Hello Kurt, I was going through my old photo shoebox a couple of days ago and I thought that you might be interested in seeing a couple of photos that I took around 1984/5 of the viaduct that eventually spanned the valley in Nantua, France. As the photos look slightly similar to yours I probably took one of them around the same time that you took yours. As you mentioned, the tunnel up through the mountains was opened in 1987 and if I remember correctly it saved you between 45 minutes and one hour on the journey to Italy.
Nantua, France. about 1984ish.
NANTUA, 2019.
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Question 3.
I still can’t work out which border you used between Italy and Yugoslavia so I presume that the border guards didn’t stamp your passport.
I once loaded in Yugoslavia near the Italian border and I was told to go and do my customs near the railway station in Nova Gorica which was only about ten kilometres away. As this was around 1981 ish I can’t remember what I had loaded but it was probably furniture as we did quite a few loads from that area.
The Italian side was called Gorizia and after showing my passport to the border guards I had no problem walking across in to Italy. I had a short walk around the town and exchanged about £4 into Italian Lira to buy myself an evening meal. As I didn’t have an Italian road permit I had to drive back up to Ljublijana the following day after I had cleared customs, then onto Maribor and use the Yugoslav/ Austrian border at Spielfeldt.
I have been looking through my old passports today and I can’t find a stamp for either Nova Gorica or Gorizia although the Italian border guards didn’t always bother to stamp U.K. passports.
As you have just mentioned Geoff “The Crow” Taylor I decided to look back at some of his old posts. Sadly, Geoff passed away a few years ago and it’s a shame that I only ever met him once and that was in The Bake House, which was a popular “watering hole” between Macon and Nantua in France.
I only noticed what Geoff was driving the following morning as we were both going in different directions and as I had seen one of Middle East Minerals motors a few years before at Kapikule I decided to take a photo of it. It was some thirty years later when Geoff joined Trucknet that he mentioned that he was the person in the photo so it was another one of those cases of ships passing in the night. We seemed to meet loads of interesting people like that, some you might not see until six months later and some you would never see again.
JEFF “THE CROW” TAYLOR.
I have decided to add the link where Geoff mentions that in September 1984 he used a border between Italy and Yugoslavia called Fernetti/ Sezana so maybe that this is the border that you used ? Having just checked where Fernetti is it looks like it is less that twenty miles away from Gorizia so it’s possible that you might of used one of these borders.
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Anyway, it was good to read the account of one of “Jiff 's” trips once again but I think that the Austrian/ Yugoslav border at Spielfeldt was probably the most used border for Western European trucks back then.
And it would of been feasible for trucks from central or southern Italy to get the ferry from Brindisi to Patras in Greece and to cross the border into Turkey at Ipsala.
Kurt, I noticed that you have updated your website and it now mentions that the photo of the Douglas Dakota in Bulgaria which was taken by a David Duxberry driver called Simon mentions that the photo was taken several years after 1984.
Re 1984: Yugoslavlia: Nis->Pirot->Bulgarian border. The latter photograph I am informed was taken one of David Duxberry’s drivers and appears to be taken several years after the 1984 photograph on the left.
I don’t think that this is quite right because as far as I remember David Duxberry finished doing Middle East work around 1982/3.
Question 11.
You asked if anybody knew which company the orange truck belonged to. I think that it might of belonged to the southern Yugoslav state owned company which was called JugTrans or Jug Sped or something similar.
My other guess would be that it might of belonged to the East German State Transport company as at the back of my mind that might of been their fleet colours.
Question 12.
The vehicle probably belonged to a Syrian company or to the Syrian state as they ran a large fleet of orange Mercedes fitted with trailer boxes and side tanks.
Question 8 and Question 13.
You also asked if anybody ever turned off the Belgrade to Sofia road at Nis to beat the delay at Kapikule. I think that you will find that a lot of us did in the summer for a number of reasons. Geoff The Crow also mentions this route in the link.
This was also the preferred way if you were going down to Izmir in Turkey as you were closer towards the Gallipoli Peninsular to catch The Canakkale Ferry which crossed The Dardanelle Straights.
I remember that the two lane road heading east just before Nis came to a long left hand bend and that the road into Nis beared off slightly to the right. This road was also a T.I.R. road and was signposted to Skopje, Thessaloniki and Greece.
This was more than likely where you dropped Paul off and after a couple of kilometres on this road there was a left turn into Nis.
Arno told you that it was 1,000 kilometres longer to go through Greece than it was to transit Bulgaria but that wasn’t quite correct.
If you go on distance finder you will see that from Nis to Istanbul via Sofia it is 708 kilometres.
Nis to Evzoni ( the Greek border) is 355 kilometres and Evzoni to Istanbul is 638 kilometres, a total of 993 kilometres which put an extra 285 kilometres onto the journey.
That extra 285 kilometres on those roads could take about four or five hours as there were quite a few steep hills around.
The border from Gevgalija, Yugo into Evzoni, Greece never took more than a couple of hours to do both sides and the border from Greece into Turkey at Ipsala also never took much more than two hours. Most of the time you could do both sides in less than an hour.
Ipsala border used to close from 6 p.m. until 7 a.m. and as far as I remember there was never a queue of more than six or seven trucks waiting to go through.
From Belgrade to Evzoni was often a good days work and the following day you could be in Istanbul. A lot of drivers used to do a long days drive in the summer months from Belgrade to Kavala and spend the night there or have a few hours off for a bit of relaxing on the beach.
The guy with the beard and the red Volvo I think was an ex Duxberry driver called Mike Benn.
Kavala, Greece. 1983.
