Türkiye: Journeys, Destinations, Impressions and Flow

by Liz Gallagher

The Kindness of Strangers

A complete stranger was partly responsible for instigating my journeys on Turkish buses. I’d just arrived in Bodrum, unaware of the Turkish bus system. It was dawn.

I was struggling to pull my bag up a single step in the hotel lobby when Efran pulled up behind me and hoisted my bag up this simple step that in ordinary circumstances would not have been an obstacle.

Doubly Fruitful

Obstacles lead to portals, entry points to new ways of doing, seeing. Efran said his name meant ‘Doubly fruitful.’ He was bussing everywhere in Türkiye. I was eager to know how he did it. Was I being naive? Efran’s in his 40s, qualified in International Relations from London University, a writer from Pakistan traveling solo.

I’m middle-aged, qualified in many things, from Ireland, living in Spain, a wanderer and sometimes-writer traveling solo. Efran said: ‘Obilet’s an app to buy affordable bus tickets on. I’ll go to Konya tomorrow on a 15 hour bus journey to Rumi’s land and the original Dervish dancers.’ I wanted this!

The Gift of Flow

When I decided to go with the flow solo in Türkiye in Oct. 2023, as a first time traveller there, I turned up without a plan, only with the intention of surrendering to the moment.

I tentatively envisioned going from north to west to south-west using local buses. I envisioned it being the destinations that would delight the most. It turned out that although the destinations were spectacular, the journeys of arriving and departing manifested into journeys I hadn’t envisioned taking, and gave up secrets I hadn’t envisioned seeking.

The Topology of Buses

I downloaded the app while Efran talked about the crews of comfortable, air- conditioned buses that sprawl out an intricate web from town to city. Where the bus drops you off, the mini-bus, or dolmus, picks you up and carries you forward into the villages and beyond. Dolmus meaning jammed, pressed, overspilling. The Dolmus bus: no passenger left behind, no matter.

The Call To Prayer

It was 6.45 am on Bodrum’s sleepy promenade. We were having a black tea, sharing a potato pie, being economical, under Efran’s guidance. The call to prayer, (ṣalāt), was reverberating. Efran explained: ‘The muezzin is the person who rallies the call to prayer, he’s just an ordinary person, I, myself, have done the call to prayer many times.’

Hearing the live call to prayer, five times a day was a highlight. Its soundscape echoed all over. It felt primitive, other-worldly. Staying beside a Mosque and hearing it at dawn, while awakening, was haunting. Science dictates the moment of the call which is planned in association with the visual observations of the sun’s position.

Efran said the call to prayer is an invitation ‘ …a call to come to security, to come to salvation…’ He said it was a call created in a time before gods were classified, a time before ‘my god is better than your god’ began happening, a time before rule books became associated with god. It connects with something deep, no matter if we are religious, or not.’

My not understanding the words was freeing, allowing the beauty of the chant to stand alone. My last morning in Türkiye, I was recording the call to prayer from my rooftop when a rooster began crowing from the garden below. The rooster’s crowing rose as the call to prayer intensified and the sea was still like a soft good- bye to Türkiye.

Bus Rides Rock Me

At twelve, I told my careers counsellor that I wanted to be a bus driver ‘to see the world and be free.’ This morphed into me being an avid bus traveler alongside a sometimes ‘cheating’ bus traveler who would declare herself to be under 18, right up until she was 23, in order to get a reduced fare.

One time the bus clerk questioned my age, a voice from behind me in the queue called out to claim me. It was Nell McCafferty, the acclaimed Irish writer and activist from Derry in Northern Ireland. Sitting on the bus chatting with Nell has been one of the best travel stories ever that I’ve returned home to Donegal with, much to the delight of my father who loved Nell McCafferty.

Bus Stations: *Travel Far Enough, You Meet Yourself

Bus stations are microcosms of society, nowhere more so than in Türkiye, they sustain the hub of life. From Barbers to art exhibitions, from landscaped gardens to health clinics, from seating options to cafeterias, shops, and in Bodrum, the fruit and vegetable market borders the bus station. Turkish bus stations are not the sole hang-out of the car-less, the working class, the homeless, bored and unwanted, as experienced at bus stations in the West.

Turkish bus stations are a big deal. Their architecture alone pulled me in. The large creative glass structure of Bodrum bus station blended into the sky, deflecting and radiating sunlight and shadows at curious angles. In the rain, light deflected from the glass and glinted through a fading rainbow, giving it an edge, a glimmer, on my last morning in Türkiye as my bus pulled out.

The delightful wooden structure of Alaçatı bus station in the North West, is watched over by a mosque. Circular wooden seating and conifer trees surround this scene, allowing me to imagine it as a small home with the slogan: ‘You know you want one…’

Rest Rooms, Big Fish and Google Translator

Izmir Bus Station is a rakish, hound-dog of a station, circular-shaped with perpetual motion and interlacing public flow. An olive grove, centre stage, shows how it’s more than a utilitarian point of entry and departure. A large fish tank with big fish, no plant life, and a round tower, flanked the entrance to the women’s rest room. The fish, congregated in one corner, gasping at the surface, looking terror-ridden as if supplicating some form of address to their distress.

