There are types of days every round-the-world traveler has and must be prepared for. They’re usually chalked up as “travel days”. The hardest part of traveling the world is just that, the travel. Going from one place to the next. Dealing with ticket-booth employees and late trains and hostile signage, lugging your backpack all over the place. These days are not always tough, but they are rarely pleasant either. So many things can go wrong, and the consequences are usually worse than on non-travel days. You could end up in the wrong town, or arrive late and have nowhere to stay, or be held at the border without anyone telling you why.

This was a travel day. I’d woken up late after staying up until 3 AM playing checkers on the rooftop bar with a Croatian guy. After spending the morning in a profound sloth, I wanted nothing more than to seat myself in a nice air-conditioned place with some fruit and crackers and prepare myself for my overnight bus to Selçuk, a trip that I was a little nervous about. I’d been fighting a pretty serious case of, shall I call it, gastrointestinal duress (for which I’ve learned the Turkish cure is two needles, one in each butt cheek, plus antibiotics) and it wasn’t slowing down. So many things could go wrong on a ten-hour bus trip. Would I have to use one of those awful bus toilets after the snack break? Or what if there was no toilet on the bus? The possibilities were too gruesome to enumerate. I resolved to do as I’ve done all trip long: not worry, and accept all outcomes as another step in fate’s ineluctable march, and furthermore, not to complain. Everything I’d read about the Turkish bus system was highly complimentary.

The day passed with little incident. I talked at length with an Iranian fellow who spent some time living amongst the nomadic tribes in northern Iran, shoeing horses and pulling oxen around by the nose and things like that. Fascinating stuff. I played some more checkers, ate ice cream, said my goodbyes. When the time came, I took the tram to the Otogar (bus station). Bus stations are crazy everywhere, but the Istanbul Otogar is a special kind of crazy. There is a sort of serenity to the madness, of tuxedoed hosts jumping effortlessly between buses reversing blindly, drivers shouting destinations, baggage strewn everywhere. No one seemed put off by any of this. There were hundreds of buses packed together very closely, and it’s a miracle any of them could get out of the terminal and onto the road (it would not be unrealistic for them to install traffic lights).

My bus to Bodrum via Izmir (my destination - I’d take the minibus to Selçuk when I got there) was comfortable enough. Lots of legroom, clean, stiff air-con, and… wait a second. No toilet? How can this be? Ten, maybe eleven hours and no toilet? This is inhumane! The Turks are a society of barbarians with strong bladders!

My fears began to subside when they started serving drinks—water, tea/coffee, soda, more water, and some truly disgusting bread. If little old ladies in hejabs can hold it for eleven hours, so could I.

The bus pulled into several other Otogars, each one crazier than the last. It took us a full two hours to even get out of the Istanbul area. I dozed off a few times, only to be woken by the hostess serving something or by a sudden stop. They showed the film “Baby’s Day Out”, a terrible movie that nobody watched. Most people shifted in their seats, but the guy across the aisle managed to drift into a deep slumber, sitting perfectly upright with arms folded, snoring like a motorcycle engine.

Occasionally, the bus pulled into rest stops along the highways. These rest stops were little malls with cafeterias, shops, and even street vendors. And, what’s that I see… bathrooms!

It turns out the Turkish bus system really does live up to the hype. Turkey has a geography that allows bus travel to make good sense. Not only are there many populous towns scattered evenly throughout the country, but also great variations in terrain between one place and the next. In some parts of the country, a railroad would have to wind its way through colossal mountain ranges and bisect tiny villages, places the bus can handle easily. Furthermore, the Turks seem to do a tremendous amount of inter-city travel. Every bus is packed solid, even on routes you wouldn’t think busy. Laying track between every town in the countryside would be a huge undertaking. So the bus is number one in Turkey, and it’s clean, efficient, punctual, and usually cheap. This was my very first time on a Turkish bus, and it was much better than I expected.

We pulled over to the side of the road at 5 AM. Usually, Turkish buses stop to pick people up on the side of the road, not just at specified bus stops. We must be doing that, I thought. But the driver cut the engine and the lights went out. He stepped off the bus and we were left in silence. We felt the rear compartment of the bus open. Minutes passed, and people began to stir in their seats. I could still hear snoring. Some younger guys got outside to have a smoke. After a few fruitless minutes trying to sleep through it, I got out to have a look.

The driver stood staring at the rear compartment. It was the engine. Had we overheated? We might just wait a little while. We stood on the shoulder, looking around. Nothing but wilderness. There were a few large hills and a couple of fields full of weeds. No signs of human life except a few radio towers far off in the distance. It was cool. Traffic rushed by, mostly other buses and trucks.

