The last time we crossed the border from Greece into to Turkey we were held up for more than four hours at Customs; it was very stressful and tiring. Other travellers had reported even worse delays. We arrived at Ipsala soon after 10 am and the inside of our truck was cursorily inspected by Customs. Then our passports were stamped and we were sent into the office to purchase vehicle insurance – €190 for 90 days. The Border Staff were putting vehicles through their X-ray machine but, for some reason, we didn’t have to go through that process. In just over one hour we were free to go on our way – and we were like kids let out of school early. We were heading for Şile, a fishing port on the Black Sea coast.
During our first few hours in the country we realised that Starlink, our internet provider, was not available in Turkey. This was a major inconvenience for us as everything we did was reliant on having fast and reliable internet access. We had purchased Turkish SIM cards for our phones at the border but the Vodafone service was a poor substitute for Starlink. It reminded us of the “bad old days” when you were regularly topping up SIM cards for internet access.
