Day 3 – Friday 14th September 2007

Budapest last night was lovely! Dinner was great - raw (not rare) steak on a hot stone to cook to our liking was fantastic! Slept well until 5am when we awoke to our alarms and here started the third day. With over a thousand miles to cover today and not really knowing what the roads would be like we thought we’d better get a head start, which annoyingly meant we missed our free breakfast!

The journey out of Budapest to the Serbian border was great. Long, straight, well maintained roads with hardly a car on them. Then again it was 5:30am! 100miles later we were at the Serbian border thinking it would be nice and easy. Not the case… apparently we needed a ‘green card’ … how does one obtain said card? Who knows!? We worked it out eventually, however not having the car registration documents seemed a slight issue (though writing the vehicle registration and make and model on a post-it seemed to do the trick! … oh, and the 125e fee!)

Roads in Serbia were fine mostly. Great motorways, tolled, and lovely scenery. It was fortunate that we had some left-over euros from the taxi yesterday to pay the tolls. Maintained our average speed of 71mph and reached the Bulgarian border having done 443 miles fuelled on simply diesel and crisps and water. Entering Bulgaria (an EU country!) should’ve been much easier, also not the case. Firstly we needed the underside of our car disinfected .. simple huh? Well, it was in that the cost was 2e and that was exactly what we had left, however throwing the coin at a very short-tempered Bulgarian wasn’t clever. A telling off later and we were at border control. Again we needed a green card … and again they wanted registration documents … this time no post-its! Sam’s log book with chassis number seemed to be ok though… 15e this time, and we were off.

Bulgaria was uneventful and rather drab. Sam’s idea of a shabby looking place was Hackney until we drove around Sofia! (picture to be uploaded will explain). Exiting Bulgaria into Turkey took almost 2 hours; after 13 hours together in the car this wasn’t fun! First of all we’d recently refuelled only to be told they don’t take credit cards. To the Bulgarians amusement Andy tipped him some fresh sterling notes (thank goodness for the British classy Royal Mint), we were on the road again but out of cash. This meant buying our visas at passport control proved rather difficult … cash machines obviously in short supply, though we did find one eventually. Next we had to get another green card for the car, which we worked out was an insurance thing! Still rather baffled… After several rubber stamps, computer logging, and a suspicious look in our boot, we got the all clear! Woo, hello Turkey!

Driving in the dark at present, heading for Istanbul, at 6:50pm. Only 130miles to go, making our total for the day ~ 820miles (considerably less than the original route… we saved ourselves around 180miles by going through Serbia, which wasn’t much different from Romania in my recollection).

Found hotel eventually … another gorgeous city! Exhausted we dragged ourselves out for an evening meal and got back to the hotel at midnight (another time zone difference cheated us of another hour!). A long day…