I went back inside.

Sleep was now next to impossible. The air conditioning had been cut along with the engine, and it was growing hot inside the bus. The silence, previously blanketed by the air-con, made every movement heard. I closed my eyes, but could only think of what a bus company would do in such a situation. I knew very little about the action plan in a case like this. We were only two hours from Izmir, so surely they could send a replacement, if it came to that. But what about a driver? It was 5:45 AM. Is being a bus driver an “on-call” job, like a doctor or a network admin? I had no idea.

The guy across the aisle snored on.

I went back out. Now we were joined by a large stray dog, a friendly golden retriever with a blood stain on his neck. The bus driver spoke frantically into a cell phone. The rest smoked quietly. The hostess was in a full and total freak-out, running up and down the shoulder trying to keep order, even when it seemed that order was being kept quite well on its own. The engine looked worse than before; a large amount of black fluid had leaked out onto the bumper of the bus and was starting to dry. The host closed the cell phone and said something to the group in Turkish. It was now after 6 AM. People started to gather their things. It looked like we were changing buses.

I took this to mean that they were going to send another bus, and we’d all get on it. But instead, the host and hostess walked along the shoulder up a small hill, and then began flagging down buses from the same company as ours. Since most of the buses were packed, and there are heavy fines in Turkey for filling a coach beyond its capacity, most buses simply drove off, or else took one passenger and seated them in the host’s chair at the front of the bus. It would take hours to get everyone off in this way, but we had no other choice. The bus company was not going to send another bus.

At about 7:30 AM, my turn finally came. Dazed with fatigue, I sat in the host’s chair, and the host was not pleased about this, because it meant he had to sit on the floor. I fell asleep immediately. When a seat opened up behind me, he tapped my shoulder and gave an unceremonious “take a hike” thumb gesture. I got to Izmir at about 9:30 AM, and immediately caught the next minibus to Selçuk. I slept through the entire ride on that bus, so I don’t know how long it took.

I hate travel days.

“My friend, are you lost? Where are you from, my friend?”

This scene plays out hundreds of times in an Istanbul day. Any traveler who so much as makes eye contact with a Turk while walking past can expect to be chatted to. The Turks are friendly and outgoing by disposition, which is a trait reflected in the structure of Turkish economic life, a merchant culture, everyone with something to sell. In Turkey you’re always talking to people as a matter of daily business, and when Turks talk to foreigners, usually they’re trying to talk them into something, whether it’s visiting their carpet shop, staying at their brother’s hotel, or even just to come inside for a çay (tea). A Brit I met described Turkey as a “society of hustlers”, a perception which is more or less correct, though you’ll seldom get ripped off if you know how to haggle. Salesmen push themselves into your personal space everywhere you go, under the guise of polite conversation. Sometimes foreigners have witty rejoinders at the ready (”Table for how many, sir?” “Zero.”) but you’ll find the Turks are very good at what they do. Their politeness and warmth makes them harder to ignore than, say, a tout in Thailand barking a sales pitch in your ear as you step off the train.

But this gentleman wasn’t standing near any wares. He simply wanted to help us out.

“Take tram up, three stops, then to funicular and ride to Taksim square. Is cheaper to get akbil (Istanbul transit pass) so you don’t pay every time.”

He was a large man with a thick head of wavy hair and a big smile. We asked him some more transit questions and he answered them splendidly for us. He then asked us a few things, about Canada, about traveling and how much money it costs.

“Both of you rich, yes? In Turkey you must be rich to do this. Canada, get paid lots of money?”

He was quite a nice fellow, but we wanted to get up to Taksim before it got dark, and I kept feeling the urge to just thank him for his help and move on. But he stood very near to us, and his body language was such that we could tell he wanted to have a nice long chat with us Canadians, and that it would be impolite not to let the conversation wind up on its own. So we chatted a while.

It turns out he was actually a carpet salesman. He pointed to his shop further up the street. He was on his lunch break, and didn’t want to sell us anything, he said. But he liked talking so much he just wandered the streets on his lunch break talking to people.

“It’s not always about business,” he said.

We told him we work in computers. This is almost always an invitation for people to ask you to fix their computer, and this time was no exception.

“I play this game, FIFA 2007. Manager mode. I love it. But I make season, first place, and I lose it. The save game, gone.”

Well, that’s a drag. The save file for his video game disappeared. Can’t help you there, pal.

“I think it is because of the sexy sites.”

