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. -
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