You don't wait for an answer while it is your turn. You wait for an answer while the other teams are playing. If you don't get an answer when you get the turn save again, then you fire off a request to the Referees.
You can't wait for an answer till next turn, because meanwhile your galley most likely is feeding the fish by that time. This is why I think this rule is so important. Otherwise the game would be completely different from a single player game: virtually in all my single player games I have entered an AI's territory, when one of my galleys managed to cross over to another continent and made contact. In 99% of the cases you simply can't stay outside without loosing your galley. And I never thought of this as something special (and apparently neither was the AI... they never kicked me out, yet...)
Why should in our game making contact be so completely different from a "normal" game?