My "Saharagelber" 300TD

In the morning we departed at approximately 10:00. We first drove through Budva to see if we could get some foord for the Benz: vegetable oil for our route back. We also had to find some food for ourselves too
We found a supermarket and I saw they had vegetable oil too. I walked towards an employee and asked if they had 150 bottles for me? After that awkward look, they told me they had this in stock and they started collecting them from the stockroom. I paid at the cashier and outside they were already waiting with 15 boxes of bottles. I started putting them in the car and drove to a parking lot where I started to fill her up. Melissa checked out the neighbourhood to see if the coast was clear, cause we had no idea what the police had to say about this. An inhabitant from the flat who passed by stopped and stared at what I was throwing in that old yellow Mercedes from the Netherlands.
We started talking. He is perplex about the fact that I am just filling her up with straight vegetable oil. He wanted to know everything about it, and this was easy as he was a good german speaker because he had worked in Germany for a couple of years.
After filling up we started our journey back. We drove along the coastline of Croatia, after the first half we decided to take the tolroute for the second part. We drove through Croatia today and 150km south of Zagreb (Slovenia) we stopped to have a break.
I calculated what we had driven today but that was not much, only 550km. Because of the coastal route, which is in fact very slow. I filled the Benz up again and a bit later we entered Slovenia. Melissa was tired and went to bed (read: pushing the seat backwards). I kept on driving and driving and it all went very well, after another 400kms we were in Stuttgart. It was already 7:15u, I had driven the whole night. I drove another hour and decided to get some sleep, I had done 23 hours of driving today.
We were around Karlsruhe, and drove 1400km today, despite three border crossings and the all the back roads we had and the coastal route in Croatia, not bad at all.

After a great night of sleep we had enough rest, after our great adventure from yesterday. The hotel beds slept perfectly and we slept as long as we could. As I recollect, we drove for 14 hours or yesterday. We ate some breakfast and from the balcony we had a view on a couple of houses and the big street, where our street was a detraction of. Many times we saw and heard honking vehicles driving by, a lot of them fit with decoration, obviously they were part of some wedding. This went on and on, therefor we thought it was some sort of national wedding day or something. After we paid the hotel we walked around a little bit, the city looked much more wealthier and western. We tried to find some bread an fruit. We were stunned by the difference, in Korce, the south of Albania it is so much more different then in this place, where there was no waste lying around, the people look less poor and the cars seemed to be in a better shape too. But still nearly only Mercedes of course
After we cleaned up the car and checked all the fluids we continued in the direction of Shkoder. After 3 kms or something I decided to pull over. I heard the shockers crack and squeak lot, as if we were riding an old horse wagon.
This is probably the result of yesterday. For hours they were loaded and had to shock extremely intense. I took the jack out of the car and lifted it up. I inspected the car for some time and I saw nothing special, only a minor oil sweating close to the oil pump, which is a gasket which need to be replaced in the future, so no problem at all.

With 78645km on the odometer we continue in the direction of Shkoder. The roads are way better around here. Along the way we stopped and made a cup of coffee (cappucino with a little bit of Amaretto). Then with the mugs in our hand, we enjoyed the beautiful landscapes and sights around us. Albania is so beautiful, we can’t say it too often.
All the way to Shkoder, which is 200km up north from where we departed today, we look around us and were amazed all the way. The cities, people, nature, the cars, the mountains etc. It’s all so different.
At the end of the day we left Albania but it will be in our minds forever. It’s definitely one of the most beautiful countries we’ve been to.

At the border it all went easy, there was an english speaking official who was eager to ask us about how we experienced Albania and why we wanted to visit it and of course how Holland is like. He also talked about our famous EK in 88
The friendly man was very interested.
Early in the evening we entered Montenegro (former Yougoslavia). The first area we arrived in looked a bit like asia, stunningly beautiful! Lot’s of lakes, mixed with mongrove trees and mountains with their feet residing in the lakes. with the sun setting the scene was complete.
We stopped in Budva and found a simple hotel, but cheap. We couldn’t eat over there so we took the cooking stuff to our room, as we were already used to.
Our room had a balcony and an old shower, but it was okay, as long as we could sleep well it was fine with us.

Today we left for Korce to have a look around and to get some stuff and finding an ATM. We departed on time, said goodbye to the sweet hostess (she waved us goodbye with here grand daughter) and we proceeded our Albania trip. When we left, a W123 was parked in front of the hotel, and the first car I saw driving on the road was a W123. Yes, awesome
The poverty showed itself today pretty good. To believe this is so close to home is hard to believe. Albania has of course been isolated for a very long time. You go back in time for at least 50 years when you arrive here from a western european country.
Tough, if you love the old Mercedeses this is really walhalla, If you wonder where lots of them have disappeared to, you’ll find out that they are here in Albania. All the W123’s, W124’s and W201’s.

Korce was a whole experience in itself. There was market in Korce today. We parked the Saharagelber and went into the city. The streets were full of life. Our tour started a bit unpleasant, we heard an awful screaming from a sheep close to us. This sheep tried to escape from his owner, it had already smelt death. The sheep are transported easier alive and for the people here the best prove of the meat being fresh is to see the ‘meat’ alive. The sheep are traded on the street here and they cut their throats and poach the sheep on the street too, horrible. Melissa did not want to stay too long here. we felt very sorry for the poor sheep. When we went on, we saw lots of chicken in too small cages, poached animals hanging in trucks.
Indeed, it happens all on the streets. A bit further lie the entrails of a sheep with the rest of the garbage, the fresh skins lie somewhere else in a van. There is a lot of waste lying around on the streets. People are walking their way trhough it.
We will try to find a supermarket and a ATM and leave the place rather sooner than later. We left the screaming of the sheep behind, it cut through us like a knife, we know now what’s happening over there.
The buildings are brown and grey and look like they can collapse every minute. It’s all a very miserable situation the people in Korce live in, Korce looks like a mess. It’s so poor and we were very impressed to see all this, we can know imagine how on of the poorest countries in Europe look like. We enter a big square, where people wandered around, finding their ways to somewhere, Mercedeses crossed the square and linebuses were waiting to set off to their destinations.
I was some people with plastic bags of the Lidl supermarket and I decided to ask someone where the Lidl could be found. I pointed at the bag and made gestures like ‘Where is it, I don’t know!’ by shrugging my shoulders. The man thinks I am crazy and walks away. ‘Gee thanks’ I thought. Again, I tried with a young man but he rigidly contintued walking. Melissa laughed at me for my unsuccesful attempts. I stopped trying. I couldn’t help looking around to see all those Mercedeses, it’s so odd. I’ve seen it in Morocco but there are so many of them here, All these old Mercedess rendered me useless and therefore Melissa started searching for the ATM and the supermarket herself. I kept on looking an tried to capture all this with my camera.
After a while Melissa found an ATM and came back to me, we continued to walk around a bit and checked if we could find a supermarket. When walking around, I even found a Saharagelber W123 station. Lots of the W123’s were in a terrible shape.
Then when we were back at the car, I thought by myself, that my W123 isn’t too different from the others now, because of all the mud and sand which made her look the same as the others.

After Korce we decided to take the same route back to Permet as we had driven yesterday and then continue from Permet in the direction of Berat. This way we could experience the nice roue again and then follow atouristic route up north.

It was again stunning to experience the Albanian landscape. Even with all the special bunkers which are scattered over the landscape. They were placed by the dictator who reigned over Albania in the seventies and eighties.
We made jokes about them. They looked like the top of a R2D2-like robot, as if the rest resided under the surface. So sometimes we yelled ‘biedebie’ to each other. We drove through the fairytale environment and it still felt weird, only the road, the ‘biedebies’ and us, no other signs of civilisation. We both enjoyed Albania very much, it stole our hearts for sure.

On our way Melissa asked me to stop, she saw a skull so she wanted to have a look (there were more of them, it turned out later). So she was wandering around and heard a very low grunting. When she looked behind here here she saw a big dog, skin to
the bone, obviously so hungry that he would tak any risk, even try eating a human. It was of course so desperately hungry and all bets were off. Melissa knew this was serious and started calling me. In fact, I saw this dog from my mirror in the Benz, but did no realize shed hadn’t seen it and that it was about to attack her. She made gestures to me to drive backwards, which I did. The dog stood still, waiting what this yellow thing that was approaching was about to do. When I was close to Melissa she started walking towards the car and finally got in. ‘Wow! That dog was trying to eat me!’ She said to me amazed ‘Tha was pretty scary though!’. This dog was totally bewildered and probably the skulls Melissa had founf were one of its family or friends. The probably were dumped here some while ago. Melissa felt so sorry for the dogs and wanted to leave some food behind, so we left some bread, that was all we had for them. Of course, it’s something, but not of much help for the coming week…
Melissa was happy she sat next to me again, I started the engine and we departed again..

After a while we were back at the intersection close to the border, we got here when we entered to and were this friendly guy read the signs for us. We drove in the direction of Permet again. Driving this part was amazing. In the beginning we had a river on our left hand side. Then after a while we went into the direction of Berat. Whle passing some houses situated along the road there were some fellows standing there looking as if they saw water burn.
The road got worse and worse and when we passed a village situated at the foot of the mountain this road seemed to end, well, in fact in continued but it meant a paved road with sand and stones. We checked on the map again, ‘Is this the road to Berat?’ we asked ourselves. ‘This has to be the road then’ I said, looking up from the map into the mountains. ‘Shall we do it?’. Of course we did, it will probably be fun anyway. So, there we went up to the hill over this stoney road. When we were climbing over the sloping road. The track got worse and much more difficult. The stones and boulders got bigger, so we had to find our way through it with the hillside on our left. The heavier parts were alternating the somewhat easier parts.
At some point I saw a car standing on the hill with noone around and thought about what we could do if the Benz broke down now. If we would run into trouble with the car we would have a very big problem in this place, in the middle of nowhere, no infrastructure and facilities. It would be stupid to leave the car alone here too.