I’d already witnessed the Turkish people’s love for their fellow sentient beings. I’d seen the system in place to look after their stray dogs and cats. I used google translator to ask the rest room porter if the fish were ok. He listened attentively, using his translator to tell me that they were due a water change that day. I replied: ‘I love how Turkish people look after their fellow creatures so well.’ Google translator deemed it better to say: ‘I love Turkish people so well. They are fellow creatures.’ We smiled.

Scenery Whizzes Past: Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!

Riding on a bus with views whooshing by made me alert to having only one chance to capture particular scenes before they vanished. The electricity pylon photo with cables elongating towards the bus, the pylon parallel to a mosque, at a tilt, appeared taken by a trapeze artist due to the angle of the bus seat in a precise instant.

For a split second, I was touching the cables and the mosque minaret. Shots from moving buses made everyday views appear exceptional. A bus stop in the middle of nowhere, a mountainous background, a single conifer tree, a lone person on a bench in a mood of regret was straight out of an Edward Hopper art print. How could I, in a flash of a bus passing by such scenes, deduct such things?

Dropping into the Present Moment

Travelling by bus held the ‘present’ centre stage. Sitting, window-side, slowed down my racing mind. The present was all I cared for. Life’s about the journey, not the destination. Not all clichés are crap. Not all impressions are sound-proof. My impressions: ‘Buses get to everywhere in Türkiye. All sentient beings matter.’

Are Local Buses an Option for Tourists?

My hotel owner didn’t recommend local buses because they didn’t go directly to destinations such as Pamukkale or Ephesus. Is going directly necessarily the best way to go anywhere? Confucius says it doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you don’t stop. I say it doesn’t matter how slowly, and indirectly, you go as long as you enjoy going off track and don’t stop.

The hotel owner recommended a tourist coach. The unfulfilled inner bus driver in me views tourist coaches as invasive monsters, ploughing onwards, leaving trails of nothing worthy behind. There’s a different driving force behind coaches. Coaches are for: getting bodies aboard, offering a few destinations in one day, getting there and back and the excursion done by nightfall.

Pamukkale and Epheseus were advertised together as an excursion of six hours travel there and six hours back, two hours for the destinations, 2 hours for breaks. It’s doable if a quick glimpse of these places and a flash-in-the-pan adventure is all there’s time for.

My quandary would be my inability to hold excitement for the journey if half the time spent on the journey is ‘going back’? Going back towards safety or going forward towards growth. Another cliché maybe. It seems that we are wired to go forward, even if consciously unaware of it.

Pamukkale and Ephesus: Local Buses Take You There

Both these symbolic locations were mind-blowing. If an immersion experience of these legendary sites is what you want, ‘go slow,’ take the local bus route, spend a night or two as near as possible to each place.

Pamukkale: A Glistening Wonderland

Pamukkale – the Turkish name refers to the snow-like limestone. It LOOKED artic. It was hard to shake off that it WASN’T SNOW until I had my bare feet placed on its shimmering limestone, shaped over millennia by calcite rich springs. It’s a fairytale place, a timeless beauty with twenty-two centuries of history and pilgrims behind it.

Walking up the cascade of dazzling, turquoise, healing pools, feeling the soft powdery remnants of calcium carbonate gel in the warm pools was tickling and reassuring: ‘It really isn’t snow!’ I moved, in a walking meditation, the forty-five minute ascent took two hours. It was all there: the visual, the tactile and witnessing others’ amazement. Handstands, anyone? It’s still a pilgrimage, a trip to honour Mother Nature in her mother-of-pearl best.

When I reached the top, it started to drizzle. The coach crowds had entered through the top entrance, they were rushing to take photos. On speaking to those who’d asked me to take their photos, I learned that the coach tourists don’t have time to descend and ascend the terraces. From above, looking down, the climb appeared challenging.

I also wondered if I’d be able for the descent until shaking off the brain’s auto-mode reaction to the terraces being a shimmering mass of snow and that I was about to foolishly descend a ski slope, barefooted, without skis and, as of yet unknown to me, togged out in a plastic yellow poncho!

I steadied and readied myself to descend the terraces. Moments before, I’d gone into a gift shop and bought the gift that would make my descent sublime, a yellow plastic, water-proof poncho! Me in yellow, the drizzle, the remoteness, the solitaire feeling of the downward climb with very few other people descending, found me swearing that I’d be back again. No wonder that seven centuries before Christ they were making this trip. Unmissable.

Ephesus: The Sheer History

Ephesus, an ancient city on the World Heritage list, accommodates the ruins of the Temple of Artemis from 550 BC, one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world alongside the Great Theatre of Ephesus with its 25,000 seats. Ephesus goes so far back in history that brains can’t even fathom the far-backed-ness involved.

It’s the place where the Virgin Mary set up home after having to leave Bethlehem. The apostle, John, accompanied her and began writing his Gospel here. Ephesus cracks open hearts to what looking back can do. Imagining the history here helped me assimilate further, in one fell sweep, the enormity of our existence and inevitable passing, no matter our destinations, no matter our credentials on earth, be it bus-driver, gospel-writer, philosopher or wanderer.

Liz is Irish and lives on Gran Canary Island, Spain. Her career is in adult education, in both teaching and management roles. She’s recently started writing articles for health and wellness magazines. A fun and fulfilling passion for her is traveling solo in Europe and Asia, making notes on incidents, moments, encounters, connections, landscapes, insights, and everything in between, to try to capture the story of the experience, and make it more than a memory, and then share the adventure of it all. https://lizstoriesandjourneys.blogspot.com