a single other car. It looked to me like the country was deserted. Also, 30KM inside Bulgaria, Romanian radio channels could still be received. One thing that I did like when I entered Bulgaria was the field of Wind Turbines. Dozens of them producing clean green energy. I like that. In my entire country I saw only ONE wind turbine. Quite sad…

After an hour in Bulgaria the road started to get a little more circulated. We passed through a region known as Southern Dobrogea or The Quadrilater which, for a brief period, was part of Romania. I enjoyed the sights of the mountains that were along the Black Sea. Varna looks like a nice city as seen from the mountains but when we descended into it, it had a shade of grey to it that reminded me of how Constanta used to look right after the fall of communism.

We continued our road through Bulgaria following the shore of the Black Sea towards the south, towards the Turkish border. At 8pm we stopped at a Bulgarian gas station. This was the ONLY stop we had in 11 hours! Not a good thing if you need to use the restroom more than once a day. At the place where we stopped, a few hundred kilometers into Bulgaria, we paid in lei (the currency of Romania) and the staff spoke Romanian which is no way an international language. I was impressed.

After that, we departed again. A mountainous road full of tight turns followed. The driver we had was a mad man or stupid so to speak. With one hand on a bottle of soda, one on a juicy tomato dripping on the floor and an elbow on the wheel, he ran through that area at 110KM/hour. About 4hours out of 11 were spent driving on the left side of the road.

At 11pm we reached the border with Turkey, somewhere in the heart of the mountains. Because we were exiting the European Union, I was expecting a more severe checkup at the checkpoint. We spent about 30 minutes in there. I got my visa and finally, we were aligned in two separate lines with our luggage in front of us so that the customs officers can check the contents. What a joke that was. They made us go to all that hassle but actually, no real control was made. Just some guy was going from person to person and briefly looking at the contents of the bags (that were opened) and at bags themselves (if they were closed):

“What do you have there?” – “Notebook computer!” – “Oh, ok”

At about 2am the next day we reached Istanbul. From here I will continue in a future article.