There aren’t a great deal of small roads into Istanbul, so we spent a fair bit of time on the service road alongside the motorway heading into the city.

We did manage to get off the main road for a big climb — it must have been around 2km at 10% and it definitely was about the limit Sarina and I could manage in one go. Luckily we’d just had coffee and cake before it!

As we neared our apartment in Galata we did manage to get off the main road and started to see some ancient buildings that this city is famous for.

We crossed the river (not the Bosphurus, but a tributary that bisects the European side of the city) and headed up another steep hill towards our apartment.

The buildings were very cute all around, but we were less amused by the address system, which didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to us. We spent about ten minutes going up and down the same roads for a while until we decided the best policy would be to sit in a café and contact our host.

A mixture of that, and a fresh looking at Google Maps solved the problem, and we were set up in our apartment for the next two days.