Turkey was the first country on our round-the-world bike trip that required any kind of visa.
Until recently you could enter Turkey by just showing your passport — or even your national ID card. But it became official — and mandatory — to apply online for the Turkish e-visa.
The Turkish visa for Spanish citizens currently costs $20 and grants the right to stay in the country for 90 days out of any 180. In other words, 3 out of every 6 months.
Although it's officially mandatory to get the visa online first, other travellers we met had shown up at the border without one — and the officers on duty didn't seem particularly informed (or didn't bother checking) and let them through without a visa. So you can always play roulette if you fancy your chances.
It's always worth checking the up-to-date official conditions on the Turkish page of the Spanish Foreign Ministry.
Ilze, as a Latvian citizen, had different entry conditions for Turkey. Despite Latvia being a European Union member — and since a year ago, part of the eurozone — its bilateral agreements with Turkey are entirely separate, for better and for worse.
With her Latvian passport she didn't need — and wasn't able — to apply for the e-visa or pay the fee. But the stamp in her passport only authorised her to stay 30 days in Turkey. Like other European citizens she can be in Turkey for 90 out of every 180 days, but they only grant her 30 days at a stretch. A real problem when you're planning to cross a country as big as Turkey by bicycle — especially if you actually want to travel through it rather than just sprint from one end to the other.
What to do about extending her visa in Turkey?
We started thinking through the options, considering the route and the possibility of leaving and re-entering the country through different border crossings.
One option — which Ilze ruled out based on somewhat unfounded anxiety — was simply staying in the country beyond the permitted time. Then paying the fine when we left.
If the overstay is under a month, the amount isn't enormous. And they don't force you to pay on the spot — they give you two choices: pay up, or be banned from returning to Turkey for a period ranging from 3 months to 2 years. That didn't strike me as much of a problem given that we're planning to travel the world by land for years — but without solid official information, she preferred to play it safe and vetoed my preferred option.
Our second option was to cut the route short, head north into Georgia without going through southern Turkey and try to reach the border in under 30 days. This was our plan for a while, until we made friends in Istanbul and spent a week in the capital. With under three weeks left, it no longer seemed feasible.
The third option was to do a visa run. The term implies leaving the country and re-entering to get a fresh visa and buy more time to stay. It's a system used in countries with free short-stay visas, especially when the nearest border is close or transport is cheap. In countries like Thailand it's fairly common — that's actually where the term was coined.
How to do a visa run in Turkey?
For me, with my Spanish passport, a visa run made no sense — regardless of how many times I enter and leave, I'm allowed the same time in Turkey: 90 days out of 180.
But for Ilze, with her 30-day maximum stay, leaving and re-entering would give her another month to cycle through Turkey.
Since we were on bikes, riding all the way to a border to turn around and come back didn't feel sensible. So we started thinking about taking a ferry to a Greek island and back, or to Cyprus. Both options floated around for a while, but in the end we decided to head up the northern coast and "see what happened" with her visa — partly because the ferries were so expensive.
Cycling the Turkish Black Sea coast we reached Zonguldak, a city where we made new friends through Couchsurfing and decided to stop, recover and park the bikes for a while.
While we were there it occurred to us to try our luck at the international port. Walk in bold as brass, chat to the passport control officers, explain our situation and see if they'd stamp us out and straight back in again.
After talking to several of the officers everything seemed set — none of them had any objection and saw no problem with it — until a female officer appeared with nothing better to do than derail our plans, saying it was illegal and couldn't be done. Despite nobody else caring in the slightest, we ended up leaving empty-handed.
Back to basics: hitchhiking
With all other options exhausted, we decided to go back to our roots and hitchhike to the nearest border — Greece or Bulgaria, either would do.
We left the bikes with our friend in Zonguldak, swapped panniers for backpacks and headed to the road.
Hitchhiking in Turkey was a dream. Two minutes at the roadside — our friend still watching from his car — and another vehicle stopped with three Turks inside, heading straight to Istanbul.
Five hours later we were in Istanbul, from where we'd continue to the border. But where to sleep on such a spontaneous arrival in the Turkish capital?
The obvious move was to pay a surprise visit to Cemil — the Turkish artist we'd stayed with when we first arrived in Istanbul by bike a few weeks earlier.
