ACROSS TURKEY - By Bus

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So there we were, in ancient Sultanahmet, with its unfamiliar smells and sounds, and that exotic skyline of domes and minarets silhouetted against the evening sky.  Immediately in front of us was the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia and, right across the road from where the bus had stopped, the famed travellers meeting place, the Pudding Shop on Divan Yolu.  At last we felt like we were really in the East. But, after three days and nights on the (not so Magic) bus from Amsterdam I was exhausted and seriously cranky.  Even so, it felt exciting to be in Turkey. 

We avoided the rush to the Tourist Hotel next to the Blue Mosque and checked into the Gulhane Cinar, a shabby but cheap hotel in a dirty, cobbled backstreet.   The place had an infamous history amongst low-budget travellers.  Before the U.S. had put pressure on Turkey to tighten up its drug laws the Gulhane had a reputation as a rendezvous for dopers, junkies and international shoestring vagabonds.  We dumped our bags in the shabby, second-floor room and took advantage of the dangerous-looking, downstairs, gasoline-fired shower (had to yell at the guys from reception when I caught them spying on Janette through a peephole in the door).  With 36 hours of travelling grime removed we hit the wood-smoke scented, brightly-lit, night streets to find food.  We seemed to be quite an attraction, everywhere we went people would stop and stare or say hello.  Unable to find anything obviously vegetarian we stuck with the street vendors, buying a couple of apples and a bag of hot roasted chestnuts.  In good spirits we walked slowly along the dirty streets back to the hotel mysteriously followed by a ragged crippled guy dragging his leg.  We could hear him scraping along behind as if in a scene from some horror movie.  Somewhere near the Blue Mosque we lost him but were both too scared to turn and look.  We made it back to the Gulhane and I was asleep as soon as my head hit the bed.

Awakened by the muezzin’s call to prayer echoing across the city from the various mosques we slowly roused ourselves and headed for the main post office to check for mail at the Poste Restante.  We’d only been away from home for nine days but, as Istanbul was on the list of places we had told friends and family that we could pick up letters, we thought it might be worth a try.  Mail was the only way of keeping in touch, mobile phones and the internet didn’t exist in 1973.  After half an hour we were completely lost in a maze of back-alleys and ended up being escorted to the post office by a friendly policeman.  There was no mail.  Janette posted a letter to her parents.  We sat in the sun, drank strong chai from tulip shaped glasses and watched the world go by.  All we had now was time and in the following months we would spend a great deal of it drinking tea and contemplating whatever reality movie was being played out before us.  We strolled up the road to the Iranian Embassy where we were informed that, as we were British subjects, visas weren’t required to cross into Iran, so, all our tasks completed, we wandered into the covered bazaar.

Nothing could have prepared us for Istanbul’s labyrinthine Grand Bazaar, the Kapali Carsi.  And no amount of adjectives can do it justice.  Suffice to say that here was a place that you could buy anything you could ever possibly need.  We wandered the streets and alleys for six hours talking to moustachioed shopkeepers who did their best to sell us rings, bags, carpets, caviar, embroidered jackets and shirts, dresses, leatherwork, fruit and vegetables, fish and meat, sheep and goats cheese.  We walked cobbled lanes given over solely to toolmakers, cobblers, jewellers, spices, letter typists and songbirds in wicker cages.  Street musicians entertained us and child cigarette sellers offered us American and Turkish smokes as we sipped samovar-brewed chai in cafes where men puffed strong tobacco in narghiles, huge silver-bowled water pipes.  Children followed us around practising their English on the foreigners and showing great fascination with my earrings.  Porters pushed through the crowds carrying enormous loads; one wiry guy we saw bent double with a three-seater sofa and two matching armchairs on his back.  Eventually we found ourselves back in the sunlight by the book market outside the 16^th Century Bayazit Mosque.  Exhausted and overdosed on the sights smells and sounds we returned to the Gulhane Cinar to gather our energies.   

