Turkish traffic experiences

date: 2006-02-08
pos: istanbul
author: frank

From my last holidays in Turkey a couple of years ago I already new how people drive in this country. But my last turkish traffic experiences I had were on a seat in the back of tourist busses who overtook inwards in left curve in the mountains, where I could at least concentrate a bit more on praying. But now I was sitting myself on the right side in our car with the stearing wheel in my hands, with side windows and mirrors totally covered with dirt and tried to manouvre our Landy between honking and blinking turkish cars across the 4-laned unmarked highway, sometimes only with a distance of a few centimetres. It was hard keeping up with the cleening of the mirrors because it was snowing constantly and the cars around splashed the wet dirt all over. You had to be prepared to all directions, for the broken cars at the side of the road or the ones that decided to pull off in a sudden, the busses that suddenly stopped to pick up people at the side of the highway or pulled in. Our only defense in this chaos, beside the size of our car – the horn, is unfortunately frozen. After a traffic jam due to snow on the highway to Istanbul we made our way into the city center – if there would have been sth like ”CENTER” on the signs, it would have helped us. But instead only turkish names, which didn’t help. At the end the GPS helped us finding the way in this for us not comprehensible forest of street signs. My advice for everyone, who wants to learn driving should do this here in Istanbul – it’s a lot of fun actually. And after this lesson, you are prepared to go everywhere I guess, even Paris.



Istanbul traffic