We couldn’t imagine the road stayed this way all the way to Berat. In fact this had to be the route to Berat but it was hard to believe. Hopefully it would get better after a while. After a while driving over this difficult track we stopped the car again and tried to calculate how far it would be to Berat and how long it would take to arrive. It was already 8:30 and it should be approximately 60km from here. With an average from 30km/h we would arrive at 20:30hrs in Berat. But the road had to be better than this from now on, otherwise it could take ages. In fact, 20:30 is pretty late already, it will already be dark by then.

After curiously looking after each curve to see if the road got better we were pointed to the facts all the time. The road seemed to -stay- bad. The Saharagelber was doing very well, but for us the last one and a half hours were very temping.
The enormous stones, holes, the small road, often a steep hillside on our left or right, deep fairways and sometimes pools of mud and water made the trip difficult but very exciting too.

To manouvre the Benz over this kind of road in these situations was a good practice for Africa coming summer.

We didn’t see anyone else while driving. We drove through the unspoiled nature of Albania. There were mountains everywhere, in between times we passed a lake and now and then we saw a shepherd with his herd of cattle of goats and sheep and their dangerous dogs they have with them.
At 20:15u we stopped to put some vegetable oil in the tank. From a distance we heard a gigantic noise from frogs sitting at a small lake. It seemed to be thousands of them, it was unbelievable. From a distance we saw a shepherd with his herd of cattle walking over the hills and believe it or not, there was a scout on his horse in a special costume who went exploring the area. These people sleep and walk with the cattle for some time in these mountains. We felt we had landed in the middle ages.

While driving for hours through the mountains over this stony road in the middle of nowhere, without any villages or cities and noone around, something happened where I was so afraid of. While manoeuvring between the holes and stones I hit a big stone with the bottom of the car. A loud bang, but it was not easy to heard where it hit the car. I stopped the car and got out, I was recollecting the situation while driving in Morocco 6 years ago, where I hit a big stone which teared open the oil carter.
When I drove slowly backwards I saw a big pool of oil. That was in the south of Morocco, in the middle of nowhere too by the way. One of the cars that was passing by towed us to the next village (and charged us big time for that one).
So, when I got out of the car I immediately checked my precious Mercedes but did not see anything on the ground and no leakages. Nothing was loose and I got in the car again, tapping on the dashboard while Melissa gave me an odd look.
“We can go on, no worries” I said to her.
The twilight was setting in and still no sight of some city. After quite some heavy driving again, we arrived at small group of houses or better: ruins.
Until now, the Saharagelber was able to pull through and over anything we came across untill now (even without the lifting of the car I planned to do before the trip, but was not able to).
A few people saw us coming and stared at us, not used to see a car around here, especially a tourist! They seemed to be perplex to see a car with foreign license plates.
We saw some old wrecks which seemed to be old trucks, a couple of plastered old ruins and a bunch of other crap, like wasmachines and plastic bottles and everything in between.
Apparently there were two or three families living in these ruins. We asked a small group of people where Berat was, by just saying ‘Berat’ and then pointing in a couple of directions.
One of them, a friendly looking man, understood what I meant and pointed in the direction we were driving in. He raised 5 fingers and pointed in the Berat direction again, so it had to be 5km. So we thanked and continued.
On our left side we saw a tarred road, but that one went in the wrong direction. It was 20:30 so we had to make a decision.
‘When it’s getting really dark, we can’t navigate just by view’ I said to Melissa. The crossings aren’t easy to oversee (where the directions are heading) and we can’t easily see the holes. Also, we can’t see where these dogs are when for some reason we have to step out of the car. These dogs are very big and are used for herding, they’re very aggressive when you approach with your car.

On our left side we saw the sun setting which gave us a stunning sunset to watch, but with mixed feelings though. It was beautiful of course, but it also meant it was getting dark very soon.
It was starting to get serious now. We decided to continue, if it’s really 5km. Go back via the tarred road we saw on our left did not seem to be a smart solution, if it was only another 5kms, with this velocity it was only another half an hour driving.
When on the top of a large hill we oversaw the landscape, the hills on the horizon got black with the sun setting in the background. Perfect!

The mountainside road went further uphill and got smaller and smaller. This felt not right. We had a bad feeling about it now, it seemed to be another planet we were driving on, nothing is recognizable. We expected to see some light pollution from cities far away, but there was nothing. We expected to see at least some signs or bigger roads, other cars or any infrastructure so you know you’re not the first who’s driving here.
The road got smaller and this seemed wrong. We met a couple of women who were walking on this tiny road. We said ‘Berat’ again and pointed around us again. They shook their heads and pointed back to the small intersection we just passed, apparently we had to take the the other direction. So, I drove backwards and we took that other road, but this seemed to be better indeed.

This road winded through the mountains too. After quite some time driving we still did not have the feeling that we were approaching a city or something. Apart from the great views and nature itself, there was no sign for us we were heading towards a city or something. We agreed that we were lost in Albania. At a certain point we arrived at another intersection with two reasonable possible directions. There was of course no one around, this could go on all night, reducing the chances to keep on heading in the right direction. If we took the wrong direction we could go wrong for hours, without seeing a city or an indication that we were going wrong. Our map of Europe was quite useless for this, Albania was too small and only the main roads were drawed.
We decided to continue straight on, this was just a guess as there were no signs.
As it turned out, this strategy does not work here. At first we passed some houses, it was immense dark, some of the houses were lit with a simple outside lamp. A group of dogs had heard us and came towards us, they barked and kept running next to the car so I couldn’t see them. We hoped they did not do anything stupid because we couldn’t see them, so we drove carefully. They ran with us for a long time but finally they stopped, thank god we were far enough for them, they had decided to go back and we were of no ‘danger’ anymore. The road became a narrow path and led us along some small houses, it looked like this was only a path to connect the houses and we must have gotten of the main road. We decided to go back and did this thing a couple of times, finally we seemed to have found the ‘main road’ again. It went up and after a while we were surrounded by trees and weren’t able to see anything except for the road iself.
We approached a tough part. Before us, we saw a pool of water, then a muddy part and after that another pool. This was pretty unpleasant, because -if- we got stuck here, we would certainly stay here for some time, as we didn’t see any car in a very long time, it was like expecting a car approaching in the middle ages, or so it felt.
I drove back and looked desperately at Melissa “I think we have to give it a shot”. I shone with my headlights at the 2 pools and tried to make a plan, how to cross them. This was pretty exciting, as we really, really didn’t want to get stuck here.
We were tired, it’s pretty dark and tools to get ourselves out of it we didn’t have, and as I wrote before, we didn’t expect anyone to come by in a long time. Thus, getting stuck is NO OPTION! When I pressed down the accelerator adrenalin was running through my vains. After taking of I entered the first pool, the Benz kept on driving, it shooked a bit left and right because of lack of grip on the muddy soil in the pool, then we were at the middle part, where there was a big stone, but we came out on the left, just as planned .
Then we entered the second pool, the car is decreasing speed but still rolling. Anxiously we sat there, I was trying to steer around a difficult part and to leave the pool at the right side of the road, so we got on the solid sand again as soon as possible.
We felt the back of the car winding left and right, ‘Come on! Come oooooon! I yelled stressfully. ‘Bang!!’ I heard. That sounded like a stone at the bottom of the car. Then again the stone showed us its presence, but now from the back of the car. Another bang, but not as loud as the first one. We kept on driving, the wheels were spinning but we were still going. After a bit of more hard work in the pool from the read-wheel drive, we had to pass some mud before we were on solid ground again.
This part went slow but good and finally we could conclude we were on the solid part of the dirt road again. ‘We did it!’. We roared and we were very delighted. ‘This old Benz did it!’

