The one thing that saved me was the inertia of the car and the trailer that managed to get me to the side of the road, even though the engine died on me while my front wheels were only slightly ahead of the bus and while the approaching van was violently flashing his lights and the bus was slamming on the brakes. On the way to Adana, which is merely 230 km away from the Syrian border, the car died seven times more but I still managed to get to the service station, where I've – unfortunately - become almost a regular by now.
Fatih was happy to see me. I was even happier to see him. He's one of only two Turks I know who speak English. Imagine finding yourself in a small village in the middle of China and wanting to get your car fixed. What needs to be fixed and nothing more. Of course I called Fatih - he's the webmaster of the Dörtler Peugeot service in Adana www.dortler.com - frequently from Konya already so I could communicate with the mechanics there through him. Just imagine my phone bill! The only good thing about it all is that they deducted the 18 % VAT of all the bills just for the heck of it. They wrote a statement, saying that the parts were sold to a foreign citizen and that was it! No copies of the passport, no validation on the border needed.
To make the account short: during the holiday it was also the guys from Dörtler that were jumping around my partner, the service computer once showed an error of the air flow sensor (they changed it, of course, without giving it a second thought), then the front fuel pump, then the BOSCH PUMP!!! Thanks to Matjaž Maričič from AvtoPlus in Maribor (Once a Peugeot, now he's switched from the lion to the arrows), who's been repairing my car through smsbefore, in Morocco and Libya, the high pressure pump – luckily for my wallet – wasn't changed, but they still had a go at the back pump, that wasn't showing any deficiency. We took the bike off the 307 and my Kateem Adventure roamed back to the trailer. That night, on our second try to get from Adana to the border, we had to be howled back 100 km to the service. The pump finally gave out completely.
I was going to travel 650 km to Damascus with the Kateem, since I was in a hurry to get to the University in time to register, but the Turks wouldn't let me out of the country, even though I had a stamped statement from the service saying that the car was with them, why it was with them and that I was going to come back for it. Maybe it was better that way: I had forgotten the chain spray in the car, and the sight of the disappearing tread of my Pirelli MT21 tyres in the Turkish asphalt made me weep. I spent the night in a sleeping bag in a corner of a bar between the two borders, with the Adventure standing above me. Yes, they let me bring it inside the bar! I didn’t sleep well, though – music all night, plus the sound of glasses and chairs moving. The Turkish bureaucracy: if I wanted to leave without the car, I should have paid about 150 EUR of taxes, the permit to install parts in a foreign vehicle would cost me 50 EUR and the best part is, if I couldn't pick the car up on an EXACT DATE, it would have become the property of the Turkish nation. Along with everything inside it.
It took some magic to produce a new pump on the next working day (Wednesday): the main organ donor was a 406 HDi, which had passed away a month ago. The lady got drunk, she span around a little and the only way to tell the car was a Peugeot was the lion on the steering wheel. Okan, the service manager that had just returned to work after the holidays assured me that the thing WAS going to work now. And, what do you know; I drove all the way to Damascus! (The pump of the 307 works under lower pressure, so apparently I burnt it on the way.)
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