Early evening found us attempting to make a booking on the Monday morning bus to Erzerum in Eastern Turkey.  We had planned to take the train from Istanbul to Teheran but discovered that there was only one departure per week and that the next train wasn’t until Wednesday.  Fascinating though Istanbul was we were keen to keep moving east.  Unfortunately as no-one in the bus office spoke a word of English and the only useful Turkish we had was the word ‘Erzerum’ the process took quite some time.  Eventually we left with tickets in hand costing 90Lira each, less than £3:00 for what we expected to be a three days and nights journey across the country.    

Returning to our hotel a young guy suddenly appeared in front of us shouting, “You speaky English?  You English?”   On finding that we were, he insisted on taking us for tea in a nearby café.  He turned out to be called Mohammed, a medical student studying at the University.   He was genuinely friendly and interested in England, (his parents were living in London) and improving his grasp of the language.  He introduced us to his brother who spoke no English but, as Mohammed whispered, “He go to get hasheesh”.  At this point I began to get a little nervous.  I’d heard stories of ‘tourists’ being set up by the police in order to extract bribes from them and it was well known that there were a number of foreigners in Bayrampasa Prison serving long sentences for relatively small amounts of drugs.  But, despite my concerns, I told myself that the situation was probably ok and that this was an opportunity to connect with the locals using something we had in common, smoking dope.  Actually, that was really just bullshit justification for wanting a smoke badly enough to risk the consequences.

Up a flight of old, winding stone stairs we followed Mohammed to his flat on the sixth floor of a run down old building.  We entered, kicked off our shoes and washed our filthy feet before sitting down to smoke and share food.  The hash was very strong and it was difficult not to get a little paranoid about the possible intentions of these two strangers but they were very gracious and hospitable and after a couple of hours they saw us back to the main street where Mohammed flagged down a Dolmus (shared taxi) that took us back to Sultanahmet, very stoned.  Later Janette informed me that she had suffered intense paranoia and had spent the evening imagining a succession of horrific scenarios.

 The following day we hand-washed all our dirty clothes and hung them over the balcony to dry, then, despite our misgivings of the previous night, we took off to meet Mohammed who had been most insistent that today he would show us around Istanbul.  At this encounter his enthusiasm was almost childlike as he led us to a big old American, Mercury-Eight convertible.  Inside was the hashish brother plus an elder brother, ginger haired and moustached, who was behind the wheel.  He turned out to be the ‘mad-driving brother’.   We piled in and did battle with the city’s traffic.  I think the guy had learned to drive by watching car-chase sequences in Hollywood movies, with the addition of much creative horn use and mysterious hand gestures.  He would overtake queues of stationary vehicles on either side and, one time, bounced the car up on to the pavement and drove for a hundred metres, causing pedestrians to jump for their lives.  I have no idea where we went except that we would periodically arrive at the edge of the Bosphorous to drink glasses of chai and surreptitiously smoke spliffs in the car, one time whilst being entertained by a busking violinist.  The effect of the hash had turned the day into a surreal magical mystery tour and, having little idea of what was going on, we could do nothing but sit back and try to enjoy the ride.

At some point the reason for the excursion changed from their, somewhat strange, idea of sightseeing to a search for yet another brother, this one twelve years old, who hadn’t been seen for two days.  This entailed a tour of the poorer residential areas, slums in fact, along winding potholed roads, scattering groups of kids playing street soccer and occasionally screeching to a halt to ask various individuals if they’d seen him.  The drive terminated at Mohammed’s place, without the missing younger brother, and once more we climbed the stairs to smoke more dope and eat grapes.  It had been a crazy day so it wasn’t long before we made our excuses and got ready to leave.  The mad-driving brother who turned out to be very gentle and friendly drove us back to Sultanahmet where we said a final goodbye with much handshaking and kissing of cheeks.  We bought two rounds of bread and a thick chunk of hard, dark chocolate and, escaping the evening Ramadan crowds retired to the quiet sanctuary of our seedy hotel.

It was Monday 22 October and our day to leave Istanbul.  We intended to get up very early but, having no alarm clock, overslept, which put Janette in an intensely grumpy mood.  We arrived at the Poste Restante only to find that it didn’t open until 9:00am, so we rushed around buying food for the trip before returning, only to find that there was still no mail for us.  So it was back to the hotel to check out and pay the bill, 33Turkish Lira for the two of us, which was less than 50pence a night.  We struggled to the bus office with our luggage only to be told that the morning departure had been cancelled but another bus would leave at six in the evening.  We left our bags in (what we hoped would be) their safekeeping and arranged to return at 5:00pm.  This gave us the rest of the day to take in a little more of the city at our own pace and without the confusing craziness of Mohammed and his brothers.