The remainder of this track was better and we did not encounter other pools. We went a bit downhill and this was a good sign, as cities aren’t usually built on the mountains. At the foot of the mountains the road was winding through the landscape, we approached an intersection again with, of course, no signs. So, we chose to go straight on, as there were no signs with directions. This went pretty good, but after a curve the road became very small and lots of big rocks lied on the road, I sat with my head against the roof so I could see as much as possible in front of the car. A bit further the road was more or less broken. It went up a bit and there was lots of sand and some very big holes. We saw some small houses. These people for sure didn’t have a car or would use the road from the other side perhaps. We might be able to continue and give it a shot, but we wouldn’t for sure be able to go back, it looks very hard for the W123 to deal with this.
Also, we didn’t expect this road to be the main road anyway, we had to go back and so we had to try to turn over here. On both sides of the road there was quite some sand with stones and taken into account that the road is very small, it looks impossible to turn here. Driving backwards is no option, because the road is pretty steep and small and there was a curve, with one side on the mountainside. I turned of the Benz and opened the window. We start to talk about our options, which seemed to be none.
“Well then”, I said. “There we are, in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Albania. I can’t go back and turning is impossible, continue in straight on means a point of no return, and probably it’s the wrong road anyway”.
We seemed to hear some noise from the the houses over there, also, there was a big dog barking over there. It sounded as if it was coming closer, but not much. “The only option is turning around” Melissa said but I told her it’s definitely not possible.
I started to panic a bit “What the hell did we do! Why?!!” I yelled and hit the steering wheel with my hand. “Relax!” demanded Melissa “We are going to try it out”. “I told you that WON’T work!” I snapped at her, knowing that in fact she’s right.
I was able to bring out a ‘Sorry’ and said “All right, we are going to try it then, but then you have to get out of the car to help”. She isn’t too happy with that because of the dog but someone had to watch the back and the front of the car.
“So there we go” I thought. After trying to turn the first time I was standing already quite crosswise. Then I started to go forwards and backwards and when coming closer to the 90% crosswise the car was hardly able to move anymore. The space was close to nothing, the front and the rear were hitting the sand of both sides of the road now. It was pretty much stuck! “Try a little bit more!” Melissa yelled, but I wasn’t able to move anymore. “Darn!”
I got out of the car and tried to dig the sand away. The end of the exhaust pipe was completely in the sand. This didn’t look to good, It was completely stuck. We both tried to remove some sand and kept looking to see if this dog wasn’t coming.
Then I tried again, and after some digging and trying the car was able to move a couple of centimeters, and after this tedious work we managed to turn and the Benz stood in the opposite direction. We were able to go back to that intersection again.
We now guessed the other direction, hopefully this is the right one.
We thought about stopping and trying to get some sleep, if this would take much longer, it was already around midnight already.
Without good sight and navigation we continued the dirt road. After a while we passed car! That at least was a good sign. Far away we were able to see some lights, possibly a city, we were not sure which one, but didn’t mind at all anymore which city it was, if only we knew where the hell we were! From high up in the mountains it became clear to us, a city loomed up in the dark. After quite some curves through the mountains we were getting nearby, we were reassured we would make it now, it would last too long from now on. But 5kms? I think he meant 50kms! After we got out of the mountains we entered a tarred road again, it felt like we were stepping on land, after floating on a raft while being lost in the open sea.
A bit further there was a nice bridge to be seen, and in a short time we saw lots of youngsters walking in the streets, coming back or heading to a party or something. We drove along the water and crossed the bridge and went searching for a hotel in the city.
When crossing the canal we saw it was a very big city, this had to be Berat, as there was no other big city in this area.
Berat is quite a nice city, much different then Korce. Chances were high to find a hotel here, but the question was if it was open or not.
It was a relieve to find a hotel in a short time, as we were pretty tired. It was in a narrow street, which was close to a bigger street. The hotel had very big castle like doors which were closed, so that did not look too good. We got out and tried to push it, with a crack it opened. “It’s open?” Melissa asked. It was 00:30u, were we lucky? We walked in slowly, it looked very nice, dark wood all over, a lot of tables. It had a very nice, cosy interior of a very old restaurant some 100 years ago. At a bar a friendly man was standing and walked towards us when we approached. He gave us a warm welcome and we tried to explain we wanted to stay for the night. We wanted to know what he would charge us, as we did not have much albanian money.
We wanted to know if we could pay with Euros too. He tried to calculate this on a small paper and it seemed a hell of a job, we ended up saying that we would pay him tomorrow with albanian money, if there was an ATM around, because he seemed not to be able to work it out After we were done he showed us our room, it was not very expensive but the room was pretty nice, it had a balcony too. We agreed with the room and thanked the good man and took all our stuff from the car.
Melissa cooked us a dinner and after that we sat on the bed and opened a bottle of wine and chatted a bit more. I had one glass of wine and after that I fell asleep right away.

After waking up in our moisted room we packed the car again, ate some bread and enjoyed the nice scenery. When we stepped out of this room a tremendous paranorama is presented to us. We departed in the direction of Albania today!
After some ours driving we stopped for a picknick at a field near a lake. We were watching a herd of sheep which was grazing in the field next to us . They seemed to be very interested in us, because they followed us pretty closely. We saw some small snakes in the lake. I also found a pig skull. After this relaxed break we continued. At around 17:00hrs we were already close to the border of Albania, but there was no sign to be found there. We continued in the direction of Konitza.
When we arrived in Konitza, still no signs . After some small indication we checked with someone at a gas station which direction we had to go for the border, because somewhere we had to to eastward and we were looking for a small intersection. We only saw a very small sign but were not sure this was the right direction. This should be right the. It’s like Albania just doesn’t exist for the Greek.
After some kilometers we entered a small border post. The greek border post didn’t know how to understand our papers from the car it seemed. I tried to explain it but the because of the language barrier I was not able to help him very well. It took quite some time and I think he gave up. I got my papers back. He asked us why we wanted to visit Albania. He told us that in the 24 years he worked here he had never seen dutch tourists here at the border post who wanted to enter Albania.
We were allowed to continue. We drove further but did not see he albanian border post. We drove over a long bridge and at the other side was the albanian border.
We were curious if we would be able to get in. It seemed no problem, if was possible to buy the visa for us at the border post. The friendly people were looking a bit amezed, to have dutch tourists today. They got very enthousiastic to see us dutch people here who are interested in their country and want to voluntarily visit it. Like some people told me before, the albanese people really LOVE Mercedes. One look around at the border post proved this fact already; There were 6 cars and four of them were old Mercedes cars. The fact that Albania is hardly visited by tourists was clear to us when we drove by, all the people were watching as if aliens entered their area. The old and the young, man and women, small and big.
At the first intersection we stopped to see if we had to go to Permet or Korce. There was a bar were some people sat outside, soon one of them came towards us and asked where we wanted to go. At least, we think he said that.
We couldn’t understand a word from him and he didn’t understand any english. In fact, he wanted to explain what was on the sign. “Permet” and he pointed left, “Korce” and he pointed to the right. “Ah yes” I said “But we can read signs too” I thought by myself

Because we didn’t have a good map of Albania (we only had the map of Europe) we made the decision by guessing and went to Permet. This route as far we could see didn’t lead us into the northern direction. We didn’t have enough details on the actual map of course, so it was pretty difficult to find these things out. As a result we drove back to the intersection again, waved at our friends on the terrace and now went into the direction of Korce. This road hopefully went north, because this Korce place was not on our map we couldn’t verify anything.
We were astonished by how beautiful Albania is. It was already 19:30 and so we decided to find ourselves a little hotel to sleep. Of this 80km we drove until now it was clear to us: Albania is marvellous, tremendously beautiful!
Because we drove some part in the dark we were disappointed that we couldn’t experience it all. It was so full of green, lots of mountains and beautifully shaped. All human intervention you see is this small tiny tarred road that cuts through the landscape.
No signs, no houses, no parking places, no garbagecans, bars, restaurants etc. etc. No form of human intervention except for the road. Sometimes we saw a river and sometimes great waterfalls now and then. This is probably the fact that it all looks like a fairytale, because most of the time anywhere else in Europe you alway see all this marks of human intervention. Sometimes we pass a group of houses, but that is really once in a while.

The mainroad to Korce is a pretty bad road with a lot of stones and holes. We then passed a small village, where we drove versy slowly to look around. Everyone was watching us. This village was mainly one big street and everyone was outside, a police man walked around looking happy. As I already wrote, Mercedeses everywhere, lots of W123’s here. Furthermore one can say that it all looks very poort and miserable. The flats and houses are not much more then concrete cages.
We asked the police man if there was a hotel here. We really want to stay here and have a look at the daily lives around here. It felt very remote and with all people outside walking around and chatting we had the feeling we should stay here and experience this. Unfortunately the police man told us there was no hotel here (‘No hotel!, Korce!’) and because of that we had to continue. Because when it gets dark here in Albania it gets really, really dark because there are no street lights through the country, finding a hotel this way will become impossible then. And thus it became a very long trip, because driving through the mountains with only hairpin bends in the dark and the bad roads isn’t really easy.
At last, at 21:30hrs (20:30hrs local time) we seemed to enter a village. The first two buildings we pretty big and more or less looked like hotels but there was no sign or something which underwrote this. So, we stepped out of the car and walked towards the building where they seemed to have a cafe downstairs, there was a lot of light and some people were sitting in this room. We walked in, the music was turned on very loud. ‘Is this a hotel?’ I asked, while making a gesture that represented this place.
He pointed at the other building. That had to be a hotel. So we thanked and left the overexposed place. We walked towards the other building. The lights were on downstairs and carefully we opened the door.
There were some people sitting there. They felt silent (Where did we experience that befor? Ah yes… ) and a woman asked us, eh, something. We tried to explain we want to know if this was a hotel and if we could stay for the night.
It was very difficult to explain this, because she really did not understand a WORD what we said, and vice versa. Even ‘yes’ and ‘no’ wasn’t understood. We stood there, staring at each other, not knowing how to explain things to each other.
She was very sweet and laughed a lot, she wanted to express how amazing this was, us standing there not able to communicate. It seemed that besides the word ‘hotel’ the word ‘Accoord’ (all-right) was common with both of us, that’s at least something.
It was very interesting to see how we could solve this. We wanted one room, for two persons, for one night, and one bed. In the end we had laughed a lot and understood each other. She showed us the room and in 5 minutes we were sitting there in this nice room where all the furniture was crafted from wood. We only had to pay 15 euro’s for this relaxed place.

We departed very late from the camping in Refina today at 13:00. Away from Athens and up north. The landscape was stunningly beautiful today, very nice mountains and nice tracks cutting through it. The inland of Greece is marvellous.
Unfortunately we got stuck a lot in the traffic today because of police checkpoints, as it appeared to us. It looked like they were looking for someone. We drove most of the day and were surprised about the beauty of the Greek inland. It’s magnificent green and lush vegetation. We were wondering why only the greek island are so popular, because we’ve been on many islands of Greece but this was so much more beautiful in our opinion. The greek inland seems to be undiscovered by tourist, they all go to one of the islands. In the evening we were looking around for a hotel. We were in a small village which looked very creepy. There were a lot of empty houses and villas. It look kind of deserted to us. We drove around but didn’t see anything here, a place where we would be able to sleep. At a certain point we saw a house on the hill so we went to this place. I parked the car and walked around. It was a kind of hotel, at least it looked like it. Melissa and I walked in to the place and suddenly it felt silent.
“Yes, indeed, customers..” I answered him in my thoughts. There were some old people sitting there, chatting with each other, like they probably did every evening the last 20 years. The owner was friendly but didn’t understand any other language than greek.
We managed to make clear we wanted to stay for the night. He seemed to have a room available. We walked to the room which was reachable from outside, a kind of motel so to speak. When he opened the door we were looking at a very tidy room, it only smelled like it wasn’t used for a long time, it was pretty humid too. Alltogether it was clean, which was most important. We arranged a price and paid for the room directly, this way we could leave whenever we wanted.
There was no hot water, so that will be freezing cold shower tomorrow. We cooked ourselves a great dinner and gave the stray dog outside a bit too.

