Erzurum is not the most popular tourist destination in Eastern Turkey, but I want to get to know at least one more place except for Istanbul before leaving for Georgia and the description of a university town with some beautiful architecture monuments and a center of jewelry-making from a local black stone made me want to go inland for a few days. So I return to the bus station after just one day in Trabzon to get on another six hours bus trip. It will be the most most eerie bus ride on this whole trip, it's a real pity my camera was broken, but on the other hand not taking pictures maybe makes it easier to take in the vastness of this moonscape. Everything looks just completely out of scale. Nothing blocks my view in this nearly vegetation free part of the highland, countless flat cones with perfectly straight edges majestically fill the huge looking area to the horizon.
We pass by a truck that just fell off the road on that same day and turned over. When we take a break on a newly built, not yet fully functioning gas station I enjoy the crisp clear mountain air, chilly and dry for a change. The break, however, turns into a repair stop about five men take turns looking under the buses hood, but it doesn't seem to work. I have a fight with my phone which is erratically disconnecting and reconnecting, finally I manage to message my host in Erzurum. After about an hour we continue the trip. At some minor stop in the middle of this massive nowhere the conductor makes me change the bus and some hours late I arrive at Erzurum's modern bus station.
My hosts show me a bit of the town by car and invite me for traditional Turkish lunch to a restaurant. Although only one of them speaks English we easily find a lot to talk about and are soon deep in conversation about German politics, Turkish food, soccer, the landscape and many other things. I am truly grateful for the kind and generous hospitality, especially after the long bus ride and not understanding where I was going.
The guys I'm staying with are really sweet and show me around the town which is an important army base and university in this part of the country and they always worry if everything is fine - it sure is! They even help me get my camera fixed, so here are some pictures of the central square and one of the old mosques, quite different from those in Istanbul.
The days are still hot and we just take a brief look at the busy life downtown before sitting in the shade outside the university eating sunflower seeds and talking about politics, patriotism, culture and modernity, religion and family values. Such a lot of world to see!
The nights are pleasantly mild, so me mostly walk after dark, have delicious ice cream and visit the Taşhan, an old trading house that contains loads of tiny shops selling jewelry made from the black stone (black kind of amber), the Oltu Taş.
I wonder why there are ski jumpers decorating most of the street lamps on the bigger streets. They seem a bit out of place at these temperatures, but I can well imagine that it gets very cold round here in winter. And yes, there are ski jumps here, I can see them in the distance behind the university compounds. In 2011 the XXVth Winter Universiade were held here, something like Olympic Games for university athletes, I never heard of it before, the city is still proud of this event. There is something going on in this far Eastern corner of the country after all. I do see it is a very different part and a very distant place from most other parts of Turkey. My host points out that he definitely views himself as an Asian. People in Western Turkey might identify with Europe to some extent, for him that wouldn't make any sense whatsoever. He has seen four other cities in Turkey and never left the country, so he uses Couchsurfing to improve his English (and German and Russian to some extent) and learn as much about other places as possible by talking to his guests and reading on the internet. It humbles me to be welcomed with such hospitality and openness by someone to whom I cannot offer the same in return as he cannot afford travelling - for now, hopefully that will change in the future...
On the third day it's once more time to leave. I wake up early and walk around in the garden taking pictures of the huge landscape all around:
After nearly a week in the metropolis my plan to head East is set. Ivana helps me to get a ticket for the night bus to Trabzon more than 1000km along the Black Sea coast, I get a confirmation from my Couchsurfing host in Erzurum where I will go after that and I bought a LOT of Turkish delight. My farewell experience is smoothly slipping through major traffic chaos by a giant portion of good chance.
I don't want to hurry with my heavy backpack and I don't know exactly how long it will take me to walk from the hostel to Taksim for the shuttle to the bus company's central station, so I leave hours early, get a kumpir on my way for dinner and unexpectedly find myself in the six o'clock shuttle instead of the seven o'clock one. Traffic jam is the natural condition of Istanbul streets, but today something is just not right. It takes us more than two hours instead of one to get to the main station at the highway. Most people on my bus thus missed their long-distance connection. I feel quite lost on the huge dusty yard overcrowded with people, bags, and buses. No one speaks English, someone manages to gesture to me I just have to check the number on the bus to find mine. I find some teenagers who do speak English, they confirm that my bus will leave on this side of the yard, not on the opposite side 70 meters away, out of sight. It's already nearly an hour late and I start to get quite nervous. I hear a man in a white shirt say something about Erzurum to someone and I show him my ticket. He beams at me, oh, yes, that's right! I have to come with him! He takes me and the other guy with him, hurrying between heaps of sand, stones and concrete: Our bus has already left and he is the conductor looking for the two missing passengers! We hop on board while the bus is slowly making it's way back onto the overcrowded city highway. Praise to the well organized Turkish long-distance buses. (You have to reserve your seat to your name, including your gender. Men and women are not allowed to sit next to each other.) You also get fed all the time. Tea. Biscuits. Tea. Ice cream. Water. Nuts. Tea. Within two hours. I fall asleep shortly after midnight. I wake up briefly at 4 am. When the clock doesn't show the time it informs me about the temperature of the dark grey landscape outside with steep stones on both sides of the road: eleven degrees centigrade.
After having brushed my teeth at a highway stop the next morning and spending some ten minutes in the sun enjoying the chilly morning air while our bus is washed, too, I get to know a new type of coastline. The highway is practically next to the beach, there is the Black Sea to my left for some hours. It is very dark blue and very detached from the land and humans as the narrow strip of brown sand is wedged between the water and the highway. Quite a distant sea...
We arrive at Trabzon in the early afternoon. It's quite easy to get the dolmush to the center, but I am a bit disoriented and walk around a lot in the heat before I find the pension mentioned in the Lonely Planet. The rooms are very tiny, very brightly colored, very tidy and everything smells of chlorine. My window also faces the mosque with the very loud muezzin mentioned in the book. I don't mind, he won't call when I'll go to bed and once I'm asleep even he won't be able to wake me up.
Unfortunately I don't have time to take the tour out of town to visit e mountain monastery, so I just walk around the city center and explore this down to earth harbor city. It is quite a contrast after Istanbul, modest, small, no tourists. I stroll thorough the market quarter. Having forgotten my scarf I buy a nice simple bluish grey one for two Lira to be able to visit one of the beautiful mosques. I manage to buy a small box containing about a hundred hair pins for a similar amount of money and a half of a huge loaf of freshly baked bread directly from the window of the bakery. I feel like I got what I need for the rest of this trip.
For the first time since I left Srebrenica it starts to rain heavily, so I spend some time in an internet cafe, verifying my schedule for the following day and writing some emails. Later I meet my train and Istanbul buddies and some friends of their's. They stopped here for some days on their way to Georgia and made use of the low prices for clothes. It's really great to exchange some more views of Turkey and get some valuable information about Georgia. And as my phone is really starting to fail me they even lend me their spare phone (I returned it on New Year's when we all happened to celebrate in Dresden, Germany)!
- Unfortunately my camera broke so I don't have any pictures of this part of the trip. -
