Crossing Turkey by Train

With the luxury of hindsight, I would have done a million things in
my life differently. I would never have bullied poor Timothy Partington
at school; I would never have spent all my money on alcohol but most of
all, I would never have gone across Turkey with Dug by rail. No
Westerner travels from Istanbul to Bodrum by train. They take a plane,
a bus, a boat, a canoe, a donkey or decide to swim. There are 101
logical reasons for this and Dug and I were about to find out all of
them. In sizzling temperatures, the two of us sweated our way to the
terminal on the other side of Istanbul where it is possible to catch a
ferry across the Bosphorus. It was at this time when I was barely able
to walk a dozen steps without swearing and shaking my fist at
astonished locals that Dug kept his cool and got us on the right boat.
If it had been left to me then we'd be on the slow boat to China by
now. Anyhow, we got ourselves to a train station where we assumed we
could just pop down to Bodrum but there were a few issues Firstly, Babs
had retained the life-saving Thomas Cook European Timetable. Secondly,
even if we'd got a copy then it wouldn't have been much good. No one
spoke English. There were no signs even in Turkish that we could see.
In fact, there was an abundant lack of information of any kind. Dug
attempted to engage the man at the TCCD office (Turkish State Railways)
but he returned with a sombre 'Well, Fuck you too!" I thought it only
fair that I should give it a go but he saw me coming and waved me away.
What a lovely man. So imagine the scene if you will. We were stuck in a
railway station where no one understood us, we understood no one and
there was no way of knowing which trains went where and how long any
journey took. Talk about character building. I was close to tears when
Dug spied a train with the place-name Denizli on it. Denizli is an
insignificant dot on the map but crucially it was in the South-west of
Turkey. Thanking our lucky stars, we hopped on board and looked around
for a seat to plonk ourselves. Yeah, right. This train was evidently
planning to go round the globe twice, judging by the number of people
on board. Every compartment was stuffed full of at least eight Turks,
several chickens and mountains of kit. Was this some sort of annual
Turkish house-moving competition? Even the corridors were teeming as we
fought our way through the hordes, both of us now hot, irritable and
exhausted. When we did find two precious seats then it wasn't long
before a burly Turk ejected us on the grounds that he felt like it.
Finally, we elbowed our way into a compartment where six Turks
proceeded to stare at us unflinchingly as we sat down. Nothing like
being extremely unpopular. This was, without doubt, the worse train
trip of my life. We had barely enough room to breathe, we had bugger
all money, we had nothing to eat or drink, we were the only Non-Turks
on the train and it was hot enough to fry an egg. If that wasn't
depressing enough, we didn't know how long this journey was going to
last or when to get off. It had to be a bad dream. Just when I was
consoling myself that nothing could possibly get any worse, we
discovered how long it was to Denizli. A staggering 22 hours! I tried
curling up and going to sleep in the corridor but I found that having
my head trampled on by Turks was interrupting my sleep pattern.
Meanwhile, Dug was slowly getting lung cancer as all the Turkish men in
our compartment began to smoke pipes and cigarettes. Up until that
point, I have never wanted to throw myself from a train. For at least
ten hours, a couple of Turkish men talked to me in Turkish and by the
end I was ready to end it all. They seemed friendly enough and would
throw their heads back at regular intervals and laugh heartily. Things
weren't helped by the fact that all the passengers in our compartment
had food and drink. A wrinkly old lady offered me some strangely
scented oil and I was just about to drink it when I saw the others
applying it like sun cream. Apparently, it's meant to refresh you
although I tend to sway towards a cold Budweiser. It doesn't make you
want to rush to the nearest bath and scrub yourself clean. Speaking of
cleanliness, had Dug and I been in London instead of Turkey then we
could have made a fortune from begging. Who needs a mangy child or dog
to complete the effect when you look like the contents of Satan's
underpants? I was smelly, rat-infested and generally unpleasant to know
but we were two of the cleanest on the train which says something about
Turkish hygiene. How we both survived those tortuous twenty-odd hours I
will never know. We were in for a final scare as the train stopped at
some nondescript village in the middle of nowhere and then began to go
backwards. Oh, shit. However, we were not destined to spend the rest of
our lives by going round Turkey by rail, as ours was the next stop. A
dusty, dilapidated sign said 'WELCOME TO DENIZLI. YOU REALLY ARE IN THE
MIDDLE OF NOWHERE NOW!'