Hi Cemil! Did you miss us?
The look on his face was priceless.
What are you doing here? Where are your bikes? Welcome!
Between laughs and hugs:
We've come for Christmas — Happy Christmas!
And it turned out it actually was Christmas Eve.
We spent a couple of days with our friends in Istanbul before it was time to go to the border for the new stamp. We caught a city bus out of Istanbul — which is chaos to navigate with its traffic and sprawl — and once in the outskirts continued hitching.
From there we quickly found someone heading towards the border. Not only that, but they were going to the border and coming back!
A couple of businessmen heading to buy some commercial premises a few kilometres from the border offered to take us there and give us a lift back to Istanbul afterwards.
When we arrived at the border, Ilze got out of the car, walked to the end of the Turkish side and got her exit stamp. Goodbye! She turned around and walked back in with a "good morning" to the same officer. Without a single fuss, he put in her new entry stamp and she got back in the car for the return to Istanbul, with several stops along the way to sort out our drivers' business. Another 30 days' visa secured!
Hitchhiking always ends well
We asked them to drop us at a service station, where we hoped to find a lorry going beyond Istanbul — but they insisted there was a better one further on.
It turned out we were right and they ended up dropping us at the same spot where they'd picked us up: a pretty poor place to get across Istanbul, and even worse now it was dark. But what could we do?
I sprinted to a supermarket for supplies and we kept hitching. Several cars stopped offering to take us to places we didn't want to go, until finally one said yes — he was going past Istanbul.
Of course. He was going to the very centre of Istanbul, the worst possible place to continue hitchhiking towards Zonguldak. The couple seemed a bit all over the place and didn't inspire much confidence — even less so after taking us on a tour of Istanbul's back streets for reasons unknown, shouting at every woman walking past.
But as almost always, even the ones who make the worst first impression end up surprising you. They brought us sandwiches, drove us to a city bus stop heading out of Istanbul in the direction of Zonguldak, and he gave me an envelope with some money for the bus fare.
In any other situation I would have refused, and I did decline a couple of times — but after he'd insisted and considering it was him who'd taken us into the centre of Istanbul despite saying he was going the other way, I decided to accept the "gift".
Despite being on the right heading, we'd lost hours between the first guys' business stops and the second driver's Istanbul detours, and it was too late and too dark to keep hitchhiking.
The bus had dropped us on a busy road in the Istanbul outskirts, so we kept hitching while walking further from the city and trying to find a quiet spot to pitch the tent.
A couple of drivers picked us up and took us a few kilometres further each time. Finally we found a patch of grass to pitch the tent on.
We were shattered after a whole day on the road and all we wanted was sleep. But… where are the tent pegs??
Ilze had reorganised the "sleeping stuff" when she switched backpacks, and when she packed the tent, she'd forgotten to include the pegs we need to anchor it.
Brilliant. We'd been carrying a tent that weighs a tonne for days on end, and now that we actually wanted to use it, it was completely useless.
So, nothing for it but to keep walking and find somewhere else to sleep — the grass was wet and sleeping without a tent didn't seem ideal.
A few kilometres further on, with Ilze complaining about how tired she was, we spotted a petrol station and the porch of an empty building next to it. We set out our sleeping bags and camping mats on the porch.
Just as we were settling into our sleeping bags a couple of rats ran across our legs. Sweet dreams, Ilze!
It was then that a couple of petrol station workers came over to ask what we were doing. Like every Turk we'd met, they asked if we'd had any trouble with Turkish people — and like many others, they said it was fine for me to sleep anywhere I liked, but a woman couldn't sleep out here like this; there would be problems.
After much insisting that it really was fine and there was no issue, they kept at it and offered us the petrol station kitchen to sleep in. And so once again Turkish hospitality came to the rescue, saving us from a night in the open — and with rats scampering over us.
The next morning, another surprise: an invitation to have breakfast with them. Recharged and full, we headed back to the road. We walked to the next motorway toll booth and in thirty seconds of hitching a lorry picked us up.
Our route back to Zonguldak continued without incident. Nobody ever took more than two or three minutes to stop and take us a little further along, and a few hours later we were back in Zonguldak.
That's how we pulled off a visa run in Turkey by hitchhike — because to cycle around the country we had to stick our thumbs out.
