I wrote most of this piece about taking a bus from Istanbul to Izmir City in Turkey as it all happened. Sharing it here as it is. I also added a part about the host in Izmir after I arrived in the city. Enjoy!
Leaving Istanbul, Taking a Bus From Istanbul to Izmir, and a Great Welcome Dinner in Izmir by a Couchsurfing Host
Today morning started at seven am. After the long laundry confusion (with a Couchsurfing host in Istanbul), I had gone to bed at almost 11:45 pm. A little more here and there and another toilet run, I put in my earplugs and tried to sleep. Earplugs because the dryer was still running. The host’s clothes, which he had asked me to wash in the machine, weren’t dry yet. I didn’t think they would dry at all with that pathetic dryer, which wasn’t working. The host had still not returned, so some lights were on too, but I couldn’t care too much. I covered myself with a blanket, and then you can hardly see any light. The couch was big and comfortable, and I was adamant about spending six to seven hours in bed (which was the couch). My bus in the morning was at 9:20 am. I had had a long cold and wet day out at the Basilica Cistern. Finding some vegetarian food and also the long way back had tired me out.
I looked at my clothes on the chairs. They were all wet, almost as wet as they had come out of the machine. My leggings and bag, which I had kept near the radiator, were dry. I should have put all the clothes next to the radiator. They would have looked too odd, though. All shirts, leggings, and undergarments wrapped around the radiator. No. No. We’ll see in the morning.
In the morning, I put a few more clothes on the radiator and removed the ones that had dried. Thankfully, I had clothes to wear. My leggings and jackets had dried. I went to the toilet and messaged this dryer story to my partner, Sagar. “I don’t know why he asked me to use the dryer when it doesn’t work. He knew I had to leave. Now I have to carry wet clothes. He asked me to wash his clothes, too. It was a huge pile.” Still grumpy, I boiled the kettle, started packing my clothes, and put my laptop on the charger. You need to be well planned for the day.
Time passes slowly when you have nowhere to go, but quickly when you have to be somewhere. I packed all dry clothes in one pack and made one empty for the wet ones. I signed a copy of my book for my host and sipped hot coffee, thinking that if I had to go to the toilet, I’d better go now, and not when I am on the bus. Right after eight, I went to shower, carrying all the clothes that I had to wear. My host had woken up too, and I had to get ready in the bathroom. I didn’t finish my coffee. I had to get ready.
I got ready as quickly as I could. The previous night, I had taken a long hot shower after the cold windy day. It had warmed me up and also satiated my craving for a long hot soak. I hadn’t been to the hamam in Instanbul, reading comments such as different treatment for locals and tourists, and so on, even at a good historical hamam my host had shared with me. I didn’t want that kind of experience. There was lots to do and experience anyway.
I put on my clothes in the wet bathroom and got out. The time was 8:32. Within minutes, I packed the last-minute things and put on my bags. I had decided to leave by 8:25 or so. I was already late. In a new place, I am always anxious. You don’t know the system, and so much has to be figured out. My Istanbul Kart, used for buses, trains, and trams, didn’t have enough money on it. Uber was charging exorbitant prices. The host had said that it would be hard to find a taxi at that time.
It was raining. The sky was cloudy, and the sun was missing.
Even during the night and the previous evening, I had been anxious. I had to find a way to reach, do laundry, and so on. A host on Couchsurfing had accepted my invitation to stay at his place for three nights. But another host had replied saying that Ephesus, a place I wanted to visit near Izmir, was too far from Izmir, and I should stay close by Ephesus. I had woken up at 3 am. I peed once and quickly went to bed again, knowing that I had four more hours to sleep.
Within a few minutes of getting out of the house, as soon as I reached the main road, I found a taxi. I think the taxi ran by the metre and cost me 280 liras. It wasn’t a long distance. The price was okay.
