When you enter Turkey, at least as an American or European, you are automatically granted a 90-day tourist visa. And as an "extended tourist" in Turkey, it just becomes second nature to start planning trips out of the country based on when your visa is going to expire (or traveling enough that you never have to concern yourself with running out of time). These departures are affectionately known to us as "border runs." The border patrol seems to have no problem issuing numerous tourist visas to individuals who have come in and out of the country every three months for several years. In fact, I've seen passports that are multi-page canvases of Turkey entry and exit stamps. Ataturk Airport. Kapikule Border. Sabiha Gokcen. Ispsala Border.
I arrived back in Turkey after a trip to the US on May 12. As such, I had until August 10 to get an exit stamp out of the country, acquire a new visa, and reenter under with another 3 months of obscurity under my belt. There are plenty of ways to do a border run, depending on budget, time, and sense of adventure. Knowing I had one approaching soon, at the end of July my friend Lars (a veteran border-runner) and I decided to make a weekend trip out of the country. Returning to my traveling roots, with a slightly more glamorous edge, we booked a cabin in an overnight train to Plovdiv, a little town strategically located in the middle of the Bulgarian countryside, halfway between the Kapikule border crossing and the capital city of Sofia, and planned to stay the weekend in a hotel and check out the city.
From the start the trip looked slightly ominous. Flooding on the tracks outside of Istanbul meant an unexpected two hour bus ride to the next station where the train was waiting. Once onboard, we were informed that despite having paid an extortionate price for the entire cabin, Lars had in fact only booked one bed on the train. After another hour of unpleasant Bulgarian-Russian-Turkish-English banter, it was concluded that we did, in fact, have the whole cabin to ourselves. Fortunately, I did not speak enough Turkish or Russian to be at all useful, and left the Lars in charge. I fell asleep only to be jolted upright several hours later to be shoveled out of the carriage into the cold night and ushered towards an endless queue to have our passports scrutinized and stamped in order to exit the country. We grumbled back to the carriage half an hour later and fell into a sleep with mosquitoes buzzing menacingly above our heads.
I awoke to the sunlight streaming in the window and pulled away the curtain to reveal fields of drooping sunflowers streaming across my sight line. It was a magical way to begin the day. Farm trucks and hay bales, overalls and pitchforks, terracotta tiles and crumbly stone walls. The landscape rolled by for an hour as I sat with my head at the window, hair streaming and a morning cigarette to make the world a little hazy. We rolled into Plovdiv just as the carriage had become uncomfortably hot, and wandered down the street to find our hotel.
When you arrive, Plovdiv seems like a sleepy place, where old, unmarked cars grumble down shady treelined promenades. The rundown buildings are slightly greened with lichen, vines hang down from sagging telephone wires and the pavement is overgrown with tufted grass. has But as you enter the city center, it transforms into something quite quaint and modern. Outdoor cafes line the newly laid cobblestone high street. Benneton and Starbucks gives it a familiar feel for the Western eye while the odd cyrillic language makes you feel like you’re peering at the world through a looking glass. We had lunch in Gusto’s, where we devoured a pizza with proscuitto and real mozzarella (pork and quality cheese are two luxuries not easy to find in Istanbul), drank cheap wine and quality beer, and basked in the surprisingly oppressive heat.
The old town of Plovdiv is romantically set amongst the cities many hills, complete with a 2nd century Roman theatre that stands majestically atop a high hill overlooking the modern city. We spent the afternoon plodding from one cafe to another, trying to stay cool in the shade while simultaneously enjoy the points of interest in city (of which there are apparently 200, I think we managed to find about 10). From antiquity to modernity, there are extraordinary Roman ruins such as the theatre and aqueduct, and beautiful 19th century buildings, such as the Ethnographic Museum and the Church of the Virgin Mary. Mostly though, I was happy to have escaped from the oppressive urban sprawl of Istanbul with a lovely companion.
We hopped on a bus headed back to Istanbul the following day, during which time I should have obtained my new visa and entry stamp. At the border, the bus conductor is supposed to guide you through the process of customs and immigration. At the Bulgarian exit point, we were shuffled into queues to check passports, then driven 500 meters to the Turkish port of entry where we were lined up again to purchase a visa. At this point we all boarded again and I assumed we’d be driven on to the next queue to have our passports stamped.
As we drove away from the duty free shops and lines of cars, fields of sunflowers began passing by across the rolling hills, and I realized we were going a bit far into farm country to be finding ourselves another line for visa stamps. “Lars,” I whispered and nudged him out of napping peacefully the seat next to me, “our passports weren’t stamped.” He looked up at me in a haze of sleep. We’d just stumbled upon a serious conundrum.
To be an extended tourist/illegally employee in Turkey is one thing. To be illegally IN Turkey is another story entirely. According to my passport I could have snuck into the country with the help of Nomadic sheep farmers in order to become a prostitute in Istanbul’s Red Light district. Well...maybe.
The remainder of the ride home Lars and I plotted out how we would deal with the situation. Call our local embassies. Talk to the local passport police. Try the go through customs at the airport. Bribe someone.
And we did. Systematically we checked off each of the options, in between busy work schedules and social lives. And at each place a head wagging Turk who spoke no English at all turned us away to pursue another course of action. These foreigners are not our problem, they seemed to say. But even our local embassies wanted nothing to do with the situation. I received the following email from the US Consulate Visa section:
“It is the individual’s responsibility to check that the police have stamped their passport with the visa. We don’t interfere in immigration issues. Hope this helps.”
No, this does not bloody help.
The passport police sent us to the airport. The airport told us foreign passport center in Aksaray might be able to help (apparently this maze of a building bane of many an expat’s existence). By this point I was completely panic-struck, and the date of my visa expiry was looming ever closer. I realized that the problem could only escalate exponentially if I also managed to overstay my allotted 90-days in the country.
With three days till the expiration, I did the only thing left to do. I got on a bus back to Bulgaria with a hangover and a heavy heart. Four hours later, with the sunflower strewn panorama stretched before my eyes, and the flags of Bulgaria and the EU appearing overhead in the distance, I couldn’t help but be a little bit optimistic. With a beating heart as the bus slowed to a halt and I walked to customs control to hand over my passport. They sent me to the police, who smiled at me with a look of complete understanding, stamped my passport with "Cikis (exit), told me to walk into Bulgaria, turn 180 degrees and walk back into Turkey and get an entry (giris) stamp. It was that easy. Done and dusted.
From there I hitched a ride back to Istanbul with a couple of friendly Turks and a Bulgarian, and spent the next five hours using sign language to try and relay my tale of woe (and its ultimate happy ending). I don’t think they understood, but they were good companions for the long, traffic-filled ride back into the city. I couldn’t believe the burden that I felt lifted from my shoulders as I fell exhausted into bed that evening. Another day well spent, another lesson well learned.