Café Palatium after dinner with all the pseudo-explorers like us sipping çay or Turkish orta coffee or smoking narguile water pipes seated on kilims. Great pasha feeling in western imagination resting away from the Grand Bazaar animation
05H00 on a Sunday morning is tough. 8 kg each for 90 days is harder but is the minimum we have managed to squash in our back packs. This trip is finally starting and yet it seems totally unreal. We have been talking about it for years and today is the first day of this dream of many years. Being driven by Ved, our Mauritian Paris driver in his Mercedes seems contradictory to the spirit of the trip.
Paris – Istanbul on Turkish airlines.