The bus station was another adventure. I was told my bus will be at platform 10. A bus arrived at platform 10. I went to the bus to keep my luggage, but the young guy putting in others’ bags gestured that mine was next, not that one. The time was 9:15. I decided to go to the stall of my bus company, Kamil Koc. I wanted to double-check. These things easily go wrong. This learning would come in handy that morning.
The bus company employee first redirected me back to that bus, but when I showed her my ticket time, she rounded her lips and said, “Let me check.” I followed her outside, where she talked to her colleague, and now they were both discussing my ticket. Now the little man said, “Let me check, let me check.” I followed them, with both my bags on me. They hurried, the girl only stopping to tell me to come from the front. Back entry was exclusive to workers. Of course.
I knew something had gone wrong. I had been confused while booking the ticket too. Why were there buses from Istanbul to Izmir by the same bus company at 9, 9:20, and then 9:25? This wasn’t Germany.
The man said, unfortunately, my bus was canceled. I wasn’t surprised. I am from India. But to act surprised, “I said, oh, but I didn’t get a cancellation email or message.” He said, “Unfortunately, no. I can try another bus for you.” I said, “Okay, I had booked a single seat; please provide me with a single seat.” He said okay. But then, after staring at his screen, he said, “Unfortunately, at 10:20 there is a bus, but unfortunately, only a double seat is available.” That seat was at the back of the bus. I had paid more for a single seat, and I was horrified, thinking of having to share the seat with someone. I said, “Please provide me with a single seat. Double seats are so uncomfortable.” He said, “Yes.” I felt that he understood me completely. Then he said, “Unfortunately, there is only another bus at 10:25, and there is a single seat.” No. 18 was available. No. 18 was right behind the seat I had booked and would have been the one I would have booked if it had been available. I took it.
“Which platform would the bus arrive on?”
He said and pointed to a paper, which said “10,11,12.”
“So I will wait outside,” I said.
“And I will also remind,” he said without asking. I loved this unfortunate little man!
I waited in the waiting area. This was just 9:30 or so. At 10, I rushed to the bathroom so I could return in time to take my 10:25 bus.
Something was bothering me, though. When my 9:25 bus was canceled, how would this 10:25 bus run?
They had another at 10:20. There was no bus until 10:30.
A bus came, and I got up to ask. The little man came to the waiting area and announced something, holding a paper in his hand. He rushed outside, some people followed him, and when I looked at him, and he looked at me, he shook his head and gestured that it was not mine.
This happened two more times. Once he announced Ankara. Every time he came in, he motioned for me to sit.
Now it was almost 11 am. There were three Kamil Koc buses outside on the platforms he had mentioned.
The reviews of the Istanbul bus station I had read the previous evening came floating to me. People had mentioned that no one gave any information, and many people had missed their buses because no one told them where to find their bus and they couldn’t make it on time.
I didn’t want to write a bad review. For the sake of the little man!
I strapped my bags onto me and went outside.
There were three buses. The first two displayed the names of other destinations. I knew those weren’t the ones. But the third one had a small display on which was written Izmir, and 10:25. I understood. The bus was packed, closed, and ready to leave. As I came in front of the bus, everyone inside, the driver, passengers, and a woman standing up front, looked at me. The woman, who was wearing a formal kind of black dress, motioned for me to go inside through the passenger door. Her gestures were frantic, telling me to hurry. Something wasn’t right. They opened the gate. I said, “Izmir?” Everyone said, “Yes.” They all gestured and, to the best of their abilities, said, come in, come in. Some said my name, Priyanka, and one guy took me out and put my bag in the cabin storage. My name was said again as I stepped in. The driver was smiling, and he looked a jolly good fellow. The old lady passenger sitting up front also smiled a big smile when I climbed up into the bus. The attendant showed me my seat, without even asking for my seat number.
The bus started. The little man was nowhere to be seen! I understood. He had abandoned me. I dedicate this whole story to him. I am sure something stopped him from letting me know. That’s what I would like to believe. Maybe he didn’t want me to leave.