Huh?

“These sites I look at. Internet sexy sites.”

Oh. He thinks he caught a virus from looking at Internet porn. Well, I suppose it’s possible. He then proceeded to tell us, in graphic detail, about each and every one of said sexy sites (w/ URLs provided) and segued this into a more general lecture on the kind of pornography he likes (e.g. “these American black man”) and doesn’t like (no comment). We were now growing uncomfortable. As entertaining as this was, we were now being sucked into a conversational vortex from which there is no escape except either by death or by having this guy invite us into his house to show us his porn collection. I backed away a little, and Will did the same. He moved a little closer, and carried on with his discourse. Will offered him a bottle of water, hoping to distract him a bit. It didn’t work. I checked the time on my cell phone to make it look like I had to be somewhere. He didn’t notice. His eyes lit up as he described sex act after sex act. Eventually I had to cut in and tell him, regretfully, that we could not carry on this conversation any longer because we had to be in Taksim. He understood, but before leaving he was sure to write the URLs of the sexy sites on a piece of paper and insist we take it.

“For when you get home” he said. “Souvenir from Turkey.”

Our first night in Istanbul, we stayed at a hostel in the Sultanahmet district equipped with a lovely rooftop terrace. Cold beers in hand, we chatted up a couple of Polish girls, Mia and Anya, who had been in Turkey a week already. Mia had short hair and a smart pair of glasses, Anya a head of electric blonde hair and huge door-knocker earrings. Evidently they had stayed in this hostel for some time, and knew all the staff by name. We were in turn introduced to two Turkish men, agents at the hostel’s travel agency, one named something like Victor, and the other Monty. Victor didn’t sit with us right away, but Monty curled up next to Anya and asked us where we were from, how long we’re in Turkey. A few others appeared at the adjoining tables, the Turkish men kissing each other on the cheeks as a greeting. It was a beautiful night and the rooftop was coming alive.

Behind the bar, the chalkboard read: “DJ Köfteci (real one) tonight @ 11:30 (craziest party!)” Well, the DJ himself graced our presence and offered us a glass of Rakı, the traditional Turkish spirit. It turns out that “Köfteci” means “meatball”, his storied DJing talents being limited to switching CDs on a home stereo system behind the bar. Victor came back, and as he sat next to Mia he kissed her on her bare shoulder and put his hand over her knee. Apparently they knew each other better than I thought.

Monty was a younger guy, maybe twenty, with a chubby babyface and a big smile. Sensing that Victor’s success with foreign girls was nothing he couldn’t do, he scootched over right next to Anya and began putting the moves on without any pretense of decorum. He told DJ Meatball to bring over two cocktails and two beers, took one beer for himself, and gave the rest to Mia.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” he asked us. “Come on, say it.”

“Yes, she’s beautiful,” we said.

“She’s the most beautiful girl in the world! Am I right? Please, drink!”

He pushed her cocktail closer. Anya gave a laugh and an obvious eye-roll. She gave Will and I a look, a very specific girl-look that every girl knows how to make. The look that said “protect me from this guy.” She got up to flip through DJ Meatball’s CD collection, and Will took this opportunity to give him a little counselling.

“Monty, listen. You have some really good skills for picking up women. You’re fearless, you’re funny and you tell them you like them without caring what they think. But you need to fix your approach a little bit.”

“What? Yes, you will tell me what to say? One of us has to pick her up! One of you, speak for her now or else she’s mine!”

He seemed resolutely convinced that territory be established before the conquest began. Surely horrible things might happen if these battle lines were to be breached, but it was only my first night in Turkey and I hadn’t yet learned their rules of engagement.

“Just give me a chance!” he begged us.

We agreed that Monty and Monty alone should be allowed exclusive territorial rights over Anya for the rest of the evening, but in light of the look Anya gave us, it was clear that we were to stay on the sidelines in order to throw out the rescue ladder if needed. Anyway, we knew that Monty had no shot whatsoever, so we humoured him for a while.

“OK, so here’s what you say,” Will said.

“I tell her that she is beautiful and that I want to get her alone, yes?”

“No, no, no Monty, that is all wrong.”

Monty appeared genuinely confused. It didn’t help that he was on his fourth beer.

“You need to talk to her some more,” I interrupted, “and you need to let her talk. Ask her what her interests are, why she’s travelling, you know?”

“She is travelling to find a man and for sex.”

Things were falling apart here.

“You shouldn’t talk like that to a woman, Monty. They hate that. Ask her some questions and listen to what she says. Then ask her more about those things. Conversation, you know?”

