Greetings from Bursa.

The Anglophones are still in two groups. Les and Margaret in Kon-Tiki are in Turkey, Clive, Anne and Maureen (in K-Nine and Womble) are probably still in Iran.

This page is based on an e-mail received from Les and Margaret on the 2002-12-21.

Greetings from Bursa (south of Istanbul, Turkey, over the Sea of Marmara) where we arrived on Friday 20th (of December 2002) and plan to leave on the 22nd.

The run from Erzincan westwards was very easy indeed. The road was almost entirely free of ice and snow and the weather was excellent. Traffic was light. The side roads however continue to be difficult. At Adapazari, we turned south to Bursa off the NR100. This was a mistake. Rain had started to fall and soon turned into snow. We camped south of Adap for the night. In the morning, after what looked like 30cms of snow, we headed south to join the Ankara-Bursa road believing it would be busy and cleared. The opposite was the case and we had to cross the mountains to Bursa in the worst ice and snow conditions we have experienced on the entire trip. A journey that is normally 90 minutes took us 5 hours and it was not funny. At Inegol, the conditions improved markedly so the last few tens of kilometers into Bursa were not bad.

We've had a very good time here, but as usual life has been dominated by our ritual visits to garages. Kon-Tiki went into the local Mercedes garage on Friday and came out on Saturday, the main (new) problem being a broken engine mounting. The garage was fine except they did not do two of the things we asked for, so on Saturday afternoon we went to another garage and had the 12 volt alternator seen to. Unfortunately the diesel space heater could not be fixed but we do have the gas space heater functional now, and we expect temperatures to be reasonable for the run home.

In Bursa we've finalized our home run plan. We'd hoped there would be an Izmir-Venice ferry functioning but there isn't so we intend to drive to north Greece via the ferry over the Dardanelles (Gallipoli) and on to Igoumenitsa where we'll catch the 4 times a week BlueStar ferry up the Adriatic to Venice. This ferry offers ‘camping on board’ so you sleep in your van and don't have to buy a cabin. From Venice we'll cross northern Italy to southern France and then work our way up to the UK.

We have no idea when we'll get home but it will probably be mid-January after visiting various folks in the UK.