my holiday

[darrenwall]

i come back from my holidays this week , i went to marmaris turkey . very nice place loads to do but dont make the same mistake i did and rent a car
first of all the state of the roads , pot holes and poor surfaces everywhere , out of town there are no barriers on the side of the roads and when you got a 500 foot drop straight down 6 inches from the edge of the road its pretty scarey
secondly the driving standards , i really think now that turkey is one of those countries where you drive forwards 10 yards and then back again in a car park and u have passed . if you stop at a red light you get the car behind sounding the horn and shouting at you and that even icludes the local police . if you are on a roundabout from wot i gathered you must give way to traffic entering the roundabout
you get overtaken everywhere , blind bends ,outside schools , through town centers
you must never stop at zebra crossings to left people across , if you do the car or bike behind simply passes you causing the people on the crossing to jump for thier lives
mopeds and motorbikes ride on pavements , through pedestrian areas and even through indoor shopping centers without any of the locals batting an eyelid
but the scariest thing is that cars buses lorries and even bikes are allowed to drive the wrong way down one way street

but the biggest reason not to rent a car out there is the fact that petrol costs £2.40 a litre thats £10.89 a gallon no wonder everyone uses mopeds out there which brings me onto another point , the amount of mopeds being used as people carriers and delivery trucks is unbelievable i saw one bloke on a 50cc stepthrough with his 2 young kids on the footboard holding onto the handlebars with his wife on the back with the family dog under 1 arm and the shopping bags under the other and not one of them had a helmet on
i also saw one moped being ridden with 6 calor gas bottles bungeed to the handle bars and footboard

wot a beautiful but crazy country mind

[Welly]

That sounds one crazy old place Darren

There's a similar 'rule' in Spain to do with Red lights where you can go through - not sure how it all works

Maybe anyone wishing to hire a car in Turkey this year should bring there own Petrol

[Captain Jack]

There's a similar 'rule' in Spain to do with Red lights where you can go through - not sure how it all works

Sounds similar to America - they can legally turn right on the red light.

[eoin27]

There's a similar 'rule' in Spain to do with Red lights where you can go through - not sure how it all works

Sounds similar to America - they can legally turn right on the red light.

Its a great rule really. Also when cars have a green light they can turn on to roads while pedestrians have a green light. You think it would be dodgy but its not at all!!

[steve_earwig]

Being able to turn right on a red light makes a lot of sense, takes a little getting used to but you miss it when you can't. 4-way stop signs though, "after you, no after you, no..." Oh ffs, you stay there being polite, meanwhile I've floored it and gone. They have the green lights for pedestrians and cars here, as if the drivers needed any more encouragement to squash people It's also a great way of getting marooned half-way through a junction when the lights change - they're very sparing with traffic lights here, only putting them on the nearest side so if you're not in the queue you can't see when they've turned red. Or green again.

[DiscoPol]

We have the "Red light" thingy here in Poland, if the lights are red but you are turning right you can go through the red light, now im sure that legally it doesnt apply at all lights and only the ones that have a small green lit filter arrow to the side of the main lights but everybody does it at all lights, so when in rome and all that!

They also switch the traffic lights off here at 11pm till 5am and then increase the speed limit by 10km everywhere madness I know but i have to say once your used to it it does make life a lot simpler, they used to do this in Spain too when i lived there but that was a while ago and may have changed now.

my recollection of Turkey was that it was one of the worse places i have ever been for driving and tbh im not that keen on the "macho" stereotypical Turkish male either but then that's probably due to the fact that i cant be doing with "10 men" blokes anywhere, big dogs dont need to bark that much, where as yappy little terriers and the like are noisy little shits trying to prove a point, think "Napoleon complex" and that should explain what im trying to say, but the beaches and the weather arent to be sniffed at, and the food is pretty good too for a man that loves his kebabs