END OF THE ROAD

London, 28 May 2002

We've arrived at the end of the road, which is more a feat than it sounds. Getting through Africa was easier than we and everyone else imagined. Europe, conversely, was a rougher trip with bits of the truck expiring as we made our way west towards the Channel.
The problems started in the Middle East; maybe Wag 'n Bietjie couldn't handle the tarred roads after so long bouncy around on bad dirt roads. But things accelerated, so to speak, through Jordan and Syria, eventually blowing a gasket shortly after we crossed the Turkish border.
When we stopped in Gaziantep, about 50 km into Turkey we found the diesel leak had become a fountain and we had to find a Toyota garage. It was comforting to find that the first things they checked were the same as I'd checked - they too found nothing there.
While I took a nap in the waiting area - after too long travelling, I clearly have no problem falling asleep with my mouth wide open and snoring loudly in the middle of a car showroom - while the mechanic took half the engine out.
Too short to work comfortably over the sill of the engine bay, he spent half the afternoon standing on the bullbar with his head buried in the innards of the truck. After disconnecting the injector pipes, removing the inlet manifold and shifting various bits out of the way, he took the diesel pump out and discovered the leak was due to a stuffed gasket. Once that was repaired we'd only wasted half a day.
From there we headed inland, trying to decipher a route across Turkey that was short, fast and avoided as many toll roads, which aren't marked as such on the map we had with us. It wasn't too hard to work out which ones they were - the first choice of road was invariably a toll road while second choices tended to wind a lot more.
For anyone wondering why we were looking for the fastest routes, the answer is relatively simple. After Jordan and Syrian border fees and the cost of fuel in Europe, our funds were disappearing faster than a good box of chocolates. Our minds, too, were still operating in a different milieu with Europe and the Middle East being way too strange after the simplicity of life in Africa.

Winding Up
We realised that Turkey was closer to Europe than the Middle East when we stopped to fill up with diesel and discovered the price had jumped from six-fold compared to Syria.
Our first night in Turkey was spent halfway up a mountain pass, bushcamping just off the road and out of sight of it. We'd arrived well after dark, having tried to make up for some of the time lost earlier in the day and driven until about 10 pm.
Well after daybreak, we crawled out of the rooftop tent to find the surrounding peaks covered in snow (explaining why it was so cold) and that we'd camped near what appeared to be the local village's old rubbish dump.
As we wound up and over the pass it got colder and the wind bit harder whenever we stopped. We made our way through really beautiful valleys to Goreme in the Cappadocia region of central Turkey where the rock has been eroded to form weird shapes - stone mushrooms and conical columns capped with precariously balanced boulders.
Even stranger are the garages, storerooms, houses and underground cities which the region's residents have developed over the centuries. While all the guidebooks give the impression that the caverns were built hundreds of years ago, if that is the case then the original hewers of stone must have had an excellent idea of the dimensions that would be used for container-laden trucks!
There wasn't enough time to explore the region properly and we again bushcamped after dark on a quite road north of Kirsehir. By now the speedo cable was screeching at us on a semi-continuous basis and attempts at rectifying it - involving removing the dashboard three times in a single day to get to the cable - proved fruitless. We eventually disconnected the cable altogether.
Weird feeling, driving around with no idea of how fast you're travelling or how far you've gone. Not that it was a major problem in the truck, which struggles to exceed speed limits at the best of times. We also used the GPS to really good effect, as it gives read outs of both total distance and current speed.

