It had taken a couple of months to secure permission from the Istanbul authorities to cross the Bosporus bridge into Asia on foot. This had not been possible since the late 1970s, when the surprisingly high number of suicides committed by jumping from the dizzyingly high bridge led to the walkway being closed to pedestrians indefinitely. Some way short of the bridge, a small white hatchback began to follow us at walking pace. Three burly men were peering out at us through the foggy condensation of the windscreen. It stopped to let one of the suited strangers out, who then started following us, trying to catch up with our now ever-quickening pace. Andy gripped his walking stick, ready to swipe if the chap got much closer. Then we heard a great shout of ‘Mr Andy!’. Stunned, we both turned to confront him. Mehmet explained that he was one of three police detectives who had been assigned for our personal safety that day, and would be escorting us for the rest of our journey. Apparently the bridge authorities, whose permission we had needed to cross the bridge, had notified the Department for Tourism about our journey. The Department had consequently set up a press conference at the Blue Mosque, from where our final day’s walking was due to start. As they had neglected to tell us any of this, we began our day’s walk from the front door of our hotel, and now we were reluctant to backtrack the couple of kilometres into the centre of town, despite to the waiting cameras. Concerned by our no-show, the Office of Tourism had dispatched a small phalanx of police across the city, some of whom, namely Mehmet and his entourage, had finally tracked us down just short of the bridge.

As the suspension towers of the bridge loomed out the incessant rain, we were joined by two motorcycle escorts. The seven of us set off to cross the final 1510m span that links Europe to Asia. Six months older and certainly wiser, we looked behind us at the muddy footprints left in our wake. Between us, we must have knocked up over 10 million of these. Some we could recall, some we couldn’t, but I knew that these last ones we would never forget. Eventually, inevitably, we were able to make out our friends and family beyond the eastern end of the bridge and perhaps more importantly, 200m in front of them, an enormous yellow sign proclaiming to the oncoming road traffic and two bedraggled pedestrians, ‘Welcome to Asia’.