Today we started driving again, this time with Melissa. We drove between the tiny villages again and saw a lot of the rural part of Rhodes, where no tourists came.
We then tried a dirt road which was quite fun. I took a very small fork and a minture later we drove over the mountains of Rhodes over very stony small roads, but still okay enough to drive.
We then saw a skull of a goat which was in perfect condition. After that we went up and up and in a couple of minutes we were overlooking a big part of the island. The last part was very steep and small. After some fund driving here and enjoying the scenerey we went down again, and when we were on flat terrain we passed some military vehicles, big machines were parked on our left side, and in front of us a closed gate emerged, but the gatekeeper was on -our- side of the closed gate. The guy laughed friendly when he saw us coming and openend the gate for us.
Somehow we were driving on militairy ground for a long time. I guess we had missed something

We continued our trip and drove through some very small villages here, they all looked interested, obviously they don’t see too many tourists here.
Then we forked from the tarred roads again and took a dirt road. This was one pretty small and we were not sure if it was leading to something. I drove beween the bushes and then came on some grass land. I tried to see if it was leading to somewhere but that was hard to see. I just stepped in the car again and told the other we will have to see if it’s leading to somewhere.
So we drove further and then Melissa asked me to back a little bit. She didn’t want to tell us what she thought she’d seen. Because she said it was too weird to think about it.
I drove backwards and we were curious about what we were going to see, or not. “Yes!, there it is, I’m afraid I was right….” We were looking at a skull, lying in the grass.
We were all perplex. It was not a skull of an animal, it was a human skull which we had found here. As Melissa’s knowledge about skulls is pretty good (that’s why she saw this in a glimpse too) she could tell us it was lying here for only 1-2 years. We were stunned, “How the hell…..?” We didn’t know what to say, but it looked like a movie. The size of the skull was obviously from a child, so that made this situation even worse. This mean the child was probably murdered and was dumped over here. If a child was playing it would be more likeley she/he was found because the aread was known where the child usually plays. It was still guesswork, but it could be child murder. We all agreed to call the police and show them the way to the skull, because this had to be investigated. We were all feelling weird about this. We went back to the village and had to find out what the phone number of the police was. We called the police and waited for one hour before they got here. When they were there we drove back through the bushes and over the field and stopped. It had to be here somewhere. It took a while before we found it back again, because it was dark. We left our names and numbers and they asked if we some of us could come over to the police station tomorrow.

Today Henk and Esther and I took the car and planned to have a look how Rhodes looked like. Melissa decided to stay in the room. So we went for a nice tour and we decided to start with the inland in the southern part from Rhodes. Soon we forked from the main road and drove over smaller gravel and sandy roads. After a while we wanted to cross a bridge but this one was close, so we branched off again and came across a river. So we had to find out if the Benz was able to do this, after some investigation I thought I would be able to cross. Esther was curious and Henk thought it wasn’t too smart. But there we went and it all went fine! We were all proud on the Saharagelber. Then the road went through the hills and mountains and we got some great views. We were all alone over there and found out that the inland of southern Rhodes is very, very beautiful! Now and then we had some hard parts, with a lot of mud, and all the time the W123 managed to go through it. Henk and Esther were amazed, about what this car is able to go through, a lot of parts looked impossible but all the time we got through it.
We saw lots of butterflies, great mountain views, a wild river, nice birds and a beautiful green environment.
Then we came across a very muddy part, which was pretty long too. Henk and Esther knew it for sure, “This is way too tricky!” . This looked indeed a bit hard for the car, furthermore we had a problem if we got stock, because noone was driving here, we didn’t see a car around here. We stood there but I did not want to go back. I walked back and forth over the part and tried to think how I should go, via the left or right side, or even the middle. Adrenalin was running through my body, “I -think- it should be possible” I thought, but yeah, -wat if- I get stuck? What are my options then? Well, we’re in the woods, so in that case it will be a lot of work but it should be possible.
I told them I wanted to try, they were surprised and curious what would happen. It was time to give it a shot, and so I did. I drove a bit back and tried to drive exactly as I planned, because there were stones I had to be careful for these too. It went all okay, the Benz just kept going, the Saharagelber kept on slogging through the mud until she was on firmer ground again.
Henk and Esther roard enthusiastically. Happy and excited we got in the the car again and drove further. Sometimes we had some more difficult mud parts but it all went okay.
This was fun! As we continued we saw a snake crossing the dirt road. We stopped to try to find it but we didn’t see it anymore. Then we decided to continue to the south and sit somewhere and relax, having something to eat. We continued the path but our road let to an dead end, a steep slope of sand and stones made us stop. Again, I was thinking if it would be possible or not, Henk and Esther didn’t know but now trusted me that I probably know what’s possible or not. Together with Henk I removed some big stones because I thought it would be possible to drive over it, but at least we had to remove the nasty big stones. After that, I gave it a shot, it was quite spectacular, at least from the inside, the start on the hood had risen in the sky at the moment I took the slope, the Benz continued with enough grip on the rear tyres and pushed us up untill we were on the flat part again. Again we cheered, we did the trick again!
Then we were on a tarred road again and drove to the next little village where we parked the car and had something to eat. Henk and Esther loved the W123 from now on, the Mercedes gained a lot of respect from them today. They were even talking about getting one too
After that we drove a bit more around and then back. We had to pay a visit to the office for checking in on the boat on tuesday in Rhodes City. It was not easy to find and we drove a bit around, I dropped Melissa when we saw where it was and then I had to park the car somewhere. In Rhodes city there is a lot of traffic at the end of the day. When I finally was able and got back Melissa told me the boat broke down. We were not able to go back to Turkey, and the fun part was that they couldn’t tell us when it would be fixed again, it could take one day, but two weeks might also be possible they told us. Great, there we are, not able to continue our trip through Turkey. So we sat down on a terrace thinking about our options. Waiting was not a smart thing to do, it could take weeks… The travel agency offered us to go with their otherferry line, which goes to Athens. That option was probably the best one, but also meant we were not able to go back to Turkey. We thought about the option to spend some more time in Albania which made us very happy too, because we were so curious about Albania. We did not know about what we needed for Albania but then we will find out when we’re at the border. So, we agreed to go to Athens tomorrow night, that’s the first possibility we have. We didn’t have to pay anything extra because of the broken ferry, so that’s done properly.

We departed very early, the owner tried to rip us off by asking way too much and he put on his ‘I am very surprised’ face, but it didn’t help. The deal was made and I did not want to pay twice as much now. I ignored further arguments and stepped in the car. He waved goodbye and openend the gate, no further problems or whatsoever. We were bright on time for the ferry, it was a very small one where only four cars were able to enter. May this was why its so expensive. “Stop thinking about that!” I screamed to myself in my head.
After we had this relaxed sunny boat trip we disembarked in the port of Rhodes. When I drove the car from the ferry on the dock we were very surprised to see some of our dutch friends!
They wanted to surprise us, and succeeded! Such a surprise to see them in front of us here! They told us they planned to be here 2 weeks and this week they wanted to help at the clinic too.
So, first get through all the official stuff here and then we can start to enjoy Rhodes.

Then the disaster began. We had to take EVERYTHIING out of the car, which would be a hell of a job.
I never had to do this before and now we really had to do it, so it seemed. But the worst part was, we had to carry everything inside, we had to take everything out of the car and walk inside to the moving belt.
I tried to deal with one of the customhouse officials to just check the stuff by the car. This would take a very long time. This official was very mad, he started to scream at us and did not want to talk with us. Melissa got very mad at him but that didn’t help of course, there was no room for discussion or any deal, we had to take everything out.
Because of the medicine we were expecting problems and that they would take it. We had to cool down and just do it, otherwise we could not expect too much from them in a positive way anymore. But it did not matter, when we were waiting at the belt they were inspecting the medicines when they passed. ‘What’s this!?’ They asked.
We explained this were needles, tranquillizers, some sterile instruments, rubber handgloves and so on. We explained that this was for a animal clinic.
The sullen officials called another official and they told us we had to have paperwork for this and for that, otherwise they would destroy it. So, we started calling vets in Holland, we started callling the animal clinic in Rhodes, but it all didn’t help, when we we close to get what we needed they thought of more we had to arrange. This greek arrogance and hate towards people getting from Turkey (because that was mainly the problem we heard later) provided no room for us to arrange anything. It took us hours and we ended up with nothing. We had to leave the stuff here. This sucked big time, this was so valuable for the clinic, worth a couple of hundred dollars. DAPS told us already that the greek authorities were very much against their foundation, which was purely based on arrogance: People from western Europe who were trying to help the stray animals in -their- country. DAPS is trying to castrate all the stray animals on Rhodes, to stop the ever expanding amount of animals walking over the streets, which is very dangerous for them as many of the greek people over there are kicking and poisoning them or driving them over. This took us the whole afternoon and without any result. They at least gave us 8 days to arrange all the paperwork, but we more or less knew chances are that they would destroy it anyway. We left late in the afternoon and decided to enjoy the rest of the day. We drove via a Lidl (Yes, they have one at Rhodes too! ) to do some shopping and getting some fuel.
Some gypsies were hanging around at the parking lot of the Lidl, trying to get the coins of the shopping trollies when people brought them back, or just some food.
We decided to buy some stuff for them in the Lidl that they could eat.
Then we paid a visit to the DAPS clinic, where the vets were working hard at the moment we came in. They showed us their work and we talked about how we could help them the coming week. We then tried to find a place where we could stay. Some other volunteers who worked there knew a place and we managed to stay there for 10 Euros a day, quite a good price.
Our own one room appartment, and it looked very nice. Quite a luxury comparing to what we were used to.