Inside the Blue Mosque the faithful were praying, kneeling on beautiful Turkish carpets under the many-domed roof.  Aya Sofia seemed to be a vast museum, architecturally amazing but lacking in atmosphere.  It didn’t help that it was full of middle-aged German and British package tourists with their guides.  We escaped them and walked along roughly cobbled streets down to the Golden Horn where we crossed the Galata Bridge, with its many fish restaurants, to Karakoy on the northern shore.  But the day had become very humid so we rested for a while, drank chai and gathered our energies for the long walk back to the bus office on Ordu Cad. 

On arrival, the guy in the office produced our bags and beckoned for us to sit down.  We didn’t have to wait long before a minibus pulled up outside and we were invited to get in along with three other men, none of whom spoke English.  It seemed a bit odd that we would be going all the way to eastern Turkey in a minibus, but, as life appeared to be getting stranger by the day anyway, I didn’t give it too much thought.  We just had time to stash our belongings away and make ourselves comfortable on the back seat when the minibus pulled into the real bus depot at Topkapi and we were ushered out and directed to a waiting room packed with people.  After a few minutes a guy appeared and personally escorted us to the Erzerum bus.  What a surprise!  This was a modern Mercedes Benz coach with reclining seats.  Luxury!  We departed pretty much on time but then spent an hour queuing to board the car ferry to Uskudar on the Asian side of the Bosphorus.  Once on board, our smartly uniformed driver (Capitain) and the co-driver invited us to join them for a glass of chai and from then on we were treated like VIPs.  The bus made one more stop to pick up passengers in Uskudar and we were off.

The first evening on the bus was great fun.  Taped music played with everyone clapping and singing along, guys would come up to the front and tell jokes and stories, and there was even a quiz. Of course we couldn’t understand a word of what was being said, everyone else on the bus being Turkish, but there was a kind of happy holiday atmosphere that was infectious.  By one o’clock in the morning everyone had quietened down.  We pulled off the road and all the passengers crowded into a large restaurant.  The Capitain invited us to eat with him and had a tray of kebabs brought to the table. Because of the language problem we had great difficulty in explaining that we didn’t eat meat and thought, from his stony expression, that we might have offended him, that we were refusing his hospitality.  But not at all.  He simply took us into the kitchen, said something to the cook, and left us to choose what we wanted.  The cook took us on a tour of all the pots of food until we eventually chose fried rice, salad and yoghurt. 

Neither Janette nor I managed much sleep that night.  The seats were comfortable enough but it was quite cold.  Janette was feeling ill, perhaps the salad from the previous night, who knows how clean the water was that it was washed in.  We stopped for an early lunch and graciously turned down the Capitains offer of a meal but did join him for chai.  The way that everyone stared at us you wouldn’t think that this was a well-travelled route for young westerners.  (It seemed that most people travelled on the overland buses from Europe rather than on public transport).  When we walked into the restaurant the conversation died down and all eyes were on us but everyone seemed friendly and there were no hassles.  This service station had the absolute worst, stinking, overflowing with shit, hole in the ground, outside toilet I have ever had the misfortune to use in all my life, then and now. I’d thought that the toilet in Yugoslavia was bad but this one beat it hands down.  I can still smell it over thirty years later.  Returning to the bus the Capitain insisted that we sit at the front where there was more room to stretch out our legs and he could keep us supplied with king-size American cigarettes rather than the cheap Samsuns we had been smoking.