Kavala, Greece. 2019
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Most of the drivers drove to suit themselves, no two days were ever the same unless you were stuck in a very long queue at a border somewhere. If somebody wanted to drive for sixteen hours or to drive through the night then that was up to them. I must admit that I was never a fan of driving through the night even though I did it on a few occasions. Also that the trucks were getting much more reliable and that most of the roads were eventually upgraded so travelling times decreased over the years.
Question 15.
Depending on how long it took you to get through the Yugslav/ Bulgarian border at Dimitrovgrad then Belgrade to Sofia was another good days work in the early eighties. One of the favourite stopping places for the night was at the Duty Free Dollar Shop on the Sofia ring road.
You could buy most things in the shop from an Italian washing machine to a set of French Michelin car tyre, Belgium and Swiss chocolates along with bottles of Johnny Walker whiskey, Bacardi rum, Russian vodka and American Marlboro cigarettes, all at very cheap prices. In fact the prices for Benson and Hedges cigarettes and Johnny Walker whiskey were a lot cheaper in the dollar shops than the duty free prices on the ferries out of Dover.
All you had to do was to show a foreign passport and pay in foreign hard currency, American Dollars, West German Deutsch Marks, G.B Pounds etc.
It was surprising to see how many of the Scandinavians used to stock up buying several bottles of spirits especially the Finns who bought the stuff for personal consumption. Some drivers bought cigarettes and spirits to sell on for a profit or to obtain diesel.
There was also another Bulgarian Duty Free Shop on the left hand side just before the Turkish border at Kap Andrevo and as I have already mentioned, there was one somewhere between where that Dakota restaurant was parked and the Yugoslav border. The Duty Free Dollar Shop on the Sofia Ring Road and at the border at Kapitan Andreevo also had a restaurant but the only meals that I can remember having in there were Beefstek and Salat.
I have also added this photo of the temporary floating bridge at Svilingrad which was about 10 kilometres from the border as I have a feeling that this was put there around 1984 so you might of seen it when you were passing through although as you have mentioned that you arrived at the Bulgarian border at night time then you might of missed it.
It was erected by the Bulgarian Army who patrolled it when the old bridge was being repaired. If you can’t remember the floating bridge then you probably went over the old bridge that was originally built by the Romans and improved by the Ottomans or so I was told (without doing a Google search).
I have also added this photo of the temporary floating bridge at Svilingrad which was about 10 kilometres from the border as I have a feeling that this was put there around 1984 so you might of seen it when you were passing through although as you have mentioned that you arrived at the Bulgarian border at night time then you might of missed it.
It was erected by the Bulgarian Army who patrolled it when the old bridge was being repaired. If you can’t remember the floating bridge then you probably went over the old bridge that was originally built by the Romans and improved by the Ottomans or so I was told (without doing a Google search).
If you went from Nis to the Turkish border at Kapikule then as you know you could be there for at least two days just waiting to get into the compound on the Turkish side.
I think that my quickest time to clear customs at Kapikule was about eight hours going in, it was always much quicker coming out if you were empty.
My longest wait was for three days and it wasn’t uncommon to hear that some guys had been there for five days and sometimes much longer if their customs documents weren’t in order. So now you may understand why going that extra 285 kilometres through Greece and using the border at Ipsala was very often well worth it.
Question 18.
You can follow on Google Earth the road in Bulgaria right up to the Turkish Border but there is hardly anything there recognisable now.
The Bulgarian border post, the road to the right that took you towards the Turkish compound and the watch towers with the huge Turkish flag have now disappeared. Along with “The Sheep Dip”, or the wheel wash, the dip in the road that was filled with disinfectant that you had to drive through as you came into Bulgaria. There was a pipe over the road that you had to drive under so that it sprayed disinfectant, like a shower all over your cab and trailer. Many a driver like myself were caught out because they had left their sun roof or the passenger window open.
I can’t even work out where the building was on the right hand side further along where the Duty Free Dollar Shop was. There is a slight chance that it was opposite where that new Shell garage is now, hopefully somebody will remember where it was.
On my first trip to Turkey we arrived at the border on a Sunday afternoon and I.I.R.C. there was about a two kilometre queue. We must of shuffled up about a kilometre in four hours but when it reached 6 p.m. the guys who I was running with drove to the front of the queue leaving dozens of Eastern Europeans parked up for the night. This was because we were prepared to pay the overtime on the Bulgarian side in hard currency, we paid ten Deutsch Marks which worked out to be about £2.50. We couldn’t get into the Turkish compound as their border was closed for the night but we had saved ourselves about four hours of waiting. All the old Communist Countries had state owned trucks and they didn’t want to part with any unnecessary expenditure of hard currency so their drivers were prepared to wait until the next day to get through.
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Kapikule, 
I think that everybody who ever went through there must have a story to tell. In the summer it was a dust bowl and in the winter it was like The Somme.
As you entered Edirne you might remember this narrow bridge that was just outside the town. The problem was that you would usually get about half way across and a Turk with a donkey and cart would start approaching from the other side and donkeys were not very good at reversing so the truck would have to reverse back or the Turk would try and squeeze past you. I see that now it is only used as a foot bridge.
Kapikule, I think that everybody who ever went through there must have a story to tell. In the summer it was like a dust bowl and in the winter it was like The Somme.
As you entered Edirne you might remember this narrow bridge that was just outside the town. The problem was that you would usually get about half way across and a Turk with a donkey and cart would start approaching from the other side and donkeys were not very good at reversing so the truck would have to reverse back or the Turk would try and squeeze past you. I see that now it is only used as a foot bridge.
EDIRNE, TURKEY. 1980
EDIRNE, TURKEY. 2019
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EDIRNE, TURKEY, MOSQUE. about 1982.
EDIRNE MOSQUE. 2019
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I hope this helps Kurt.