The bus started. The journey was beautiful, passing grasslands, sheep, little red-tiled homes, and villages. We stopped a few times for the toilet, and sometimes to board more passengers. I had asked the little man if there was a toilet on the bus, and he had said, “Unfortunately, no.”
The attendant announced the toilet break in Turkish, while, sometimes, she also gestured to another non-Turkish passenger. She put up her five fingers. So I understood. When she said something else, and then we stopped in front of a big food place, I understood it was a longer break.
I had had a sandwich as soon as I got on the bus. A sandwich I had made the previous night with cheese and fresh bread, big bakery bread that had cost me fifteen liras and cheese that cost me forty-five.
The Couchsurfing host from Izmir had given me directions from the bus station to his home. Now he was sending me pictures of the food he had been making. All vegetarian because he had read my profile. In the images, I saw carrots, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, and some gourd, probably. He said he would put on rice, too, and didn’t invite my idea of me cooking them when I arrived home. You would come after traveling, rice is easy, I would cook it. He said.
I arrived at the bus stand and took the shuttle, which was ready to leave and was being packed with luggage. They put in my bag too, and the driver settled in his seat. We drove through Izmir. The sun was to set after seven, and it was just seven pm.
A big woman rushed in, sat next to me, and said, Mehraba, Mehraba (the Turkish hello). She was nice. Not everyone is nice, of course. Especially the service staff and waiters weren’t the best in Turkey. As I write this, I’m sitting at a fish restaurant in Selcuk village, and I am not sure if the waiter saw me signaling him for the menu. Maybe he saw me and ignored me. Good. Their loss because I was going to order a chai. The lady was nice. We drove for forty minutes to the city. The roads were lined up with buildings and the usual big city things. By this time, I was wondering why I went to Izmir, the big bulky city. My next place would be more natural and in the countryside.
My Couchsurfing host, Mohamed, asked me to get down at McDonald’s. I asked, “Would they have fixed stops?” He wrote, “Yeah they will.”
Hopefully, he understood me. I didn’t look at the map, assured that they will drop me at Hatay, the stop for his house. When we crossed Mc Donald’s and when I loaded the map and saw that we were crossing his home and going at full speed, I stared at the map and took half a minute to say, “Señor, Hatay stop?” The driver looked at me, pointed to the back direction, and said, probably, “This was the Hatay stop.” He said more things in Turkish, pointed to my bag, and I assumed he would hand me my bag, and I would go on.
Thankfully, we had not gone that far. It was the main road, I walked quickly, and as Mohamed had asked, I took a left from Madam Coco.
On the host’s street, a man was washing his car. The soapy water had flown down the downhill street, and tissues lay all about. An older woman walking next to me, looked around, mumbled, and tried finding a clean, stable path through the mess. I looked at her, too, and also showed how I was looking for a path, too. I couldn’t speak Turkish so had to do with gestures.
She was not the first and the last to speak to me in Turkish, assuming I spoke the local language. I made sure she had walked safely. As I approached closer to the blue dot on Google Maps, a flashlight flashed above me. My host, Mohamed, was showing me the light from his balcony. I wasn’t surprised. He had been messaging me non-stop, about his recent visit to India, how the vegetarian food wasn’t cooking in the oven and how my pressure cooker idea was better, and how he would help me visit Ephesus, the ancient Roman ruins for which I was going to Izmir anyway. It was only natural that he would show me the light from the balcony. The woman was still next to me. She also looked at the light but didn’t react at all, as if she was expecting someone to show me the flashlight, and we said our goodbyes, and I turned onto the street from where I was to climb up.
Up the four or five flights of stairs, I arrived at Mohamed’s house, and from behind the half-open door, a white fury cat was meowing at full volume. He grabbed her, and I took off my shoes and entered.