Monty broke into uproarious laughter. He laughed so hard it caused us to laugh too.

“Why you talk like this to girls? You probably want to marry them! Ha ha ha!”

Monty was a lost cause. Probably just drunk. But I looked over Monty’s shoulder to see DJ Meatball and Anya standing behind the bar, and DJ Meatball standing with his arm against the wall, blocking her path as she tried to squeeze past him.

“You’re beautiful! Most beautiful in the world! Won’t you give me a chance?” I heard him say.

OK so there was one odd memory I had from Belgrade, and it was when our train had just entered the city limits from Novi Sad (a 1.5 hour journey that costs less a ride on the Montreal Métro). Will and I were sitting on either side of the train, absently cracking dumb jokes to each other across the aisle as you tend to do when you’re flushed with the excitement of a new city. But the train pushed ahead a little further, reconnecting with the Danube, and as we stared out the window we both went silent at the same time.

Next to the highway on either side were enormous interconnecting huts made of little more than sheet metal, dirt, and rocks. The huts were all the same. There were clotheslines hung with laundry, oil drums tipped over, garbage everywhere. There weren’t any people around, but the destitution seemed recent and alive somehow. People were living in these hovels, definitely, and all the huts were sort of built together in neat rows to form little streets. Hundreds and hundreds of them. All of this was built right behind large industrial lots filled with machinery and bustle, shockingly close to the action. From the train you could see forklifts and trucks at work right next to these villages. The train slowed down a little, and finally I saw a group of people crowded around something near one of the huts. It was a family of Roma as best I could tell, and the father was holding in his arms a little girl, about ten years old. She seemed to have badly twisted or broken her ankle as it was hanging rather askew from her leg. None of them seemed to know what to do. The father seemed to be quite upset and maybe crying but I couldn’t tell for sure.

I looked up ahead, towards Belgrade, to the lights and condominiums and riverside views, couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This is a major modern city, isn’t it? And this, here, is third-world poverty on its outskirts?

Well, I never worked up the courage to head over there, but I later met a Canadian guy who decided to take nothing in his pockets except bus change and take the bus over there and walk through this ‘Gypsy quarter’. He gave me the following account:

I took nothing except the bus change I needed to get there and back. I told the bus driver where I wanted to get off and he looked at me like I was nuts, and asked me if I was sure. The bus let me off about two blocks from the place. As soon as I turned the corner and saw the first set of shacks, they saw me, and a bunch of kids came running over and started grabbing me, grabbing at my pockets, grabbing everything. I sort of pulled them off me and they let me go. I tried to laugh with them a little but they weren’t friendly. For a little while I was left alone, and I kept walking and looking in the huts. People looked at me and yelled things to their family. Then an enormous herd of people—kids, adults, everything—came running out of two or three huts after me, waving their arms and begging, and this time I started running a little bit. It wasn’t so much scary as very uncomfortable. They kept following me, really bearing down on me. I had to start sprinting. The last of the kids followed me for three blocks before giving up. I ran to the next bus station and luckily my bus was right there and I got the hell out of there.

All this and more, just a city bus ride away from your hotel or guest house.

A question I hear from nearly everybody is, how the heck did you save up enough money to travel for ten months? My salary was decent but little more than that. I have no secret stash of money to cushion my fall. The truth is, I have neither Croesusian wealth nor a particularly Spartan travel style. The only way I can travel for this long is by budgeting carefully, and enduring the incredible stress that goes along with it.

Yes, that’s right, to travel the world you must deal with relentless budgetary stress. There is a constant tension between the desire to see sights, experience things, make the most of your trip, and the conflicting obligation to maximize value, cut corners, make spot decisions with salesmen breathing down your neck, and avoid indulging yourself needlessly. Budget travel is a matter of turning down familiar comforts whenever they appear without compromising your spirits. Every opening of the money purse is preceded by hesitation, and followed either by relief or shame. And your lapses in discipline add up quickly.

For example, right now I am sipping a coffee while sitting in the hostel courtyard. The coffee ıs sucky Nescafe, but cost about one dollar CAD. But as the words I’ll have a coffee left my lips, I began to doubt whether it was the coffee I wanted, or just the familiar comfort of coffee, of sittıng beneath an awning on a breezy day with a coffee which I otherwise had no desire for. I upbraided myself a little. The expense was nearly nothing, but what sort of habits would this fiduciary laxity beget? And furthermore, if I’m to stay on budget, I’ll have to make up for this purchase by saving an equivalent amount somewhere else, won’t I? Oh lord, what am I to do? My bank account will be bone-dry in months at this rate! And so on. This is how the cheapskate mind churns, and for the next nine months, I am wholly of his ilk, the skinflint, the killjoy, subsisting on bread and water and wagging a dirty finger at money-wasters.

