Half the price of flying last minute but several times the trip length, I board the bus to Urfa at Istanbul’s main otogar in the early afternoon. I settle into my seat with 19 hours of road ahead of me, and I don’t really know where I’m going.
The woman next to me is large and seems to grow larger with each of my attempts to reclaim lost ground (key on an overnight ride of any sort), as I drift closer and closer to the window. Ignoring the rolling hills and the polite, general announcement to refrain from cellular communication, she complains loudly that she had to take the bus instead of flying to Gaziantep. “So she’s getting out before me,” I think with some consolation, which then begins to melt away as she hangs up and folds her hands on her lap, forming a sharp pointed elbow that seems to interpret my forearm as an armrest.
Before leaving Istanbul, I dismissed the good natured advice of some friends to avoid the long distance bus by telling them the not untruth that I enjoy long-hauls. “I don’t mind them, and if you get too tired of it you can always stop to eat at the tesisler…who can resist running into the tesis with everyone on the bus at 3am to eat sütlaç?”
“Yes,” a friend had replied, “ everyone who ends up on the has that romantic view of those places, but it is only because it is the only damn thing to do. Don’t forget the toilets.” Yet a few hours into the drive, I’m looking forward to our first stop with the excitement of a kid whose been promised a Happy Meal “when we get to Kentucky.”
Nearly everywhere interesting outside of Istanbul is at least an overnight bus ride away, so it seems everyone has an overnight bus story or two. [Yet since most of the bus rides go so smoothly, none of them are usually very good.] This shared Turkish travel experience varies slightly depending on your bus company and destination, but for the most part is wonderfully predictable and comfortably dull.
If you’re my height, there are no complaints in the seating department. In accordance with your ticket price and luck, you’ll be entertained in one of the following ways, in decreasing order of desirability: an interactive screen, a la transcontinental in-flight entertainment, strategically placed televisions with Turkish films, sit-coms or dubbed foreign films you’d never otherwise see (I’m thinking “The Lake” and Lohan’s “Love Bug”); Turkish music blaring from one speaker; Turkish music blaring from speakers above every seat, which you may or may not be able to turn off; a single Turkish CD playing again and again and again.
The bus will also have a flight attendant who keeps everything in order, passing out drinks (coffee and tea, water, Coke and some version of orange soda) and – again, depending on your luck – pre-packaged cakes.
Just when you’ve had more than your fair share of the complementary beverages, and usually in exactly the middle of nowhere, brakes huish huish huish into a parking lot, filled with a handful of other busses, all spilling out passengers to the cafeteria. For breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, or for whatever sort of meal you might feel compelled to eat at 2am, while still others pour over the nuts and sweets in kitschy barrels and islands of boxed Turkish Delight, buying bags of gifts for recipients most likely yet to be determined.
But on the bus to Urfa, I was one of the few passengers who even stepped inside these shiny monuments to modern Turkish consumption and construction. I sit in the AC with my lahmacun, looking through the glass store front at the families eating sandwiches and dolma from old yogurt tubs in the sticky air.
I usually indulge in sütlaç at these stops, but sweets aren't as fun alone.
9:30, and I’ve been on the bus for 9 hours. My two friendly attempts to small talk with my neighbor have failed, but I’ve hardly looked at the clock – particularly impressive as the reading lights don’t work.
Riding along on this route – and indeed many routes in Turkey – you realize how big it is, what a large, growing country it is. Riding a bus, with little else to do than look out the window, you’re bound to reflect on where you are, where you’re coming from, where you’re going. It feels like a timeless slice of life, an empty mind stationary yet rolling, and somehow more profound than being an empty mind anywhere else. As the countryside seems endless, I think about where I am. The tesisler, which we find in fields of nothing and so leave them, are new, unarguably clean with the sad reality of the utilitarian multi-purpose space.
On my last long ride, from Istanbul to Athens, I thought for hours about Greece’s long coast, miles and miles of coast, with every gas station boasting a clean, uninterrupted sea view. But I feel that the quintessential Turkish bus ride – not just this one, but the one I’m nurturing and contemplating on this long ride [and again typing my notes from the trip] – is not one winding along turquoise waters, but one lost in the middle of Anatolia.
