Imagine the hardest border you could ever cross in your life? That was mine. A flight between Istanbul (Turkey) and Tel-Aviv (Israel) with Pegasus Airline for only 65 EUR found on Skyscanner.
The city of Istanbul in Turkey is divided between two continents, part Europe, part Asia. My first time in Asia was when I went to Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen Airport to catch a flight to Te-Aviv in Israel. We woke up early in the morning and took a taxi with a young man from Israel who was returning to his native country. On the way we crossed the bridge that divides the two continents. Even though the driver could not speak English, he used an instant translation application to communicate with us.
Upon arriving at the airport, after checking in we ate at Mc Donalds and went to boarding.
Arriving in the city of Tel-Aviv, Israel, geographically on the Asian continent, but in practice considered Middle East, I came across the most complex frontier I have ever crossed in my life.
This is what happened:
- 20 minutes in the immigration line to speak with the officer
- In my turn, the woman starts to bombard me with questions:
- Where are you staying?
- Why are you coming to Israel?
- What were you doing in Turkey?
- Do you have another nationality? Could you provide your other passport as well?
- Where are you heading next?
- Why are you traveling with this guy (my travel partner, Pedro)?
- Where you guys met?
- … 10 minutes of uninterrupted questions…
- Not happy with our answers, the officer decided to call the chief police to have a chat with us.
- We waited a while until he arrived with a few more questions:
- Where are you coming from?
- Which country you visited before Turkey?
- And before? And before? And before? I began to list and even confused the order: Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro and so on… I told him I was doing a long trip and could show him my itinerary in my computer.
- He kept asking why we were connected, how we met, why we travelled together… for about 10 minutes…
- Not satisfied, he took our passports and asked us to pick up our luggage on the treadmill, accompanied by two other policemen.
- After this we were invited to a room where we were locked together with the chief police and the policemen.
- Than he said: Look guys we are only looking for drugs, if you have some speak now, otherwise it will get really complicated for you. I told him we had absolutely no drugs.
- Then he checked our entire luggage, every corner, space pocket for 10 minutes.
- He could not find anything even tough he was sure we had because of our hair style.
- For least but not last he gave us a paper to sign written signature of arrested he explained this word was meaning that our luggage was checked, pretty strange…
After more than one hour and a half we were finally released and entered Israel! Such a welcoming country!