Today we had a day of rest. In the afternoon we went to Marmaris, checking if boats were going to Rhodos which were able to take the car. In the centre of Marmaris we heard some strange things, at different places they told us it was not possible anymore to take your car on the boat to Rhodos, this ferry wasn’t going. I had to find a place where I could park the car and go without it. This was a very bad idea, we wouldn’t leave the car here with all the stuff in it, and also it is very impractical. We also brought a lot of medicine (three or four plastic bags) for DAPS, the foundation we were planning to help the coming week. We had to try other agencies, see if it was really true, we suspected them to just offer us what they could and desperately wanted to have customers even when they had to tell us we couldn’t bring our car. After a while we found an agency which told us that it was possible, although very expensive.
I had to pay 350 Euro’s only for the car, round-trip! For this very small distance! But, then, we were lucky because we could take the boat the next day. So we booked, bummer that it costed so much for an distance of practically nothing, but so be it. We went back to our private campsite and relaxed for the rest of the day. In the evening the owner gave us some fresh milk and salad. I think this man tried to live from all his own supply, gardening and the cow which was walking around here. This cow broke loose earlier today and walked over the campsite
Melissa was able to get enough rest now. We spend most of the time relaxing and reading.

After a good 10 hours of sleep we woke up. Finally we had some good sleep, the W123 seats are a very good sleep! We only had to drive for half an hour today, because we were already close to Marmaris. Early in the morning were driving around looking for a campsite. In a short while we found a sign along the road. We started to follow it but it seemed to be far away, we didn’t see a sign for a long time. But, especially that we wanted to find it even more, because it might be not too crowded then. After a while we had to go off the road over a stony track.
Driving over this route took another 10 minutes or something, but then we arrived at a place where they were building some rooms, and there was some building material outside.
I stepped out of the car and walked towards the freshly build appartment rooms. Someone was walking towards me and asked what he could do for me. I told him we would like to stay here for a while, but if that would be possible. He called the owner of this place. He told me we were the first visitors of this place and we were very welcome, he told us one of the rooms was ready to use but that they are still building and fixing the other rooms. I told them that was no problem fo rme and I asked if we could stay between the trees with our own car.
This was no problem, so I parked the car and there we were, finally some rest. This place is really awesome. We had our private beach and were standing quite relaxed between the trees, overlooking the bay which was wonderful, we’re all alone and have this great view. Melissa could get some rest now and we will spend some time here.
The rest of the day we rested here, reading, walking around and I checked up the car, because the waterheater refused to work lately. That night we slept in the back of the car, with the liftback open

We stood there for hours, I walked in and out, tried to see what he was doing. Sometimes I checked if Melissa was okay with the pups. and we both were very, very tired.
Then, 3:30 he was finished, the battery was charging all the time so it was quite full. I had to pay him and I thanked him for all the help, during the night. Where can you go in Europe at 22:30pm and ask for help, and where the mechanic will stay until it’s fixed, even when it’s 3:30am! We were happy to have the headlights beaming again, this way we could continue more safely, and we had to fix it anyway. The mechanic replace an internal part of the dynamo, he told me the internal voltage regulator broke down. This way the battery was not charged by the alternator. We thanked him again and took off. We passed the police checkpoint and told him it was fixed. We drove for another 2 hours or something and then I really had to sleep, I was totally broken. Melissa wanted to try to sleep too but saw no change with these pups. I parked the car somewhere along the road and was able to get some hours sleep.
After I woke up Melissa was still awake, she was only able to sleep for 30 minutes consecutively. It was 8:30, only about three hours later or something.
She had to get out all the time, because the pups were now eating and drinking again so the metabolisation was working very well, one could say
I stared through the window letting things dawn on me. It was already very sunny, perfect weather today again. As it was all the time.
When I rubbed in my eyes I started preglowing the diesel engine and started it again and there we were, back on the road. Don’t think and just drive.
Today it all went very smoothly, our new familiy was still happy together and we got to know the pups better and better, I tried to protect myself from that, but these pups were so cute and cool, it was fun to be with them. They started getting stronger and stronger and it was clear that they got over it and were healthy again. They survived, thanks to us! We felt happy about that, now hoping that they will get a good life from now on. After a half the day driving we were in Fethiye. We had the address and now we had to find this shelter, we got a short description and we tried to find it, although we didn’t have a map with streetnames. While driving in Fethiye I found out the battery was empty again, the horn wasn’t working anymore, and the same was true for the windshield wipers. “Not again!” I yelled, not right now! But I decided just to keep the car running until we were done at the shelter. That is a pro of the diesel, if the battery is empty, it’s alway able to keep running idle. When we found the shelter we were please to see it was indeed very good looking and a lot of european help organizations supported it.
I parked the car, took the extra key and then we walked to the office. The next hour was kind of difficult. First, we had to bring the dogs and say goodbye to them, which was now a very difficult task. When the pups were inside the fence we saw them between the others and we were really hoping that they all would get a good home. We drove 1200km for them, to make sure they would go to a very good shelter, and we were happy to see it looked so good.
Melissa cried, one of the dogs was looking at us from behind the fence and saw us leaving. For them, we were of course their new parents. Finally they must have thought that their new parents, who seemed trustworthy and caring, were leaving them too. We regretted that so much, the pup was screaming and screaming and we couldn’t handle that at that very moment.
We knew it was best but saying goodbye to them was very, very hard. We hoped the best for the pups! We couldn’t do more for them than we had done now.
I wanted som time to grieve but there was no time for that, I had to think further, my car is running down there and when I turn it off I won’t be able turn it on again. So I looked around me and asked one of the turkish guys around me if he could help me in a certain way. Either if he knows how to fix this or if he knows a place around here where I can have it fixed.
He knew something about cars too so we first walked to the Benz, I opened the hood and explained the problem. He started calling someone and handed the phone over to me, this guy I had on the phone started to ask about the whole situation again and I explained it again. He asked if he had to come over, but wanted to know if he could count on me that I would have it fixed by him, I agreed and a bit later he arrived. He investigated the situation and could not find anything, the dynamo seemed to charge, this didn’t seem to be the problem at all.
“Great, so I paid so much money yesterday night only for charging the battery” I thought by myself.
Since the car was running I was able to drive with the car although I had no way to point to the direction in which I was heading so I did put out my arm out of the window if we were turning left, and if turning right, Melissa had to do her job. After we were done here we left and drove through Fethiye to a big area, where the only subject was cars and all that was in a way related to it.
A great area, cars all over, people who were busy working, walking around with stuff in their hands which they need to deliver or just picked it up, tyres and engines all over.
Great place, but not much Mercedes here in Turkey. We drove to a place where some guys were working, it was not much more then one wall, a corrugated iron roof and a fence-wall.
Engines and parts were on the ground. A friendly guy (the owner) came towards me and I started explaining, although his english vocabulary was close to nothing. In a minute 5 people were busy under the hood. Melissa sat in the car, she was totally exhausted and broken. She had to sleep for a while of course, and also she was very sad about leaving the pups and seeing them so afraid and scared when we left, and we don’t know if they will be well taken care of by the new owners and how long they will stay in that shelter.

I also wanted to relax but there were some other concerns I had to be busy with. To cut a long story short, they asked me to get another alternator to replace the other one. Someone would go with me and so there we went, on a moped crossing through the parts area to a parts shop where I bought the alternator. When we came back and they fixed it under the car, the problem still wasn’t solved. The mechanic found that this did not help too much, I didn’t really understand but there was some problem with the electrical circuit. They found me a interprator and he told me that there was probably a leakage of electrical current. They had to find it and it cost a long time for them. I waited and waited and saw the clock ticking to at least 22:00 hours before they seem to have found it. It was the relais of the preglowing system. It had a short circuit and was pulling all the energy out of the battery in a very short time. The bad news was, they couldn’t get another one for me in about 2 days… BUT, the relais is not really a black box you can’t do anything with wih the good old W123! Hip hip hooray for the old mechanical cars! They managed to make a bypass with some default wires and a separate fuse and there we were! A working relaisswitch in the interior which could be operated manually
I had to turn it on, wait for the default 10 seconds and start the engine, then turn the switch off so the preglowing turned off. I was so happy! I paid them (a bit too much, but hey, they helped me directly) and we left, waving our friends goodbye. Great to drive in the Saharagelber again! Yeah, I know, after 2 days driving continously day and night, it sounds crazy

We drove out of Fethiye in the direction of Marmaris where we were planning to find a ferry to take us to Rhodos tomorrow. After i guess 30 minutes driving we were out of the city and I managed to find a place to park the car somewhere so we could have a nice night of sleep. We put the seats in the ’sleep mode’ and got into our sleeping bags. We were so tired and fell asleep immediately, finally some rest…. Aaaaaah….

We slept pretty good in our front seats, luckily I was able to get quite some hours of sleep. Melissa had to get out a couple of times with the pups and in fact was not able to sleep.
She was pretty much exhausted, but we had to start with te trip.. In the morning I filled the Benz up with vegetable oil again and we were ready to start the trip. The counter showed 75226km. We used some rope to fix some stropes so they won’t run away when out of the car. “Well, there we go guys” I said. And we went of, starting the long journey to Fethiye, next to Marmaris. We decided to continue the trip to Greece from there, and then leave Turkey. This way we had to skip some things, but then after Greece we would see what to to do next. Every now and then we stopped to let our new fellow travellers out. We tried to feed them because they didn’t want to die, and a couple of them kept on sleeping and kept looking miserable. We had to take into account that some of them were not surviving and would die, they were heavily dehydrated too which is very dangerous. It’s a miracle they survived the dropping until now anyway. Melissa examined them and estimated that they were there for a couple of days already. They were skin to the bone, and had to be fed bit by bit, and not too much at a time. After a while some wanted to eat already by themselves.

