With 31-36% salinity the lake is even saltier than the Dead Sea. However, you can’t swim in it.

But it is still a magnet for tourist of every stripe.

Yesterday evening we reached Cappadocia, “a semi-arid region in central Turkey, which is famous for its fairy chimneys. Those conical rock formations exist in the Ihlara Valley, Göreme and other places. Additional important sights are the cave houses from the Bronze Age, which were later on used by Christrians as sanctuary. There are many rock churches in the 100 m metre deep Ihlara Valley.”

People from the Mongol Rally Whatsapp group recommended the “Dilek campsite” which we drove to. It feels like it is located right downtown in a backyard and other rally cars were literally piled up there.

We met two guys from the UK. They also travel with a “Polo Mark 2”, altough a coupé.

After the first welcome beer, we pitched our tents and talked about our experiences on the road so far.

After a long, difficult battle, countless tries of reactivation, remote access from home and a lot of swearwords, it became clear this morning: The tracker doesn’t track anymore and it will never again. 🙁

We are going to receive a loaner tracker in Yerevan (Armenia). Until then, we will try to record our journey manually over the next few days.

-Tobi

Istanbul was truly amazing. It was my 2nd time and way better this time. Would even consider to come back one day…We left Istanbul yesterday early evening and thought to stay in a smaller town close to the road… turns out Bolu has 130.000+ people and quite some industry… 😀 With a night in an unbelievable cheap hotel we will head to Ankara and afterwards to Kapadokya, where we are planning to stay for two nights.

Yeah… it went too good so far… so the “IT” left us

You might have recognised our struggle with the tracker colleagues built in a new time record. https://live.teilzeitabenteurer.de

Looks like the power injector went toast just the second we crossed the Albanian border. And with that we also left the EU, which resulted in a massive gap of mobile data…

We had good help by remote hands from the engineer who invented the tracker – thank you ginger incognito-man. 😉

(

Show above: A (successful!) try to rescue the tracker)

From BIH to AL via MNK

After a short but satisfying break we started to Tirana and decided to take a route via Kotor. It’s not only a UNESCO protected city, also it was one of our hottest places so far…

Fun fact: we met a buddy of Caius for lunch.

Albania / Tirana is great!

I don’t know what I expected but Tirana positively surprised me big time. To be honest, whole Albania did. Easy and friendly border control, cheap and good room, same with the food.

(North) Macedonia – the mix between Balkan and EU

We were crossing Macedonia (or since Feb(?) this year North Macedonia) from Albania to Greece and had some small lunch on Lake Pogradeci in Ohrid.

Macedonia is where worlds collide… dead dogs on the street but also 23€ for two starters to share with three pax. :/

But you can see the country changing to become a full member of the EU.

After that really fast stop, we went straight back home to HELLAS! 🙂

And please… Don’t forget our social media channels!

Please also have a look at

https://mobile.twitter.com/mongolrally2019

and

https://www.instagram.com/theparttimeadventurists/

– Tobi

After a little more than 500km, we decided to stop on Bosnia and Herzegovina in a little town called Bileca. We found a small and nice pension and were heading to a restaurant in town for dinner.

(Sorry for the blurr!)

By the way; don’t forget to track us on https://live.teilzeitabenteurer.de/

Every 10 minutes (with existing satellite connection) we send our location and a few details e.g. breakdowns.
We also fill the map manually with more links to Instagram and Twitter.

Heading to Montenegro now.

From Zagreb we moved on to the coast.

The plan was to camp close to the car at the shore. But we only found a camping ground with a dedicated parking lot and super solid ground with lots of stones… but hey; it’s an adventure, right?! 😉

After preparing the tents, we went for a small dinner in a close village and went to bed quite early.

After the short stopover in Hungary we were heading to the Croatian coast with a small stopover in Zagreb for a (really good) breakfast and some fast sightseeing.

We met two super-nice Danish boys camping next to us. Sadly one of them steped onto (…OR INTO?!) one of my peg herings which perforated not only his shoe but also his foot…
Yeah… what an un-lucky dude he was…

Only thing we could do was to put him into their car and let him drive to the closest hospital. Haven’t heard from them since then.

Pictures might come… ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