At Mohamed’s home, which was big, room within rooms, with stuff everywhere, I settled in quickly. He had me keep my bags inside a room that had a sliding door, a bed, and many mattresses put up against the walls. First, it had felt like storage, but Mohamed later told me I would sleep there and that he had put up a fresh sheet and cover. I was thankful. He had prepared the room for me thoughtfully with pink flowers on the bedcovers.
He had already served dinner. He had prepared a lot of vegetables: carrots, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, and zucchini. I was given the option to choose from the preparation in a pot in the oven and the pressure cooker. He had also made rice. A plateful of yoghurt awaited me. “We eat yoghurt with everything and all the time. It is like your coriander.” He laughed. He went on talking about how he hated coriander.
The curry was nice. A brush full of white hair next to my plate distracted me, though. It was cat hair. The fluffy white ball of a cat was called Diana, named after the princess. After dinner, we kept talking with two big cups of Turkish chai. He described the history of Turkey to me and also explained how I could go to Ephesus.
The most enjoyable for me were Mohamed’s impressions of India. He had visited India the previous week and noticed the weirdest stuff, of course. He had already sent me a photo of him playing Holi, and he started playing these videos of men being massaged at Hogenakkal waterfalls. The masseuse, stationed under a tree, of course, was pouring oil on the faces of his clients, all of them in their underwear. From my trip to Hogenakkal Falls, one of my first trips with my partner, Sagar, where we had taken a coracle on the Kaveri river, I had remembered the men being messaged.
So many men in their underpants were spread around the waterfalls, and other similarly dressed, or undressed, men were messaging them. That massage scene was my most significant memory from the waterfall, too. I have photos of them, though, not in the obvious way my host captured the videos, looking straight into their faces. I told him so. We were laughing out loud.
Next, Mohamed pulled up videos of dentists on the road: another thing I have always noticed but never seen in action. He had. A dentist on the road, checking a woman’s mouth, and a table full of teeth in different sizes, which he pointed to and said: this is small, medium, large. They would just fit right in.
Dentists on the road have always intrigued me. Seeing them through an outsider’s eyes, I was convinced that they looked ridiculous. Mohamed was laughing, with his eyes closed, his head turned upwards, his whole body shaking. I laughed aloud too, my cheeks hurting, my eyes tearing up due to laughing hard.
We laughed and laughed and laughed.
In some of his pictures, cows were being milked on the road. Mohamed, through spurts of laughter, asked me, “Are they his cows? Or wild? Whose cows? He is just taking milk from anyone’s cows and selling lassi?” Mohamed had loved lassi, of course.
“They are the man’s cows.” I was not so sure myself. Many men were milking cows on the road. Who was milking whose cow?
Meanwhile, Miss Diana has decided to warm up to me. She was rubbing herself against my legs and bringing up her head to my hand to be petted. She was all white and a true princess. While I was looking at his backpack, bent down, my face just a little above the sofa, she brought her face to mine as if about to kiss me.
What do you say to that?
I went to bed at midnight, well fed, warm, and thankful.
From that moment up until now, I think I have had many moments when I have thought that I won’t find a host as great as Mohamed again. This cultural exchange is what makes travel and Couchsurfing interesting. As soon as I arrived, I had a house to go to, directions on how to reach it, a hot dinner to my culinary preference, and a human being to share with. It’s not this simple, and not every experience is good.
For example, at the host’s home in Istanbul, I was unable to understand some of his actions. For example: why did he leave his laundry to me, and why didn’t he tell me that his dryer wasn’t running properly? I did as much as I could, and when the clothes didn’t dry fully, I packed them in a travel pack to take with me. What else could I do? He spoke little but answered all my questions. He got up in the morning, lay down on the couch, and stayed there all day.
Mohamed would get up at 6:30 every day, go to work, and spend every evening with his Couchsurfers; After me, three more people have come to stay at his place. They are staying in the living room, and I am in the room I had been given as soon as I arrived.
Every experience is different, and every experience counts. I am glad to be on the road and thankful for all the people I am meeting.
Did you enjoy reading about my bus journey? Would you like to try Couchsurfing?
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