The plan was to spend three days in Istanbul and move on. We stayed for three weeks. Turkey does that to you.

We crossed into Turkey from Bulgaria at the Kapıkule border crossing on a grey Wednesday morning in September. The immigration queue took three hours. The customs officer looked at our van, then at our faces, then at our van again, and asked us a question we could not understand. We shrugged. He stamped our passports and waved us through. We drove into Turkey with absolutely no idea what we were doing, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions we have ever made by accident.

Istanbul: Parking is the Problem

Istanbul with a van is, to be blunt, a logistical nightmare. The city is beautiful and chaotic and magnificent and absolutely not designed for a 6.5-metre wheelbase. We found a motorhome parking site in the Asian side, near Kadıköy, that cost twelve euros a night and had functioning showers. This is where we stayed. We took the ferry to the European side every morning like commuters. The ferry costs less than a pound.

The Drive East

The road from Istanbul to Cappadocia is around 750 kilometres. You can do it in a day on the motorway. We took five days and barely touched the motorway. The D200 highway through Bolu and Ankara is slower, stranger, and infinitely more interesting. We bought a kilo of tomatoes from a roadside seller near Bolu for forty pence. They were the best tomatoes in the world.

“We bought a kilo of tomatoes from a roadside seller near Bolu for forty pence. They were the best tomatoes in the world.”

Cappadocia hit us at dusk on the fifth day. We had been watching the landscape slowly change from green forested hills to high Anatolian steppe, and then suddenly, without warning, the fairy chimneys. You know what they look like from photographs. They look nothing like the photographs. The photographs do not have the scale. The fairy chimneys of Göreme are vast, and there are thousands of them, and the light at dusk turns them the colour of amber. We pulled over on the roadside and did not speak for some time.