Lost Chance to See
By now the brake pads were even more worn out than we were feeling and we were trying not to brake too much, using the gears and a bit of foresight to slow down. I wasn't keen on changing the pads in the middle of Europe - more time and the chance that something would go wrong (considering my mechanical skills) plus the piggy bank was empty.
Crossing the Bosphorus, both Lisa and I looked longingly at Istanbul's old city of Sultanahmet and muttering about having to come back for a proper holiday.
We spent the night in (another) bushcamp just before the Greek border. At the border the next morning we met Renate and Gebhard Fleck, a German couple touring in their motorhome. Gebhardt wanted to know where we were from, which led to us all stopping for tea once we'd finished the border crossing.
I'd been really nervous about getting into Greece because European Union regulations stipulate that animals must be microchipped. Tigger isn't one of the electronically tagged but in the event, the officials didn't even ask about her and we cruised through without a problem. Thankfully, they didn't ask about insurance for Wag 'n B either.
While we'd invited Renate and Gebhardt for tea, when they stopped beside us they insisted on making it and hauled out a gigantic box of excellent biscuits, insisting we eat as much as we could. "Nem! Nem!" ("Take! Take!") Gebhardt kept saying to us.
The morning we spent chatting with them - despite their lack of English and our appalling German, we all made ourselves understood - was worth a week in luxury hotel. It recharged our batteries and faith in people. They also insisted on giving us a pile of treats to help us on our way, a map of half of Greece (the only one we had!) and an offer of cash (with a trusting offer to let us repay it when we were settled) and their sons' addresses in southern Germany: "We'll call them and let them know that you might be coming".
Crossing Greece was fairly straightforward although the last 200km were over mountain passes in the rain and Wag 'n B, which has always had a "light" rear end, was sliding all over the place, even at 30 km/h.

Washed Out
Igoumenitsa lies on the Adriatic coast of Greece and is a major ferry port, particularly for those touring Greece and Turkey in motorhomes. For much of the day there was a continuous stream of motorhomes coming inland as we made our way west to the seaside town.
Getting aboard the ferry that evening was a welcome relief - we hadn't had a shower in a week! After parking the car, both Lisa and I headed straight for the heads, peeling off our smelly layers and shedding a further 5 kg as the dirt washed off. For good measure, I went back the next morning for another shower before we reached Bari on the Italian coast.
True to form, the ferry owners lied about when the ferry would dock and I had time to catch another hour's sleep before we docked and wound our way north up the Italian coast.
While the regional roads in southern Italy were clear enough to travel on, those further north wound through every single village, one village ending where the next started, and we sought refuge on the toll roads.
Stopping at one of the rest areas on the toll road, we were approached by another German. Andreas and his countrymen were the friendliest we met in Europe and the most knowledgeable and interested. Lisa and I were both a bit astounded when Andreas walked over and, pointing at the number plate, asked: "Is that GP as in Gauteng Province?".
Again (and again, and again!) we were spoiled with a good (German) map of Italy. In our defence, I have to say that most of our planning and research had been focussed on Africa and we'd planned to buy European maps when we reached the region. By the time we got here, we were too frazzled to venture into the big towns looking for maps. Fortune smiled on us though.
Weaving through the Alps, we crossed into France via the Frejus tunnel, a 13 km long tube through the mountains that cuts out a long and winding road over the mountains with rises to 2 500 m or so.

Bon Jour-ney
Reaching the light at the end of the tunnel we halted for the night at a truck stop and did some shopping: we figured we'd need a map of France! We also had another shower (you'll understand the joy of showering when you go travelling!) We'd been hoping to reach the UK by Friday - two days hence - but quarantine arrangements for Tigger made this impossible.
Instead, we took our time crossing France, spending two nights and a day secluded in a small patch of forest near Abbeville. Less than 100 m from the road, we were completely screened from it and even the picnickers who arrived during the day didn't realise we were there until they put foot on the track leading into the forest and Tigger appeared out of the gloom to growl at them. She's become quite protective, which has its advantages! None of the visitors continued down the track and we rested undisturbed.

Ferry Nearly Not
We almost didn't get to cross the English Channel because our credit card decided now was a good time to bounce, 40 Euros short of the ferry price! On top of that, we couldn't draw any of the money in our British bank account because the card had expired 4 days before we crossed into Turkey, the first country where we could access the funds.
Great things, sisters. After another plaintive phone call from the dumb cells in distress, my sister used her credit card to book the tickets and we collected them, along with Tigger's quarantine paperwork and boarded the ferry on the last leg of the journey. Mind you, I think we boarded on our last legs too!
We won't talk of the horror of seeing Tigger taken off to quarantine. Leaving Dover, I had a couple of weird moments adjusting to driving on the left again after three months of keeping right but we skirted London on the M25 (the superhighway that rings London) and found Ham Island, our temporary home.
We've reached the end of one journey but have started another. Of a different sort, this journey will, perhaps, involve less moving but more journeys of discovery.
Now, I need to go and talk to our cat, which has been sitting - impatiently, no doubt - in quarantine for 6 months. It's good to see her again.