Across Turkey Part Two

10:49

Istanbul-Ankara.

I woke up after a few hours of sleep, watching across the balcony as the sky was still in the blanket of darkness. It was around four am and our bus to Ankara will leave Istanbul exactly on eight am. Words of the wise : Don't underestimate their public transportation system schedule. It happened to a friend of mine and he reaped what he sow in the end.

Journey to Ankara from Istanbul took around six hours by road. We opted for this as we want to spend our money as little as possible. After we had prepared some snacks to munch on, we took off at around 5.30am in the middle of the cold morning. It was seven degree and I only wore two layers of clothes. My girl wore up to four layers and a pair of gloves.

We're ready!

Walking for a few minutes and took a cab to go to Yusufpasa Tramvay Station and went up to Aksaray Metro Station. Our journey was already exhausting as we had to carry around our backpacks all the time whilst running to get to the intended places. This was Kak Mira's first experience as a backpacker and I can't have her lose her high-spirited self so early just because of some inconveniences. We ran, we walked and the people among us kept giving us weird looks and suspicious glances.

We reached at the bus station around 7.45 in the morning. We were very lucky because we already asked around and did some research on the Internet the night before our journey. The bus system here is very systematic. They used numbers on each ticket, along with our names and ID (In our cases, passport numbers) and the buses will be on the right station on that very particular time.

Ouh, we used KamilKoc by the way.

The bus took off from Istanbul, heading to Ankara station. Kak Mira has already sleeping by the time some refreshments arrived after two hours of journey. The bus have two attendants, just like in a flight. They attended and served us with some coffee and snacks. I munched along the way while reading Gone Girl.

Exactly on 2pm, we arrived in Ankara Bus Station, situated in the outskirt of the city. Lucky for us, the metro station just situated beside the bus level and then off we go. We had to go to Ankara Gari (pronounced Gaa) quickly because our train will leave to Erzurum in a few hours. We rushed through sea of people, some Turks managed to scammed me on prepaid charges as he said that the prepaid will be on my account as soon as I got some messages and I wasted fifteen Lira on that. I'm pretty pissed off.

In Turkey, if you didn't know how to speak their mother-tongue, you're gonna be in a quite big trouble. Turks didn't speak other language other than their own. Lucky for me, my girl studied for a year on Turkish Language and she can speak in Turkish quite fluently. Everything in Turkey is written and spoken in Turks. My first time in Turkey was quite a nightmare as I didn't know anybody to help me and whatnot.

We yabanje (foreigner) need to survive on our own. Istanbul's people were quite different from Ankara's. I was called an Arab countless time here and also when I was in Europe. I AM MALAYSIAN, BY THE WAY. They often came at me and asked whether I'm an Arab or not. I held my temper in the metro just because there was a group of older women were bad-mouthing about me, as they thought I was an Arab. I was gob-smacked when Kak Mira translated what they were saying in front of me. It was quite an experience.

Ankara Metro

My travel-mate.

After we reached the end of the line, we embarked and to our surprised, we were actually lost. We looked around and there were no one out in four degree cold. We walked until we found a nice lady and she showed us the right way. We thanked her and we ran as fast as we could because it was already four pm. Our train leaves at five-thirty pm.

We embarked another station to get to the right way and the stares and glances came straight to our faces. I guess they didn't get lots of girls with 50L backpacks here. We finally reached the right station and had to walked almost two kilometres because Ankara Gari didn't connect with the metro line.

BUT WE MADE IT.