Border crossings

Given all the refugee business, with pissed-off truckers rumoured to block border crossings, my expectations south of Schengen were pessimistic. But it turned out ok. All of the following on the main Zagreb-Belgrade-Sofia-Istanbul highway were doable in less than an hour:

• Croatia-Serbia 15 min queue, no problems 
• Serbia-Bulgaria 30 min queue, no problems 
• Bulgaria-Turkey no queue

The system at the HUGE new shiny white border crossing complex on the Turkish side was interesting though. When you approach the police, they don't pay any attention, so the natural thing to do for me was to move on slowly and expect to be stopped. Indeed, the customs lady stops you, says you need to go to the police. Park your bike here and walk back. Ok, done. The customs lady looks at the police stamp and waves you on to the third counter some 300 m further. There the guy looks at the bike papers, then at his computer, and says you have a problem. You have no customs clearance for the bike. Go back to the customs lady. Ok, third meeting with customs, and the bike has clearance. Back to the third guy, who asks for the barcode sticker. What's that? You get it from customs. Go back to customs. Ok, fourth time at customs, sticker attached to bike, and the gate at the third counter finally opens.

All of the people involved were friendly and helpful, looking professional, working with their unbelievably complicated database system with a 1990s style UI, manually keying in data from my machine-readable passport for the nth time (yes I peeked at their screens). If the point of this process would be to solicit bribes, I would understand. But they didn't, to the contrary, there were large signs about bribing being a criminal offence, and, once more, the people were really friendly and helpful. What's the point then? No idea. Anyway, it seems travellers are expected to be proactive on the Turkish border, and ask to be checked.

Being proactive and actually looking for a police officer to check me certainly worked when exiting Turkey. The Turkish-Greek border was fine, almost looked like a border between two friendly countries (if you disregard the numerous gunmen standing around everywhere).