Europe – Finally on the road!

You’ve guessed it, we’re finally moving!

Thursday, 15th of March
After another failed embassy run for the Turkmen visa, we decided to leave yesterday, Thursday, at noon. The Turkmen embassy promised us that they will send us a Letter of Invitation by mail, if our visa is approved. With this letter we can retrieve the visa at the embassy in Tehran, Iran. Still not sure which way we’re going, then: either through Turkmenistan or over the Caspian Sea (see previous post).

But enough about that! Yesterday, after dropping by Wafa’s parents to arrange for Abdel’s plane ticket to Tehran -Wafa’s father is coming with us, part of the way- we finally left at 13h00!

This went more or less like this:

13h00: Car is loaded, off we go:

(Chickens won’t be coming with us.)

13h10: We just got on the highway, and the ‘check engine’ warning light comes on… FUCK!

(Also: poop.)

As we both don’t know anything about car mechanics, we decide to drop by a Walloon Suzuki garage to have them quickly check out the engine error message. Turns out it’s just a loose cable from the turbocharger, probably caused by the engine maintenance we did earlier. Phew, false alarm… Not good for our nerves though :p

(The face of a relieved man.)

After a quick stop in Luxemberg City to buy water purification tablets (which are now illegal in Belgium, apparently?), we steam on through Germany. The wheather’s absolute shit, but Suzy doesn’t even flinch.
(Sidenote: we’ll be doing 3000 km in 4 days. Suzy’s previous owner did as many km in a whole year for the last couple of years…)
We didn’t book anything to sleep in advance, as we didn’t know where we’d end up. So after 800 km we call it a day and turn into a nice South-German motel.

Friday, 16th of March
We’d set quite an ambitious goal for today: all the way from Regensburg, Germany, to Belgrade, Serbia (1050 km).
So we quickly got under way. After about 150 km the turbocharger cable became loose again and had to be expertly fixed by Tom:

(Wafa got annoyed with the car at this point.)

Luckily, no problems other than that. We moved quickly through Germany, Austria, Hungary and Serbia. Again heavy rain, some traffic jams between Vienna and Budapest, but otherwise the day proceeded well.

We leave you with some of our thoughts on the countries we passed through:
– Germany: boring,
– Austria: boring,
– Hungary: shitty drivers, some shitty roads, really flat and empty,
– Serbia: nice people, nice and cheap hotel in Belgrade, nice roads, much better than expected in all aspects.

Tomorrow: on to Greece!