The Balkans - 3 - Greece to Turkey

Having crossed from Bulgaria into Greece I drove down the eastern border of Greece to the crossing into Turkey near Ipsala, Turkey.

First of all, however, I made a small detour near the Bulgaria/Turkey/Greece tripiont into the Greek village of Kastanies which has a border crossing with Turkey. I think this is the only land (as in not even across a river) border crossing between the two countries. I did not want to enter Turkey at this point as I had a mission to find a geocache in Greece first - but I did check out the border post on the Greek side as you can see in the following video.



The actual crossing into Turkey, however, was another story. As you can see from the following video, the Greek authorities were concerned about my camera as well as the documents for the car. The car being registered in Serbia, and being a rental, they wanted to check that it was permitted to take it into Turkey before they would let me through. Although the insurance documents were in order there was no annotation in the rental contract about taking it into any other country. Fortunately I eventually remembered that I had a paper copy of the original booking off the internet and that explicitly stated that I was allowed to take the car into both Greece and Turkey and that satisfied them. As for my camera, they wanted to check that I had not taken any video of "prohibited" places in Greece (although how I was supposed to know that an particular place was "prohibited" I don't know). They spent some time looking at the video footage I had taken and eventually seemed content to let me proceed, asking me not to video the area between the inspection post and the border. You can see the result in the video below. For a fuller video of the actual border crossing I have found this one on YouTube which may be of interest.

Once I reached the Turkish side it was a matter of a lot of stops, my failure to understand the instructions being given in virtually non-existent English about where to go to buy a tourist visa, all of which combined with the delays on the Greek side to make this border crossing take about 2 hours. Sadly this meant that I arrived at the Anzac memorial to Gallipolli just after sunset (1715 at this time of year) which lessed the impact of that most interesting place.