Turkey

Surfing adventure with the bus

After a good night sleep, we left Antalya to head for Kiskalesi. Kiskalesi is a very small town with a fortress 150 meters away from the coast. The road to Kiskalesi is pretty good but, because it follows the coastal line in the hills, we weren’t able to drive faster than an average of 40 kilometres an hour. Halfway during our journey we were frightened by an enormous amount of water on the road. Here in Turkey they sometimes have huge ‘car-showers’ alongside the road where you can get rid of the dust on your vehicle. Okay, if the water can flow away but not this time, where the water stayed on the road. We had a splitsecond to react; break and skidding of the road or drive straight on and hope the water wasn’t too deep. We decided to keep our course and while bracing ourselves we hit the water. A huge wave formed, nearly as high as the car, and with clenched teeth we surfed over the water. Fortunately the Pirelli tires did their work excellent and kept us on a straight course. Okay, now we know it, our camper is not going to be a surf champion but came very close in winning a medal here. Despite the fact that we made it, we noticed that the newly bought oiltemperature gauche had broken. A further inspection of the car revealed that our little headlights didn’t work anymore as well. Maybe not a medal after all.

We drove on and hoped that would be the last adventure of the day. But it wasn’t. In turkey you will find petrolstations every few kilometres. But not on the road from Antalya to Kiskalesi. As we had not filled the jerrycans (not needed with so many petrol stations) and the fuel meter nearly on zero we started to worry. Yep, stress in the van The winding road did not reveal any relief so we started to worry as we did not wanted to run empty on a hill or in a bend in the road. Fortunately we met two Dutchies of Turkish and Yugoslavian origin/

Ramazan and Mirsala offered to stay behind us in case we got into trouble. After looking at the meter in red for half an hour we got to a little town with a petrol station. Guess what.. we had one litre left!