Driving with the pups was pretty much okay, sometimes they were very busy and then a couple of them were asleep. The problem was, when a couple wanted to sleep and one of them started to bite the others because it wanted to play. The five pups in front of Melissa’s seat enjoyed their new residence. We began to see some differences between them already, one of them still was very weak, and one was very strong and brutal, one was very energetic and other more subtile character differences.
We kept on driving, the whole day long. From Malatya via Osmaniye to Adana, to Silifke. This place 586km further and 10 hours later . I had to fill the car up again, 56L of fuel and now 75888km on the clock. It was 20:30 and we were still able to go on, so we continued. During the day we let the dogs out and they started to get used to us, and unfortunately we to them. Unfortunately, because it will get hard when we will hand them over to the shelter in Fethiye while we’re so attached to them. We had quite a good time with them. Melis played with them and tried to help the pups which wanted to sleep by getting the one that was awake. Melissa had no time to sleep with them and was still awake, she sometimes was able to get 30 minutes of sleep. We were driving on the coast line of the mediterranean sea again, in the direction of Antalya. Lots of winding roads. It got really dark and somehow it seemed that my lights weren’t shing too well anymore. “I think it is dirt” I told Melissa. But it got weaker and weaker and after a while we were nearly driving in the dark. I started using the great head lights to see at least a bit more. “Don’t let me down! Don’t let me down NOW! Please!” I yelled. My Benz, she never let me down, was now putting us to the test. Driving here, through the mountains with the truck drivers driving like maniacs over the winding road and we were difficult to see with hardly any lights. After some time driving behind a truck I stopped the car to see if I could find something.
I called my collegue Harrie in the Netherlands and asked if he knew about the symptoms I had, what it could be. He told me it could be the dynamo, which was not charging the battery anymore and then the lights will go out because then they are emptying the battery. That made sense, but now what? I now nearly had nothing that was shining as strong as a simple old flash light. I was totally exhausted and Melissa sat there with all the pups, we travelled only half the distance so far. I decided to go on, without the lights and then with the alarm lights on and then find a truck to stay behind, see how far we can come and then try to sleep until dusk. But then, when we drove like this for some minutes there was a police checkpoint. Of course we had to stop and the friendly policeman told us we really had to do something about it, we were not allowed to continue like this. He told me to wait, because he said he wanted to help us with a solution. After some waiting he pointed us to a electric mechanic who was still open at this time (22:30u). He told us he could help us, and wished us luck with it. This was very friendly, and the electro mechanic . He was not speaking any language I knew so I started to show the problem and soon he got started to check out the car. This man, who had this small store where hardly one car fitted in. It was a very small place along the road, I hoped he was able to do something about it, because there were not much other possibilities around here.
He was busy for a very long time and apart from that, he was not able explain what he wanted to try to help me out with this problems, only showing and pointing were the tools available to us to communicate. He wanted to repair the dynamo, although I did not understand how, he had no spare lying around so I hoped he was able to help..
The whole thing cost a lot of time and we stood there for ours. Melissa tried to let the pups to get some sleep by peting them on their bellies.

Today we decided to go on to Nemrut Dagi, to have a look at the heads of Nemrut and enjoy the environment and hang around in this area. To shower before our departure seemed was impossible, it did not work. After trying to find some bread, in which we did not succeed we left this village.
After some driving we stopped in a tiny village. A village type you see often along the roads, a couple of houses along the main road, where all that may happen, happens here. Trading, talking, sitting, cars dropping an taking passengers and so on. We stopped at a mini market and my job was to find some bread around here.

We passed 75000km

Two turkish men were trying to understand what I meant, they didn’t understand what I meant, it’s difficult to depict. After a while I saw him open a wooden box and got a glimpse of what looked like bread. Actually it was bread! “Brot!” He replied, ah yeah, I should have said it the german way. The something funny happened, he was cleaning the table which stood there, put two chairs under it, covered it with some papers and took some vegetables and gestured if we wanted to eat something there, and drink some tea. I walked to Melissa who was still in the car and told her about the friendly guys in the mini market, who were very happy to have some tourists there, they wanted us to stay for a while.

Later on, when other people came in, a turkish man who was a foreign worker in Germany in the 80s, told us they they were happy to have us here, because tourists just don’t stop here.

On the road to Nemrut

We ate the prepared lunch with pleasure and they happily watched us, refilling the glasses with tea, when empty. How generous these people are, and how kind, is one of the best things in Turkey. When Melis was smoking a cigarette outside, she was hearing people talk about ‘Holland’ all the time, and sometimes a new person walked in to have a look.
After this special lunch, we continued our trip.

During our drive I thought of this second fuel filter from the Elsbett system, which can be closed because the original fuel filter is connected in parallel with the SVO filter, when you close the second one, the first one is used. The Elsbett filter is a fine filter, and the engine restrain might be caused of the SVO from the supermarkets here, which is probably more thicker and that’s why the fuel can’t get through the fine filter fast enough.
This was indeed the problem, the car had more power again and no restrain anymore.

In the afternoon we entered Malatya, this was a quite a big city, compared to what we had seen today. We found ourselves a supermarket and I got inside to find some fuel. They had the 18L cans of Sunfloweroil, and after I put the cart full of these cans we went to the cash desk. The woman saw the cans but could only speak turkish, she began talking to us, looking worried about what we were going to do with this. I ‘explained’ with my hands, that we are using this as fuel, by making gestures of steering a car. Now she looked even more worried and in the mean time while she was talking, more supermarkte staff arrived and after a while six persons stood around us and a couple of them tried to say we’re crazy to put it in our car, “you, cooking this!” (pointing at the oil) “Not in car!” I was not able to explain that we know what we are doing and we smiled and left, “Car kaputt!” the shop manager warned us yet, bummer that I was not able explain it, they did not understand a word.

We continued our trip, heading to Nemrut national park. We found the relatively small side road to Mount Nemrut and short after that the Benz started climbing the roads in the mountains, and did the job very well, this famous OM617 diesel engine. After a while, driving on the climbing road, we saw some very small puppies dribbling on the side of the road.
‘Did you see that?’ Melissa asked. ‘Yeah, puppies?’ I asked.
We continued driving and kept on talking about the pups. ‘Where that really pups?’ I told Melissa that there was probably someone around. But we couldn’t get is out of our heads, we hadn’t seen anyone around.
We knew, if we would drive back and they were indeed alone, we knew we ended up with these two pups, although we thought we’d seen two of them.
After 15 minutes we decided, we had to go back, otherwise it would bother us te rest of our trip anyway.

So when we got back we stepped out of the car we tried to see if they were still there. We couldn’t see them, I saw a big stone and a shock went through my veins. I saw a very big stone and it looked like the pups were under it! The stone was thrown on the pups to kill them!?!?! I told Melissa to get back in the car, then at least she didn’t need to see it. But she wouldn’t go back, she wanted to be sure. I saw something moving, I walked down the side of the road over the stones and checked the pups. It started to move, there were five of them, and they were just asleep, using the stone for warmth, as they missed their mother of course.

Unbelievable, 5 pups which were thrown out of a car!

‘There are five of them! All alive!’ I yelled to Melissa. She was so happy to hear and walked to the big stone too.
5 nice cute little puppies woke up and started dribbling around. We startet to catch them, the first one was very easy and the second one followed soon. Then after one hour we had four of them, we had put them in a box in the car.

Safely in our car.

The last one was difficult, after quite a while it was gone and I walked further away from our place, the place where we had seen the little pup for the last time. I couldn’t find it and was afraid we had los it. Then I heard Melissa scream it was over there.

I walked back and was glad that it did not run away from us deciding to find a place to hide somewhere else. So we started again to surround it but it still had energy to run or walk away.
So stupid, the pups were only a couple of weeks, 8 or something and already faster than us. We tried with the cheese and other food again but gaining trust was still a problem.

“It will get dark soon” I said. Then, when it walked up again to the road I was able to come close. It was between the side of the road and the stones from the slope. I walked towards it very slowly like we did all the time, and all the time when you’re about 2 meters close it usually starts to move. It looked very scared but this time I was within these 2 meters and still the pup was there. I move towards it so slowly, I had to get it now. It looked me in the eyes but didn’t move. Finally I was so close I was able to grab it, it started to yell like they did all the time when something scary happens. “I got it!” I yelled to Melissa, she ran to me and saw me standing with the pup in my arms. We could cry from happiness, we did it! After four and a half hours of trying we finally had all five of them! This strong pup was responsible for nearly the last 4 hours! It was a very emotional momen, standing there with the strongest pup in the world, finally it gave up and we were able to get it.

After we tried to convince the pup we didn’t want to do no harm we put it in the box too, where it’s brothers and sisters were waiting for some hours. Then we had to figure out the next step: Now what? First we put the pups in the front of the car, 5 of them in this box was really too small and in front of Melissa they had more space. They were totally exhausted and the strong one was finally tired too. Luckily it was, because that was probably the reason that it didn’t start to run the last time.

The last pup, it took us 4 hours to get it!

