After four days in Istanbul, we had to leave this wonderful city eventually. Our plan was to head towards south-east, to the mountains between Ankara and Samsun. There is a small national park where we thought staying and going for a hike could be nice. Since the distance between the national park and Istanbul is more than 500km, we were planning to charge the car at a charging station at a shopping mall, outside of Bolu.

Turkey has charging network named “Esarj”. This company behind the network is working on setting up more and more charging stations. It already has an interesting net of charging stations along the busy routes of Turkey. As mentioned before, Esarj has a charging station (with 22kW) in front of the shopping center of Bolu.

Like many charging systems, also esarj requires a sign up. Benedikt tried to do this for us. he did not succeed, since the sign-up process requires a Turkish identification number. Because we obviously do not have one, we arranged with Osman from Esarj that we get a charging-card anyways, we would call him when we are about to charge and he would unblock the charging station from the distance. This worked perfectly and thanks for the charge, Osman and esarj!

The only problem we had (and the problem recurred a few times after that in Turkey) that the charging station or the car lost at first one phase and later all of them before having finished the charging process. Our theory is that sometimes the electricity network is not very stable or too much traffic is only on one phase. If one phase is overused, the Tesla or NRG-Kick pulls themselves out and charging therefore slows down or stops. Luckily, every time it happened, we noticed it quickly and started the charging process again (this helped sometimes, sometimes not).

After we charged at Bolu the battery to about 85% we left for the Ilgaz Mountain National Park and arrived there later that evening at around 08:30 p.m.. The roads in Turkey are really good. That way it is not a problem to be driving at night.