With two speeding tickets to my name, I needed to up my game if Turkey was not going to become very expensive. The obvious strategy would be to stay below the limit. However, as I had found out to my cost, it is not always easy to know what the limit is for bikes. My satnav was completely useless in this respect. Roads signs only gave limited information. Background reading was often contradictory. I read that the limit on motorways was 80 kph for bikes. With the rest of the traffic doing 130 kph this did not sound at all safe. All the speed radars that I had seen were forward facing. This is good news for bikes because they can’t capture your number plate. It only works when there is someone down the road, watching a live feed, that can flag you down. The set up for this was usually a small temporary warning sign on the hard shoulder. A couple of hundreds of metres later would be a parked police vehicle with the radar mounted on its roof and a similar distance further along the road would be coned down to one lane where the police were waiting. There were also radar and other sensors on gantries over the road. Most of these, at the entrance and exit to towns, were, I think, more to do with ANR. Keeping track of who goes where.
The road north to Hapa on the Black Sea was spectacular. It wound along a series of mountain passes and was virtually deserted. The sun was shining and the air was fresh. We had a relaxed night at a resort type hotel on the coast and then turned west. The coast road was very different but equally enjoyable. Mostly it was tight, twisty roads in and out of the small valleys running down to the sea. Occasionally we dropped into a town and here the road would be dual carriageway interrupted by multiple sets of traffic lights. There was usually a hard shoulder. Separated from the main carriageway by a solid white light. It found far more use that just being for breakdowns. It was also used for parking, for horse drawn vehicles, for filtering at lights (even for cars), for loading and unloading trucks and could also be used if you needed to drive against the main flow of traffic. Very useful.
After three days we turned inland to avoid Istanbul. Far too busy to be an enjoyable ride. We find big cities are better visited on foot. Instead, we headed towards the Dardanelles straits where we could cross to Gelibolu and mainland Europe. This area controls maritime access to the Black Sea and has been the scene of many conflicts over the ages. In WW1 over 300,000 soldiers were killed at Gallipoli in a failed invasion that lasted eight months and badly discredited Winston Churchill. The largest single span suspension bridge in the world is here. Built in 1915, the Çanakkale bridge has a central span of just over two kilometres. We chose the ferry but nearly changed our minds when we saw the queue. Sometimes, however, being on a bike is just wonderful. We were waved though. Past rows of trucks and scores of cars right up to the ship. Here we just had time to buy a ticket before being literally the last vehicle onboard.
A short ride took us the border with Greece. Here I had to pay my speeding fines. Just the two, I had successfully avoided any further trouble. No further checks, so long as the bill was paid I was free to go. So we arrived in Greece and lovely hotel in a quiet village just past Alexandroupoli.
