Istanbul Part 2: Goodbye, Civilization!

Both pictures are random places in Turkey on the road from Istanbul to Batumi.

I was doing so well for a while, updating, but I got distracted by school and friends and all the usual things that distract me more than they should from writing. However, I’m now finally going to finish my Istanbul story so I can move on to bigger and better things. But now, the return trip from Istanbul.

We woke up on our last day, not yet ready to leave (we knew from the beginning that leaving would be much more difficult than arriving), but we’d packed and gotten our bus tickets arranged and were, for all intents and purposes, on our way out already. We barely made the bus, due to bad instructions and language barriers, but we finally did get on with the help of one very determined Turkish man who pointed us in the correct direction.

From this difficult beginning, the trip back to Georgia only became worse. We joked later that we should have known from the first wrong turn that it was going to be a long trip. Before I knew it, we were an hour into our trip and the bus was pulling to the side of the road, white smoke engulfing the entire bus and panic-stricken Georgian and Turkish women pushing me down the aisle screaming and crying. Sarah was smarter, waiting until the end of the line. I was almost shoved down the stairs and slammed my cheek into the head of the woman in front of me. Not the nicest way to begin a trip. From the smell and the color of the smoke, I knew it was only the radiator (thanks, dad, for all those cars that overheated over the years), but this was a Georgian bus and their way of dealing with an overheated radiator on a bus was to fill it with dirty, sewage-smelling water pouring from a pipe on the side of the road. No problem!

For the next two hours we stopped every twenty to thirty minutes to refill the radiator or ‘let it cool’. We were on a bus full of Georgians, but the only things we could ask wouldn’t be much help in this situation. Knowing how to ask in Georgian where people were from, what languages they spoke and how they were was not going to get us a new bus or an idea of what the driver was planning on doing to fix the problem. When we pulled off the highway at a random exit ramp and drove up to a supermarket to ask questions of the locals, Sarah and I hopped off and asked as best we could what was happening, but we only established that no one spoke English. The next stop was a mechanic. By this point we were probably two hours outside Istanbul, but four to five hours into the trip. We spent a half and hour at the mechanic’s (unfortunately, at this point my desire to stay hydrated caught up with me and I was forced to use a toilet I’ve almost successfully blocked from my memory).

Despite the tendency of both Georgian (and, sadly, Turkish) mechanics to stand around open, running, diesel fueled engines with lit cigarettes, Sarah and I had our fingers crossed that the stop at the mechanics meant a fixed bus for the rest of the trip. You can probably guess what happened next: an hour or so from the mechanics we pulled over again, white smoke pouring from the radiator. We were told, “Ara problema! (No problem).” We’d left the bus station in Istanbul at noon and it was already 5. We were not happy, to say the least. We stopped a few exits down at a big truck stop supermarket, where we stayed for a grand total of four hours.

While at the truck stop we accomplished quite a bit: we watched episodes of Frisky Dingo, planned our escape from the bus, planned the murders of all involved in our current situation, found someone who would speak Georgian slowly enough, and with enough hand motions, that we could get a general point across and understand what he was saying and we established one major point: we were not getting back on that bus, even if it did decide to move. We wanted a new one. He told us that, yes, a new bus WAS coming. In two hours. NO problem!

When the new bus finally pulled up, we were losing confidence that we’d make it back. There was an issue with the old bus not wanting to give our money to the new bus, but someone was convinced somehow and we got on our way. We weren’t even close to Samsun yet (which roughly marked the 2/3 point), but we should have been, since we were now 9 hours into the trip. The rest of the drive went smoothly, in comparison. The bus driver believed a little too firmly in long, frequent stops and following speed limits, but at least the bus was moving.

In the next 15 hours, Sarah and I pretended like we were not still sitting in a bus. We especially pretended that we didn’t have hours to go. We got to Trabzon, which is roughly 200 kilometers from Batumi (our final destination), almost exactly 24 hours after we’d left Istanbul. Considering the drive TO Istanbul had taken less than 18, we weren’t exactly keen on prolonging the trip anymore. Unfortunately, though the drive from Trabzon to the border was fine, our border crossing was less than ideal.

No one told us on the bus that we needed to take our bags, by hand, through the border to get them scanned. We even asked. They said, “Don’t worry, no problem.” If you’re starting to see a pattern, good on you. You’re thinking, “Haha, bet there was a problem!” Of course there was. We walked through the border, giddy that we’d finally made it through. There was a little incident where I tried to take a picture of the sunset mid-border, (which is, oopsies, not allowed) but we got to the Georgian side with no major issues. Until two hours later when they finally told us there was a big problem and where were our bags? This is the basic gist of our conversation with various people:

Driver 1: Where are your bags?
Us: On the bus.
Driver 1: There is a big problem. Why on the bus?!
Us: Uh, because?
Driver 2: Where are your bags?
Us: On the bus.
Driver 2: WHY?!
Us: (silence)
Random people: Where are your bags?
Us: On the bus. What is happening? What is the problem? Does anyone speak English?
Random people: Uh. No problem!
Driver 2: Come with me!
Security guard: Where the hell are you going?
Driver 2: To get their bags.
Security guard: The hell you are.
Us: What is going on?! Hello! Do you know someone who speaks English? What is happening here?!
Security guard 2: (finally in English) What’s the problem?
Us: WE HAVE NO IDEA! We left our bags on the bus. We were not told to bring them with us.
Can you please explain what’s going on?
Security guard 2: Come with me. We will find your bags. (She brings us back through the last stop of the border, where our bags have been piled nicely on the ground.)
Us: These are our bags!
Security guard 2: Huh. Okay. Have a nice day. No problem.

After this thirty-minute ridiculous chasing of our tails, we had our bags and were scolded by everyone around us. How were we supposed to know you were supposed to walk your bags across the border? It wasn’t as if we’d asked and been told that there was no problem, nothing to worry about. We gave up on even trying to stay calm. We just stood there trying not to scream until we finally boarded our bus and drove on to Batumi where, due to the length of our bus ride, we were forced to spend another night.

I think both of us, once we’d finally reached Batumi, just wanted to punch the living daylights out of anyone within reach. I don’t know how we did it, but even after our stupidly long bus trip which lasted a grand total of 32 hours (almost double what it should have taken) we still didn’t hate each other. I guess misery love company and despite swollen feet and the epitome of a shitty road trip, we still made jokes and managed to stay on good terms. In the end we joked that apparently the best way to test a friendship’s strength is a hellish, thirty-two hour bus trip.

We survived to tell the tale and now I’ve finally gotten it up on this blog. It’s taken me way too long, but now I can actually focus on the things I want to talk about now. Like entire entries devoted to the driving in Georgia, a brief entry on the Super Bowl, a little bit about teaching updates and my return trip to Turkey this past weekend.