I keep a detailed log of every cent that leaves my pocket. This is pretty much required for long-term travel unless you’ve got enough padding in your bank account not to worry about it. Doing this lets you see not only how much you’re spending, but whether you could cut down on some recurring thıngs. There are a lot of ‘Beer’ entries. I haven’t decided what to do about those. More worrisome are the food costs, easily the most frustrating aspect of budget travel. You simply must eat three meals (or really two and a half) a day, and sometimes you’ve got little choice but to absorb the sting of that $12 tourist-trap dinner. Conversely it’s quite rare to find food that is all three of: cheap, good, and convenient, as most of those get spotted by Lonely Planet and up up up goes the price. These are the stresses of the day, of scrounging for food and beds and cheap attractions so that you don’t just spend your time walking around the park all day. Quite a bit different from the stresses of meetings and project schedules, eh?

There is a three-day gap under ‘Belgrade’ in my travel journal from Aug 21 to Aug 24, during which I managed only to make a note about how I enjoyed the Nikola Tesla museum, and how I’d like to find a good Tesla biography. This is because my three days in Belgrade were severely impeded by a combination of extreme heat and wanton drunkenness. Belgrade is not a pretty place, nor is its layout welcoming to visitors. It took us a good hour to find our hostel, fruitlessly circumnavigating the hills surrounding the Kalemegdan complex until finally chancing upon the main pedestrian street, Knez Mihajlova. After unloading our gear, I sat on a park bench and resolved to learn the Cyrillic alphabet properly so that I might be able to make sense of the signage. From that point on, Belgrade began to open itself to me. The first day, I walked the city to the bone, starting with Kalemegdan and on down the Knez Mihajlova, through side streets, museums (incl. the aforementioned Tesla, which featured some wonderful demonstrations of his inventıons such as an enormous Tesla coil that, when activated, lights up the [unconnected] fluorescent bulb in your hand—sadly, the museum made little mention of his many notorious quirks, but I expected that). I took refuge from the heat in the cavernous St. Sava church, the interior of which was under construction, but cool and dark and with many pigeons. Tesla would have loved it.

At night the hostel crowd made their way down to the infamous ‘barge party’, which is a series of no-cover barge nightclubs floating on the Danube. We spent a time listening to some kind of Serbian rap show in which a very large man simply yelled at the crowd while some obnoxiously loud drum ‘n bass music pounded our ears. We went next door to an R&B place where near-nude dancers with leathery tanned skin danced on a tiny circular platform, so dangerously high above the crowd it made you cringe. In any case, the setting was less than ideal, but we had a large entourage and a group of Danish guys providing enough entertainment in the form of pitiful drunken leering at women that we managed to have a good time. We took a taxi home, in a taxi with no seatbelts and with an ancient taxi meter with one of those analog numerical displays where the numbers flip manually, like a clock radio from the 1960s. And it didn’t really work. The cab driver, a heavily tattoed man with a moustache that meant business, took us on an unforgettable death ride through Belgrade’s hills, culminating in his getting pulled over by a cop who demanded to see his credentials. And the numbers on the meter kept on flipping, but fortunately, taxis in Belgrade are so cheap we didn’t much care.

The next day was so incredibly hot we could barely even go outside. I walked to the store and back, no more than three minutes walk, and had to change my shirt when I returned. So we spent the day watching DVDs of some British TV comedy called Peep Show, as well as the movie Back to the Future II, and doing laundry, and all the other mundane things you hate to do when you’re traveling, but don’t have any choice.

The final day, we messed up bad. We discovered at the last minute that our flight to Istanbul was much earlier than we thought it was, so we had to endure yet another death ride from a Serbian taxi driver, who took us on a journey so incredibly dangerous and thrilling that I would almost expect the Serbian ministry of Tourism to consider selling these as a tour package. Our entry to the highway was particularly memorable: the driver passed a car on the (single-lane) on-ramp, weaved recklessly in and out of highway traffıc, drove a good 3 km on the shoulder, and then proclaimed the highway too busy to continue, opting instead to take us to the airport via the backroads. After another fifteen minutes of hairpin turns and nick-of-time passing lane antics, we landed at the terminal and he charged us the modest sum of 1000 dinars, which is probably cheaper than going to a movie, and at least three times as entertaining. And we were off to Turkey.