Sometime in the early hours of the morning we passed through Ankara of which I only have a fleeting recollection of lights and modern buildings.  Throughout the next day we followed the central route, E23, across Turkey through Sivas and Erzincan, the scenery becoming more barren and rugged the further east we travelled.  The people we passed looked very poor, their houses little more than stone shacks with mud floors.  There were no tractors or mechanised farm machinery and whole families were to be seen working in the fields.  The small towns were simply clusters of squat buildings huddled together against the extremes of weather annually experienced in eastern Turkey.  At the next service station we were once again invited to eat with the driver and, as before, we made our choice from the kitchen, where the workers appeared delighted to have us check out all the bubbling pots of food.  We ate butter beans in tomato sauce with rice and salad.  We desperately tried to get across to the Capitain how grateful we were, not just for the meal but for the hospitality he had shown two foreign strangers on the entire trip.  We had no Turkish and he had no English but he nodded, his face expressionless as ever, as if to say, ‘It’s no big deal, this is how we treat guests in Turkey’.

We had expected the 700 mile journey from Istanbul to take much longer but we reached Erzerum at 8pm after twenty-six hours travelling.  Our bags were offloaded and we said our goodbyes.  In the bus station a small boy who spoke English approached us and offered to take us to a hotel.  The Hotel Asya charged us 20Turkish Lira each, (about £1.20 for the two us) for a double room with heater, telephone and hot shower.  There was no telephone, not that we had any need of one, but there was a large radiator and the windows were crudely double-glazed. In the shower room were three cubicles, the first had a shower but no water came from it, the second had no shower or plumbing and the third contained a huge oil drum.  We used the sink and managed to wash off most of the grime in a trickle of lukewarm water.  The room was clean and warm (Erzerum is located on a high plateau, 5760 feet above sea level, and was quite chilly).  Exhausted, I fell asleep in the middle of a conversation with Janette.

First thing in the morning the communal bathroom was full of soldiers cleaning their teeth and hawking up phlegm into the washbasins.  I hurriedly splashed my face, cleaned my teeth and left them to it.  I had chronic diarrhoea but a couple of Lomotil tablets sorted it out enough for us to be on our way.  Our plan was to change enough money to get us to the Turkey/Iran border, and hopefully before nightfall.  The guy at the hotel gave us directions to the bank and, on returning to the bus station, we were accosted by a fast-talking, crazy looking guy with wild eyes, a three-day beard and no front teeth.  In broken English he asked us where we were going and, before we had time to think about what was happening, had hustled us into an already overloaded beaten up minibus.  The ride was very uncomfortable and when we arrived in Agri, about half way to the Iranian border, we were told that this was the end of the line.  Feeling a mixture of bemusement and irritation we stood in the dusty street with our bags as passing locals stared at us suspiciously.  The place felt like a bandit town.  Almost immediately two men approached, asked if we wanted to go to the border and dragged us off to sit on a bench in a ramshackle wooden hut full of men, all of whom looked like dangerous criminals.  After a time a converted Transit van pulled up and we were loaded on, along with fourteen guys plus a three or four year old child who sat on the drivers lap.  The journey immediately began badly, with the driver reversing the van into the path of a passing truck and smashing one of the rear indicators.  This was a bit worrying and the route, along narrow, winding mountain roads, although spectacular, was more than a little scary, packed in as tight as we were.  Coming down on to a stark, treeless plain the driver brought the vehicle to a halt outside Dogubayazit, a small Kurdish town famous only for smuggling and being the nearest inhabited place to the border.  I was glad to get out. 

Conned for the second time that day we sat at the side of the road and looked into the distance at Mt Ararat, Turkeys highest mountain, partially shrouded in cloud.  Within minutes we were picked up by a soldier in a car who drove us the final twenty two miles, past the long line of trucks waiting to cross into Iran, through an arched gateway and into the walled border post of Bazargan.  Passing from the Turkish to the Iranian side was done quickly and easily, passport control and customs were efficient, indifferent and heavily armed.  We changed some money, bought a cheap tourist map of Iran and drank chai in the restaurant whilst pondering the best way to move on.  As it was beginning to get late we decided that the best thing to do would be to stay the night in the nearest town and set out again first thing in the morning.  A rather suspect looking taxi driver who’d been hanging around waiting for us to finish our tea offered his services and dropped us at what he called a hotel in Maku, a couple of miles down the road.  The place was first and foremost a restaurant with a few extra rooms at the back. The room door didn’t lock, the washbasin was in the corridor in view of the diners and the toilets were outside and pretty rank but the owner was friendly and the beds were clean.  We ate in the dining room, drank chai and went to bed exhausted again.