Say hello from Iran

Just a fast fast update why its the first post since the end of february. so the thing is that neither the east of turkey nor iran seem to like my blog so they banned it.

so we are in Iran now, in Tehran until this night when we will take a bus to Esfahan because we couldnt arrive there until the visa expires. there we hope to be able to extend the visa with a new month where we will go to Shiraz and around.

from Shiraz with a new extension we will go to the north coast to the Caspian and then all way long the -istans, China and India. or we will see if due to some mysterious reason Pakistan desides to give us visa then that way.

so things are going well we are going even better, everything is cool, irani people are even coolest.

thats al falks.

ps: i try to write short posts at least in the notebook and when i can i will upload them at once.. at least.

Farewell gifts and their private life

before i left, i had a great party with most of my lovely friends who came to have a last nice nice night with me before i disappear and some of them even prepared me small farewell gifts. now its time for a short summary how much i have to thank the gifts again because they have already appeared to be very useful!

the two sporks, gifts of Kata were our nice helpers in cooking when we accidentally lost two of our spoons and a fork. as small they are as big help they were in the need :)
for making sure that i don't forget Hungary and its taste, i got a bag of paprika from Reka that since then is a basic ele,ent of our meals making them much tastier.
the knife i got from Akos which is one of my best friend helping me pealing, preparing, cooking, everything!
the compasses are constant helpers of not getting too much lost so they are in good use as well!
the "kanalgep" happened to be a big help too in the same cooking field
and beside this all the chocolate had been eaten, the small amulets, lucky thingies are carried and we played many times with the table game i got from Kati!

so i only can say that thanks for all the gifts, you found what we will need even before i knew it!

Turkish visa extension in a few easy steps

So as it was explained a bit earlier, as hungarian citizen you can basically get only a one month visa, and it's certainly not enough for Turkey. so when the time approached we were looking for options how to solve the problem. exiting-reentering the country is the easiest way so i only needed to choose the country.

the options were Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria. Cyprus left the list fast as it takes some money to get there from turkey by ferry. Bruno arrived from Greece he told me the how to, but only by bike, but it was an option too, but finally i decided for Bulgaria as Michelle showed me a previous report how to do it:

so how to get a new visa to Turkey:

• start from Istanbul (until then you can easily get with the really comfortable and cheap coaches)
• take a bus to Edirne; 2,5 hours for 20 TL
• the bus will arrive to the Otogar (bus station) that is out of the city, but there are free service buses. if you take a Metro bus, the service bus takes you to the center of Edirne. from there here is a map drawn by a shopkeeper and i added a few additional things that can help to find the minibus stop where from you have to take a bus to Kapikule (the border village to Bulgaria)
• the minibus costs 2,5 TL goes really rarely so you have to wait for a while even 20-25 mins, but then the bus itself takes 20 mins too only, and takes you directly to the border
• walk straight to the border, exit the country. then it is important, that if you are EU citizen you don't have to enter Bulgaria, you can simply turn back.(the easiest is to go in the big shopping center and exit it on the other side and you are directly on the turkish entry side)
• buy your visa stamp at the 92 gate
• with your new visa go to any of the open police checking gates (passport control), and cars are probably stopping there anyway
• try to skip the costum control (smile at the officer and then they will take you in front of the cars as they deal a lot with cars and you shouldn't waste your time there)
• welcome to Turkey again!

the whole procedure from getting of the service bus in Edirne until getting back to Edirne center shouldnt take more than 2 hours, but it depends a lot on how fast the minibus comes. the border part itself took around 30 minutes for me. though probably during the summer it can be longer.

so that's it. no big deal.

ahh and i got accidentally a 90 days visa for a duration of 180 days, so maybe it worth to enter Turkey already from Bulgaria if you plan to stay longer than 30 days.

Most interesting places we slept I.

if i haven't mentioned it yet, normally we sleep in a tent, that we camp wherever we find a safe, not visible flat place for it. but beside this somehow it happened several times that we ended up somewhere else in the evening. now i will just do a short list, and at some point i will try to find some time to add short notes, what and how happened where. they will be found in the "Map" on the right side of the blog.

so up to know we were hosted by

• two amazingly nice, hospitable and interesting turkish families,
• slept in a dzsami (a small mosque)
• placed by the municipality of Kilimli in their town hall's building
• in an abandoned house
• in hotel placed by the regional head of police
• hosted by couchsurfer Esher

and each of them were honestly remarkable, and i haven't even mentioned the invitations that we couldn't accept, as we are already "overloaded" by the turkish hospitality and couldn't sleep at two places in one night.

15 minutes of fame

the Zonguldak Bartin area is probably the place where we got the most press interest. (though you can never know what will happen from now on)

first in Zonguldak, or Kilimli to be precise we were photographed by an unexpectedly appearing photographer and later found an article in the local online news about us:
http://www.demirmedya.net/guncel/item/11910-bisiklette-t%C3%BCrkiye-turu.html

then not even a week passed when a few of silly coincidences made us lost each other in the city of Bartin, where we produced for the regional police the operation of the year by finding me; an in exchange they got nice articles in at least 7-8 national online news, printed newspapers, we were in the TV, and people came to us on the street that they read about us/saw in the TV, and got a free dinner in the Police house that was really nice, and a free night of a really nice hotel of Bartin. so all in all everybody got what they wanted :)

http://www.webhaber.com/Dunya-Turuna-Cikan-Cift-Bartin-Da-Kayboldu-haberi video in english at the end

http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalDetayV3&ArticleID=1040575&Date=20.02.2011&CategoryID=77 with a nice picture of reunion :)

Macar Turkçe iki kardes

First of all, I think every Hungarian should be transported to Turkey at least for a short while and then they might revise their opinion about the turkish hungarian connection, the question of occupation etc. here when you mention that you are hungarian, first of all they know that it is a country, secondly in 80% they are really happy that finally they can meet a living hungarian who is in real brotherhood with the turkish nation. of course mostly beside a tea invitation. they ask about hungary, how is it there, if i understand something from what they are saying, and this is the first country where being hungarian is a bigger attraction than being french. and this experience doesn't really depend on education background or place of living, i experienced this in big city, from business men to a nice old man who was repairing a lock in the middle of nothing.

so there is endless things we should learn about trying not to be the sad looser one always and still crying about what happened 400 years ago. and yes, they occupied Hungary, but we got many things we gave many things and anyway it happened long long time ago, and its much better having brothers and friends in far far away countries than having enemies and moaning how badly they treated us.

short update

Here we are, in Zonguldak. The posts are quite rare, but İ have excuse :) we don't really have interrnet more often than once a week and even if we have it's hardly enough to read or maybe answer emails that i'm also in delay so sorry!

But at least shortly up to know we are fine, without any unmanagable problem, crossed Şile, Agva, Kandıra, Kaynarca, Karasu, Kocaali, Akçakoca, Alaplı, Ereğli and arrived in Zonguldak today. Now we will try to find an outdoor shop to buy a rubber thingy for the mobile stove and then we will leave the city to get back to the nature.


About my visa, probably İ will take a bus to İstanbul or directly to Edirne around the 20th, cross the greek border and then come back to Turkey and then we will be heading to İran and going to Georgia on the way back, but we will see :)