Did you work out where we were going?

Our flight was with Turkish Airlines. In fact, our around the world trip is booked with them, and it is just the first and last legs of our trip that will be with Qantas. And this was our first time with this airline.

We had arrived at Narita Airport with plenty of time as we are determined not to miss a flight.

An around the world ticket has a condition that if you miss one leg of the flights, your ticket is cancelled. Not only if you’re late, if you don’t have the correct visa – the trip can be all over. Friends of ours were heading off on a similar trip 12 months ago and discovered that they had been scammed when they had applied for the visa to enter the USA (ESTA).

I am pretty confident that I have the right ESTA, but we will find out in a few weeks. Having said that, I almost was scammed when applying for the e-visas for Turkey.

I successfully filled in my information online and paid $61.50USD, receiving my paperwork in an email a few minutes later. I decided I would come back and do Mick’s in a day or so as we had just over 2 months before our entry into Turkey.

Mistake! Well almost.

When I typed in a search to Google about e-visa for Turkey I found a site that asked me all the same questions I had been asked a few days ago. It wasn’t until I entered our entry date to Turkey that I received a prompt saying this was too tight a timeframe and I would need to pay and additional $100+USD to have it processed sooner. Alarm bells rang. So I shut the site down.

I tried the same process a few days later and I got the same result. So I Googled scams with e-visas to Turkey and found that this was common. Luckily I got the correct URL and successfully bought Mick’s e-visa.

We ended up being in the air for just over 12 hours, with the help of a tail wind. Mick and I had decided that we would try not to sleep during this flight as we were due to arrive into Istanbul around 5.30pm.

We had a smooth flight, and the biggest stand-out feature for Turkish Airlines was the food. While we try not to eat too much on flights, we were certainly tempted on this one.

Istanbul must be a huge airport. Once we landed, the plane taxied for over 15 minutes before we arrived at the terminal. It was then a very long walk, with the help of optional moving pathways, before we arrived at Passport Control. I estimated that it was about a 1.5km walk. The line up was huge, and unlike in Japan were there were lots of staff facilitating the movement of people through the checkpoints, there was none here. The lines to each of the passport control officers were long as well, and some moved more quickly than others. Of course, we picked a line that had a couple of issues which slowed us down.

The e-visa appears on our passport when our passport is scanned – the officer was not interested in seeing the printout copy. We passed through that interview very quickly.

It was then another long walk to customs (which we were able to skip as we had nothing to declare) and finally, baggage retrieval. By the time we arrived, our bags had been going around and around.

Another long walk to find Exit 14 – where we had been told our driver would be waiting for us. I had been in touch with our hotel and had agreed to pay 50 euros each for the transfer. The man at the airport checked with our hotel and nothing had been booked for us. Luckily, we were quite close to the taxi rank and were able to get a taxi that ended up costing us much less than a transfer. It cost around $55AUD in total (12,000 Turkish lira), and took almost an hour because of evening traffic. The skyline was very interesting, with lights illuminating mosques and palaces along the river. Amazing.

We will spend 9 nights here, and have a long list of places we want to visit and things we’d like to experience.

With the confusion to our body clocks, I have organised a rather easy program for tomorrow. We have tickets on the Hop On Hop Off bus. This should give us our bearings and a taste of what is in store. We are both pretty excited about our stop-over here.