End of the Road – Bolu

I am still awake after a big night and a day of doing paperwork, I am still on the bus with a driver who is falling asleep at the wheel. Its 3am and we pull into our petrol stop at Bolu. Horrors they don’t seem to understand they are supposed to bill us for fuel. I spend about 1 hour in total making and receiving phone calls from my boss who eventually tells me to pay for it out of my expense account, luckily I have enough on me, as two big burley guys have now got on the bus and are being quite intimidating. We pick up another driver after the current driver insists on stuffing about for about another 30 minutes on top of all the time we have wasted on the phone and getting agro at the petrol station.

We pick up a second driver who drives us all the way to Istanbul and who is awake, so now I can relax a little. I manage to fall asleep for about 45 minutes, before we arrive at the Bosphorus bridge, and I need to wake the passengers up and start guiding again. I tell them they are crossing from Asia into Europe, I point out Dolmabache Palace and the Spice Bazaar, then Topkapi Palace and finally get into “the strip” (the street where the office is) at about 7:30am.