When they were all in the car we decided to go on to Mount Nemrut, try to visit the big heads statues and in the mean time we will try to call/sms friends to see if there is a stray shelter for them around here. On the way to Nemrut some guy in an old Mercedes bus which was approaching us started flashing with it lights. When we stopped he told us that the road was blocked a bit further, because of too much snow, we were not able to reach the top. Well, then we need to drive back from where we came from. in this place called Malatya we stopped to go to an Internet cafe and tried to find some dogfood, that, is not too easy in this part of Turkey. They really had to eat and drink so we drove around for a long time, finding big supermarkets and search them through. In the end, Melissa manage to find dog food, it was even puppy food! This was so cool, we could give them what they needed! Then, the search began, calling people, browsing on the Internet.. When I was in the Internet cafe, between a lot of young people who where chatting and gaming, I tried to find organisations who could help. In fact, at the end of the evening we got very helpful information of one of our friends. He spend all his time on the Net to find addresses where a good shelter was to be found. Melissa knew that municipal shelters were not the place to bring them too. These places are usually the end station of the dogs. So what our good friend Henk told us, was that there were only 2 municipal shelters in the vicinity. In fact, in Turkey there was only one good place, a foundation supported by some well known good organisations, there was only one problem: This was located in Fethiye, roughly 1200km away from here. As if you have to drive from Amsterdam to Barcelona over the national routes just to drop a couple of pups. From another organisation in Holland they told us that the only way to help them is taking them with us to the Netherlands, which was definitely no option, because we had some charity work plans in Greece ahead of us. So in fact, we had no other solution then driving to Fethiye, to give the pups a chance on a good life.
We were tired and found a place a couple of kilometers from Malatya to rest, as much that was possible with the 5 pups in the car.

All very tired, it were some scary days for them. Especially today, they we’re afraid and exhausted themselves nearly to death to escape from us.

We parked the car and were laughing about the situation we were in. There we were, in midnight sitting in the are, too tired to think, 5 pups walking and playing around.
I really had to sleep, we had 3 days of driving ahead of us, with stops every 2 hours or even less for the pups, driving from East-Central Turkey to the atlantic coast line.
We had tried to sleep in our front seats, Melissa had to go out with the pups when necessary, so I could get my hours of sleep because I was the only one to drive.

This morning we left Cappadocia and headed east, we will explore some parts of Eastern Turkey now.

Our friend at the Antalya Cave Pension

We were not able to visit the Ihlara valley, so that’s one the list for next time, hopefully next year, when we will (probably) travel to China/Mongolia. The departure today was a bit of a bummer today. We wanted to find out about departure times of the ferry in Marmaris for the boat to Rhodes. We will do some charity work there with the foundation Melissa works with. All in all it was not very clear to us, and we decided to give one of the agencies a call later on. After backing up some of our pictures via the pension computer, we thanked our family at the Anatolya pension for our pleasant stay. Alas we left at 13:30 hrs.

Very soon it was raining, but as a result, this made for a very relaxed atmosphere. on a side dirt road of the main road to Malatya. We had a nice lunch with tomatoes, pesto and mozarella on bread!

Having lunch in the W123

During the chomping we watched the beautiful sky and the mountain range at the horizon. We are heading to Munzu national park, which we chose from the map, but we couldn’t find anything about it in our LP, and no turkish person we spoke was able to tell us something about it.

Great cloud formation!

Clouds in the mirror

When we continued the ride I felt the car was holding back, and started to get a bit frightened of what it could be. It seemed to be mainly when the Benz had to climb, it was getting worse in the mountains, we could only drive 20km/h on some parts at a climb of say, 15%. We were already quite far into the Eastern part of Turkey, so this was not very practical! It was the same feeling as if the car ran out of fuel, so I was thinking it had to do something with the fuel supply. The vegetabel oil we’ve thrown in was only new oil, so that can’t be the problem as far as I can imagine. After filling the car up with some diesel the problem still existed. I also cleaned the air filter, which was a good idea anyways. But in fact, this wasn’t a problem either. Funny thing was, when I tried to explain the service station attendant, who was blind in one eye, what I wanted he was very helpful and took the job out of my hands and did it himself. A trucker who was standing nearby thought this was a good idea and did the same thing too. The very friendly attendant spontaneously shook my hand after I gave some money when the job was done. Still amazed how friendly the turkish are, it is such a relaxed country to travel in! At the time of writing I still don’t know what is wrong, but on the flat roads there is not really a problem, I try to think about it tonight, hopefully I can track it down tomorrow.

Impressive mountains when going east.

We were in fact able to continue the ride, albeit a bit slower than usual. We are now in a hotel 120km west of Malatya. Our hotel is about 120meters of a big minaret and when packing the stuff from the car, we couldn’t even talk to each other, well, we could, but without hearing wat the other said. This hotel was very cheap, about 18ytl (15 Euro), apparently less touristic, as we could see at the entrance, this man seemed not to understand any other language then Turkish. A clean room, and a not so clean bathroom was what we arranged for the night. Cool enough. We had a lot of fun together tonight, hanging around in our room. When we look back to our route today, we have to say it is a real amazing route, stunningly beautiful, we like the Eastern part of Turkey very much so far: Lots of rocky mountains, in many different colors. Sometimes it looked like parts of Morocco.

Melissa and me acting foolish	Even more foolish

After our great breakfast at the pension, which was included we were about to explore the environment together. After my orientation yesterday I knew a bit already to start with today.

Based on tips in the Loneley planet and on the map we had received from our friendly pension owner we had quite a full program for today. We took more than one hundred pictures today, this illustrates how stunningly beautiful Cappadocia is, at least according to us. In fact one cannot describe it really, I’ll show pictures of it, they can illustrate Cappadocia way better then my words.
We planned to explore at least the various cave valleys, like the yellow, rose and the red valley and the cave houses. There was also a church with various images carved in the volcanic stone. We’ve put the Benz away and walked through this area for quite some time, enjoying it, we were alone all the time, I wonder how it is in the high season.

After our exploration in these valleys we went to an ancient city which was carved out of a very big rock. When we got there some guy started to talk to us and wanted to know if we would climb that rock and he offered to guide us. We didn’t, and we also didn’t want to buy his turtle carved out of stone, and went on, this guy following us. Melis wanted to stay down and relaxing on a terrace with a cup of coffee.
I ended up with this guide, climbing on the rock It was not an official guide, I know, but he was so persistent and I felt really sorry for him actually. Usually I’m quite difficult with this, persistent in saying that I don’t want it He told me there was much to see and I wouldn’t be able to find it all by myself.
“Yeah, right”. Disappointedly he walked back.
I walked upwards on the huge rock trying to check out the things to see myself. This fake guide, did tell us that the inhabitants left this city after an earthquake some 600 years ago. He also told me there were nice fresco’s to see in the church.
After I paid the city a visit and walked downwards to Melissa I met our friend again. He asked me if I saw everything and I had to admit thta I didn’t. Thus, we went up again.
He showed me indeed a lot more and couldn’t tell me very much, but he was able to show things I didn’t see. I ended up paying some Ytls and bought his turtle of stone too.
I felt sorry for this guy, that he had to to go through so much hassle, for just a few coins.

After all this, we continued the tour through the area. On our way we saw a turtle crossing the road, a tour bus coming from the other side had stopped and the tour operator was already busy to speed the turtle’s process to cross the road. After that we visited another small village, which also had an old part with houses carved out of rock, as a lot of villages have in Cappadocia. At the end of the day we went back to the valleys around Goreme and drove on a couple of dirt roads, twisted through the landscape of fairy chimneys.
This way we had to drive between the walls of the chimneys and it became smaller and smaller, and after a while we were driving with our wheels completely on the walls, it was exciting to do this, but sometimes a bit scary, then Melissa had to get out of the car and check the space between the car and the walls and see if everything worked out.
The path had become deep in the middle and the curves in it made it even more difficult. After investigating a very difficult part, measuring, considering, thinking, thinking again, I decided this was not save enough to do this, and go back. The problem was if I would give it a shot, I couldn’t go backwards because it was really small and there was a curve in it too. The Benz was too wide to go through this tiny part and I wouldn’t take the risk. I was able to turn around and we drove our same route back, without any problems.
After the sunset it was getting dark so we drove back to our cosy cave. It was a very special day today, lots of beautiful things we saw and the adventure of driving here. We didn’t have the time to go to the Ihlara valley anymore, it was too much. Tomorrow we are leaving again and drive to the East of Turkey.
This night we went out for dinner in a restaurant in Goreme. We had a very good vegetarian pizza and after that we talked with the waiter, who spoke very good english. We had a very good conversation about life and our home countries. It was a pleasant evening and a perfect seclusion of our time in Cappadocia.

Cappadocia

Valley, Goreme

Odd shapes again

View from a cave

Ancient carvings

Ancient city in the rocks

Strange shapes by erosion

Me, driving through Cappadocia

Another W123 T-modell, you don’t see the W123 in Turkey too often.

Urgup, Cappadocia

Heavy steering

More exciting steering

Ballooning in Cappadocia

When it’s getting late in the afternoon, the light becomes very colourful

Sunset

Sunset

Today we decided to rest a bit and do nothing. Melis liked to read today and I wanted to do some stuff to the car.

Having breakfast @ the Antalya Cave Pension

This was the right moment to investigate the Saharagelber, see if everything is all right. Everything was quite okay, hardly any oil usage, and all other fluids were okay. I also fixed the pot meter of the dashboard light, we didn’t have any when it was dark until now. I didn’t have time to fix this before departure so I did this today. I’ve brought a lot of tools with me and some small materials, so with that I was able to fix it. I’ve checked all the connections, tubes and lubrication points. I’ve replaced one fuse and until now nothing more happened since the 4600km we’ve driven. I also glued the Zebrano wood to the dash.
At the end of the afternoon I decided to drive around on my own, Melissa kept reading.
I was longing to drive around in the Saharagelber again So, I took my camera and drove around Goreme, stopped at every place where I wanted to take a picture.

Goreme overview

As a result, most of the time I was stopping, taking a picture, driving and stopping again, taking a picture, driving and so on. It’s great to drive around here, there are loads of small winding dirt roads which are a great to drive on, some are a bit difficult so I had a lot of fun today. The Benz is in its element here, it’s great to see with how much ease she is able do these things. Driving here is a real pleasure and you can get everywhere and stop at very nice spots, being alone nearly all the time. And everytime when I stopped and looked around, I was magicked by this stunning volcanic stone environment created by previous volcanic explosions, with all these strange caves and fairy chimneys, morphed by erosion. After sunset I went back to our cosy little cave where Melissa was (still ) reading

Volcanic environment

The ‘Chimney valley’

The W123 in the volcanic landscape of Cappadocia

Odd shaped, but recognizable…

The Saharagelber in the Goreme valley, the sun was setting, still shining a bit on the car and the trees around.

