It’s foreign rental car day! Yay!
When renting a car in a foreign country (via a Polish call centre 3 months ago in New Zealand), one must prepare yourself for issues with the following points.
1. Will you get the car type you ordered, or will they have none left and force you to have a massive gas guzzler.
2. Will there be little extras you didn’t read in the fine print which makes it an obscenely expensive venture.
3. Will the car be clean, or has it just had 4 backpackers, live, sleep and travel round Europe in it.
Having got up early in Istanbul, we get collected from our accommodation by a shuttle. We went with this option rather than 2 trains and a long walk for 3/4th the price of an aircon bus. Arriving at Ataturk airport, we look at the rental receipt for our car for our pick up location; none specified. We look for a rental desk with that name of the company; not anywhere to be seen. We ask another desk who kindly call the contact number on the booking; thankfully they are sending someone to deliver us our Suzuki swift.
Quickly enough a gentleman comes, from a completely different company with a document and my name on it ( always a positive sign when before you have started they have sub contracted out your hire).
He shows us the vehicle, a Renault cleo that’s done 120,000km, had cigarette burns in the seats, and rubbish still in the door slot. This is clearly a problem of issue 1 as mentioned above; not a yellow Suzuki swift (having seen no Suzuki swifts in Turkey, I should have known). I argue that’s its not the right car, its not clean, and it looks like its been driven around the world. The gentleman’s English isn’t good, so he puts me on the phone to his boss, who doesn’t quite have the grasp of the situation, without a desk at the airport it’s hard to argue the point solely in sign language.
They also point out that despite me having a ‘to pay’ amount on my receipt, this doesn’t included one way fee that hasn’t been added in correctly; issue 2.
So far its 3 for 3 on the ‘issues’ front.
After 30 min deliberation and a little forcefulness on my behalf (a lot of gesticulating), we have a new 2013 Renault cleo that’s done 1800km, and has a AUX input for the speakers. I’d call that a win !

Driving on the right hand side of the road is a pretty interesting proposition, particularly in Istanbul which constantly gets voted as having the worst traffic in the word. We have purchased a GPS for 120 NZ dollars rather than hiring one for 96 euro; kiwi ‘Ben’ as the voice is a welcoming addition to driving in Turkey. As all rentals in turkey come with an empty gas tank (? so you can siphon off the last bits when you return it since gas is so expensive), so we set out to find a petrol station. A complete wrong turn later we head back to the airport to try again – success finally !

Road rules really don’t apply in turkey. Passing dangerously at speed, using your horn and using the kerb are all common place. The highways switch from each side of the median due to construction so that you go from 2 lanes to head on traffic without any signs or warnings; big slabs of tarmac covering massive pot holes. Random road workers run across the highway, and people generally drive the wrong way all the time. Takes a bit of concentration! After 350km today we are pretty tired.

Thanks to kiwi Ben we are headed in the right direction to Gallipoli. A little frazzled, a little rattled but we get there in one piece. After 350km today we are pretty tired but pull into our hotel called ‘Crowded house hotel’. Kia ora!