Ankara, Erzurum, Trabzon, Sarpi, Batumi

We were running out of time and we needed to get over to Tbilisi in Georgia in time for when Charlie was supposed to land on the 5th. This meant we had to speed our way across Turkey in 5 days (about as quick as you can go in Eastern Turkey!)

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 I took a night train to Ankara to meet Sam who had successfully acquired his Uzbek visa and had stayed with the friendly couchsurfer Idris.

Ankara had a distinctly more functional feel to it than Istanbul, so unfortunately we didn't take that many pictures... We just stayed for that day before taking a night train across Turkey to Erzurum. However we did came across something that all cities in the world could benefit from:









TRAINS AND BUSES

Trains are cheaper to take than buses in Turkey, but are slower and generally less frequent. You have much more leg room in trains but in buses you have a 20 channel TV and free coffee and tea. Both have air conditioning. Due to the vast distances within Turkey, night trains and buses are a great way to cover the longer trips, especially during the cooler nights. Our train trip from Ankara to Erzurum, roughly half the length of Turkey, was supposed to be a 17 hour train. It took us 25 hours. The running joke in Turkey is that when the Germans were paid to build Turkey's railway, they were paid per kilometer, which explains the completely random curvaceous nature of the rail track. Sometimes you could look straight out of the window and see where you had previously travelled only a moment ago but in the opposite direction...! There is a food carriage, which serves affordable and decent food, but it is important to at least bring a large supply of bottled water...

The landscape changed a fair bit during our trip...

Whilst eating in this food carriage we met a Turkish guy named Ahmet, he was from Sivas, in central Turkey. He spoke enough english for us to get by and helped to translate the rest of his friend who spoke very little english. After eating with them for a bit we discovered that they were actually the off duty train drivers of the train!

They invited us up to the front of the train where we sat for hours chatting away, playing Backgammon and drinking tea. Awesome!

We then stayed a night with Ertuğrul, Zafer and Atakan when we arrived in Erzurum (Couchsurfing). We had a ridiculous amount of awesome Turkish food, followed by beers and vodka over Backgammon. And then MORE food, where (bearing at this time Sam and I definitely were not sober) for some reason Sam challenged me to a chilli contest.


So we ate 10 chillis each. And yes we definitely did pay for this mistake in the toilet during the following days...

 
 

The next day Ertuğrul took us out and about to show us Erzurum, which was very interesting but very hot! It is worth noting that Palandöken (2600m), Turkey's biggest ski resort, is only 10km from Erzurum. You can fly to Erzurum on Turkish airlines for relatively cheap I am told, so it could be a prefect place to plan an alternative ski trip! Here is (another) mosque, but this one is very old. Can't tell you exactly HOW old but it has a different design from a lot of the other ones so it was interesting to check out...

This is the Çifte Minareli Medrese. It was originally built as a mosque by the first Turk civilization: The Seljuk Turks, but was only half finished. The reason? The Mongol invasion of the late 13th century wiped out the Seljuks and ended their civilization. Pretty cool eh? Well, not for the Seljuks anyways...

We then visited a fortress that was originally created by the Byzantines. Climbing up the restored watch tower, we got some insane views of Erzurum and the surrounding landscape...

After Erzurum we took a bus to Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast, mostly because it seemed to have good links to Georgia, but also because we heard the road over the Kaçkar Mountains had some awesome views, which it definitely did. Rolling green hills turned to dusty, rocky mountains which then turned to humid, green mountainous forest. I didn't get any good pictures that could totally justify the landscape but I'll put them up on Facebook later... 

Our bus from Trabzon to Batumi, Georgia, was certainly an interesting one. From sporadically changing lanes on either side of the road to actually stopping in the slow lane of the motorway to pick up passengers, there were a few questionable traffic decisions that only we seemed to care much about.

After arriving in Georgia, home of one of the oldest languages in the world, we managed to find a great hostel, also the first hostel in Batumi. I'll put more info about this in the next blog...

Here are some pictures of us visiting the beach near Batumi on the Georgian-Turkish border!