W123 Sunset

Driving in Cappadocia

Driving in Cappadocia

It was raining this morning. The village looked a bit sad in the rain. The underground city was 200m from our hotel and we walked a little bit through the Kaymakli village first. A bit disappointed, to see the countless stray dogs, which are fighting to stay alive. Lots of them badly hurt or infected, and today, we saw a badly injured dog again, Melis couldn’t get it from her mind. This is one of the bad things of travelling abroad, in most countries the animals have a bad life.
Anyway, we couldn’t help this individual, he was able to walk and we can’t give him a better life. We went to the underground city and decided to take a guide, we were very curious about the story behind these cities.
Some information extracted from a website:

Archaeological evidence shows that Cappadocia was inhabited as early as the Paleolithic period (c. 2.5 million BCE to 10,000 BCE), and continued to serve as home to the peoples of many different civilizations, including the Hittites, Greeks, and the Romans. Dwellings were dug into the rocks and provided shelter from the environment, defense against foreign invasions, and refuge from religious persecution. These dwellings interconnect, forming some two hundred to three hundred underground cities, equipped with elaborate air ventilation systems, water storage units, and in some cases, even stables and wineries. One of the most famous and well excavated is Kaymakli, where Christians hid from the pagan Roman invaders during the seventh century.

source: http://www.bookrags.com/history/worldhistory/cappadocia-ema-01/

This was really fascinating, from the Kaymakli ancient city 3 etages were open to the public, and there were five in total. Our small guide ran through the small passages and told us that these people used to to that too to move very fast and able to block passages with big rolling stones. He showed us wineries, kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms (for the regular and the richer families), meeting rooms, etc. Really impressive.

Inside the underground city of Kaymakli	Corridor

A family house
Kaymakli

After we investigated the city we walked back to the Saharagelber. It was still raining and we decided to drive to Goreme, from this base we would explore Cappadocia. Since it was raining we would then find a cosy place were we could do some reading or something.
We drove through this beautiful area and it all was a very nice atmosphere after all, a bit of rain, driving through this weird quiet area and listening to good music. Near Goreme we began to see the fairy chimneys, the weather had cleared up a bit and the rain had stopped.
We were stunned by the view of these chimney-like caves. This area really looks awesome! It is so weird, so beautiful, like another planet. We found a nice room in the Anatolya Cave Pension, it was a room in the cave we took, and we both said to ourselves, that this room was one of the cooles we ever had on our travels. You can see ‘our’ cave on this picture here (on the left): anatoliacave.com/resimler/029.jpg.

If you tend to stay in Goreme some time, really visit this pension, it’s such a nice place!
Very friendly people, and a beautiful pension, a place to be and a place to remember!
The room we had was as you can see in such a cave and is really, really cosy. We actually had two rooms, and a very luxe and clean bathroom, and it was definitely cheap too. The url is Anatoliacave.com After we installed ourselves in our new home, we sat down with the pension owner and his family and drank some turkish tea. He told us about what to see and where to go in Goreme. Mellissa and I both agreed that this must be paradise.

The Antalya Cave pension

Cave cooking

The rest of the day we hung around there and relaxed a bit and played with the dogs. There was a small dog, called Pascha which reminded us of one of our own dogs. At the end of the day I watched the sunset from a hill nearby, where some other backpackers were to be found too, I was surprised to meet my new friend Pascha there again The sunset with all these strange morphed caves and the sight of the colored mountain gives an extra dimension to the sunset, and on top of that, it all colors very beautiful. After that I walked back and saw a very cosy cafe-like place called The Flinstones. This was a very cosy place, also in a cave, I decided to ask Melissa to go there tonight, and we did. But first we Melis made our dinner in our tiny comfortable cave.
This was *the* place where fellow travellers were chatting with each other and sit and relax. A hearth in the middle kept the place warm. One of the visitors started playing music, vocals and guitar, this girl had a pretty voice and it was a pleasure to listen to. Oh what a night! Sometimes, when exploring the world, you come across a place which impress very much and has a very relaxed atmosphere, In my opinion, Goreme, Cappadocia ist just like that.
After a boatload of wine (for me though) it was time to go to bed. Still happy to be in Turkey, still amazed about the hospitality and the kindness of the turkish, and the beauty of Turkey itself.

Sunset in Goreme

Close to our pension, Goreme. The sun was setting and a lot of people were watching it., myself incluis

The travellers place to be: The Flintstones in Goreme

After a cold shower (yah, indeed). Yesterday it was indeed warm, as our turkish friend told us, but they have a watertank on the roof, and the sun warms it up during the day.
But in the morning the water has of course become stone-cold. But it’s okay, it’s all part of these kind of journeys. Just like this, just before we left Melis also broke a lath of the bed by just sitting on it. Yesterday evening I’d found out that one of the fuel tanks was leaking, when I was inspecting it today, I was inspecting the damage, it turned out that the complete roof was full of this vegetable oil, as was the cargo door. Furthermore, the rest of the car was full of tiny spots of oil. So, I planned to stop at a fountain along the route through the coast mountains. I had fixed the tank leak yesterday night with some glue and one screw, the glue had become hard, so that’s good. After we were offered a cup of coffee again, which was very kind, we departed to continue the coastal route for some time and then go up north to Cappadocia. After I found a fountain I stopped to clean the oil, while I was cleaning the car with shampoo the turkish family in their nice red W115 drove by and honked.

Our pension last night	The nice W115 of our hotel owner

After some time we stopped at a very nice spot with a beach in front of it and had a cup of coffee on a cosy beach terrace of the restaurant. There were hardly any people around here, and after we sat there for a while we decided to sit on the beach for a while. I also took a dive in the sea, which was a good refresh for it was very warm. We relaxed some more and then left again, in the direction of Cappadocia. We won’t see the sea for some time now.

We were quite late again, so we would arrive during the night.
Late in the evening we entered a small village (I guess it was Derinkuyu). We found one pension which appeared to be full, we didn’t get any offer to sleep somewhere else, so we continued our trip, the man of the pension told me ‘Kaymakli’ a couple of times, so there we were maybe able to find something (it was already nearly midnight). We managed to find something in Kaymakli indeed so we were lucky to find the door still open. This pension looked okay, if there’s a bed and water it’s okay already. We made it, it was already 00:30am, but managed to find a place to sleep.
After we walked the stairs we found two men in a room and we arranged a room. The turkish man spoke a bit english and we had a short chat about the ancient underground city we had to check out here in Kaymakli, he borrowed me a small book of Cappadocia and I read some of it in our room. First get a good deal of sleep and tomorrow we will check out the underground city. Melis cooked a nice meal again and we enjoyed it with some wine.
It’s getting exciting, tomorrow we will see what Cappadocia is like…

Always disappointing to see how all the garbage is thrown of the hill by the local people.

Garbage	More garbage

In the morning we arranged to meet each other on the square, we lost half an hour, because there were two squares After we found each other we left for the ancient city or Termessos. After about 40kms from Antalya you enter the national park. We parked the car on the parking lot, which was already full with tourist buses, hmmkay. We walked through those ruins today, it was quite impressive to see this, but unfortunately, most of it was completely or mostly destroyed, as is oftend the case with ruins of course, but we hoped for something more after we read about the enthousiastic review in a travel guide from Fedde.

Some info about Termessos:

Termessos is perhaps the most interesting ancient city in Antalya region. It is a Psidian city built at a height of 1050 meters in the Taurus Mountains. Termessos constitutes an unusual synthesis of a large number of rare plants and animal species, which are under protection in the Termessos National Park. When turning off the Antalya-Burdur highway (11 km.) in the direction of Korkuteli, the Termessos signpost will be seen 14 km. further on, and Termessos itself is a further 9 km. A visit to this site requires time and the stamina to walk uphill, because Termessos is built entirely on a mountainous area difficult to access.

See for more info: This article @ Antalya-ws.com

Termessos has a lot of tombs	The amfitheatre

Amfitheatre again

After the ruins we went back to Antalya, we passed the big Kipa supermarket and wanted to check-out if they had vegetable oil. We wered stunned how big this place was, a gigantic K-mart like warehouse. I was glad to see they had 5L bottles of sunflower oil, that’s a whole lot better than the 1 liter bottles. In the supermarket, after I filled the shopping cart with 135 liters in total the turkish people around us were stupified. We saw them watching like “What is this guy doing with that stuff?!?”. A turkish man couldn’t restrain his curiousity and walked towards me and asked what I was about to do with this. He only spoke turkish and no english or german or french, but he was so amazed, he just *had* to know (otherwise he probably couldn’t sleep I made some gestures by virtually steering a car, and I guess he’d understand At the parking lot of the Kipa, Fedde helped me with filling the car up. After that we had to separate, we brought Fedde back to the Citadel of Antalya and we were heading east in the direction of Anamur. It was already past 7pm, so we tried to make it to Side and look for a pension/hotel there. We didn’t want to drive in the dark as we sometimes do, because the coastal route of Turkey is amazing.

When we entered Side in the evening, it looked awful. Side only seemed to exist of awful gigantic resort buildings, the part of side along the coast that is. After looking for a while, we found a small one which was okay, and not too expensive. Melis didn’t want to spend the night in the car, because the lack of water to wash ourselves with. In our room we Melis made a dinner with rice. We had a lot of fun tonight, this time it resulted in a rice fight, we bombarded each other with rice, too much fun we had Tomorrow we depart again to continue the coastal route.

Wondering what we are going to do with it..	Fill ‘r up!

Filling her up again	Manavgat falls

On the road to Side (Manavgat)	Along the coast