Is it a truck? Is it a bus? Is it a sewing machine?
I’ve already introduced the Monster, which is also sometimes known as The Big Orange Truck. But there’s the problem—is it a truck, or a bus or a different beast altogether? The Turkish border officials certainly couldn’t make up their minds. That’s why we spent seven long hours at the border before we abandoned the Monster and took ourselves to Istanbul. Will, our driver, foreshadowed a longish border crossing, but even he was stunned by how it all played out.
Lu directing the truck/bus out of the carpark at the campground in Romania. Have you ever seen a bus that had wood racks at the back?
Now I may be mis-telling this—heck I don’t speak Turkish and I wasn’t there—but this explanation is close enough to accurate. The Monster has a raft of paperwork—some call it a bus, some call it a truck and some call it a specialised safari vehicle. I look at it and it’s a truck, but that paperwork didn’t seem to do the trick.
It didn’t matter that three times in the past a similar vehicle with similar paperwork and from this company had been allowed in to Turkey. Oh no! This time the officials at border control couldn’t make their own decision. Instead they had to fax their ministry for guidance and then their ministry wanted guidance from the British Consul. All this ‘guiding’ took about 24 hours, and straddled two days.
In the end, Will and the Monster languished at the border overnight and we took a taxi, then a bus, then another taxi and finally walked to our hostel in Istanbul.
That first taxi—from the border to the main bus station in Edirne—delivered the most hair-raising ride of my life. It’s taken a week for me to regain my wits enough to be able to write about. See Stop this taxi we want to get off! in the Turkey category.
By the way, after all that guidance was flying around, for Turkish purposes, it was decided that the Monster is a bus. Now I’m confused?
Where to next? 
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