Over the border we go....

We spent our final two days in Turkey in Antakya, which is the closest biggish town to the Syrian border. The town seems nice enough, although we didn't do too much exploring. We did however book ourselves a taxi to take us over the border, we'd heard that the the bus trip can take ages as you have to wait for all the passengers to be processed at immigration and when travelling the two kids, that's one chance we didn't want to take.

As expected, our driver was 30 minutes late, then just as we were leaving town he informed us that he was going to pick up his wife to join us on the trip also... She seemed really lovely, although the only words we could understand from each other were çay (tea) and passport... LOL

We were kind of nervous about crossing the Turkish/Syrian border. The official rule state that you need to have a visa before going to Syria, because 'officially' they don't issue visas on the border unless you come form a country that doesn't have a Syrian embassy. Because NZ doesn't have a Syrian embassy we could get our visas, Alain on the other hand was in a bit of limbo with the 'official' rules. The Syrian embassy in Australia would issue him a visa that would be valid for 3 months from the date of issue, which was no good to us because it would have expired before we even got to Syria. The Syrian embassy in France wouldn't help him at all because he lived in Australia, so we were kind of buggered. We'd heard of other travellers getting their visa at the border after a bit of a wait, so we decided to test our luck too...

Thank goodness we had our taxi driver, he helped us navigate our way through the chaos at the border. After lots of money (US$68 per NZ passport and US$28 for French passport), lots of waiting and to-ing and fro-ing we finally had the prized Syrian visa stamp in our passport. Hooray...!!

Goodbye Turkey... Hello Syria!