The rest day was also tiring – we walked a lot in the city. I haven’t seen such a crowd before than here in the walking street. We did not spend much – just bought some ice cream and a tavuk (chicken) döner. We don’t like the beef meet here in Turkey, the taste is too strong for us – so we already became semi-vegetarians, eating only cheese, because we cannot buy good (Hungarian pork) sausages here… Or we can eat chicken meat.
We also visited some mosques – they are really nice inside and outside. But inside there is a strong smell of feet because visitors must take off their shoes and carry it in a plastic bag (which we discard afterwards, so it is not a green solution – producing a lot of garbage). Then in the evening Nuri invited his friend who brought some food like pizza so we ate it together. We also talked about Kurd people (they come from there). We could wash our clothes and hung them on a rope that we spanned across the living room in the diagonal. 
The next morning we started at around 9 and we only wanted to leave the city. It was not so easy! Thanks to Tamas Schmauder, I could plan the route with MapSource (and Google maps). So we could follow the GPS. I hated those parts where we had to cross 3 lanes and take the left lane on a highway-like road with lots of traffic – sometimes we had to wait for minutes until we could cross the lanes. Then there were so many buses that we couldn’t make progress because of them stopping all the time and people jumping on and off in front of us. So we took the tramway. It was OK for 2-3 km’s but then a
police car came behind us and they said no-no, but we were just about to leave it anyway so I said OK!
Skyscrapers in northern Istanbul
The European part of the city had the most traffic. We wanted to cross the northern bridge – we saw that both bridges are highways and the route was shorter if we took that bridge. But then we saw the green highway sign and also the “forbidden for cyclists” sign. OK, we continued in the rightmost lane, it was safe (definitely safer than some main roads where cycling is allowed but there is no stopping lane!). Then the paying gates came – OK, we crossed them with confidence without stopping. No police came blasting after us. Then at the beginning of the bridge, there was a small booth, and a man came out running towards us and asking to stop and lift our bikes over the roadside barrier (he helped us) and only repeated “Yasak!” and go back. He told we cannot use the spare lane either (which was empty and we could have gone through it). We did not want to go back into the busy city just to try the other bridge – it was so far and we were not sure whether we can cross it or not (unfortunately we haven’t made a research on internet – we’ve read in Tamas’s blog that it would have been possible!). So we went back to the paying gates and asked a big van to help us cross the bridge. The first one we asked was immediately stopped by the police so we couldn’t talk to him, but the second man was so kind to help us put the bikes in. We wanted to take a photo at the “WELCOME TO ASIA” sign but couldn’t!!! It was on the bridge and did not want to go back (police booth again…). So finally we arrived to Asia! Bike to Asia – mission completed. Even if it was a “van to Asia”. Also, the view of Bosporus was so nice but the camera was at the back of the car so we missed it.
The Asian side was a village compared to the European side of the city. There was no end of Istanbul sign, just as there was no Istanbul sign when we entered the city. So we couldn’t take a photo at the Istanbul sign either. It took us 35 km just to reach a place which we could call the end of the city. On this day we couldn’t go too much because of the steep hills. We did not know that this was just the beginning! We wanted to reach Sile but we slept somewhere before the seashore (Sahilköy). So we did only 50-60 km a day not because we don’t like to ride the bike, but because we are so tired of the steep ups and downs that we cannot do more!
More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/felix.kovacs/BikeToAsiaTorokorszag#
Tags: Istanbul
It was a pleasure to have read this post! Thank you!