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.

A good amount of ink has been spilled on the subject of Tourists, a pejorative term meant to denote a sort of reptilian creature that slithers on its tanned belly between approved locations in major cities, excreting money in exchange for the souls of the indigenous population. Much of this literature builds its house on the premise that one who simply snaps photos, wanders aimlessly between monuments he knows nothing about, and returns home utterly unchanged by the experience is a Tourist, while one who reads up on his destinations, experiences other cultures, partakes in sights “off the beaten path”, moves freely among the locals, and returns home profoundly altered, even shaken to the bone by what he has seen, is something else—perhaps a “traveler”, an “explorer”, a “vagabonder”. In other words, a Tourist is someone with no purpose to his travel, and you’d have to be a real sucker to be one of those.

Well, I’m not so sure. For one thing, it’s not quite accurate to say that a Tourist has no “purpose”. It seems to me that the purpose of most travel, Touristy or otherwise, is novelty. Not banal or tacky, simply new. North Americans, for example, don’t get to brush up against ancient history very often. We rarely get to see great sprawling castles and towering statues of war generals atop mighty steeds. So that’s a “purpose”, even if the Travelers say otherwise. It might be that a so-called Traveler has a different conception of novelty, but novelty it is. And the Travelers will visit these sites too, of course, but they’ll learn about them beforehand. Fine.

But what of “experiencing other cultures”? The Travelers love to drop that one. But I haven’t quite figured out what this expression means, if anything. For example, I wrote this journal entry in a bar in Vienna, seated near two older Viennese men with sagging eyes, each chain-smoking, drinking heavily, and staring head-in-hands at the wall in what seems to be outright despair. I doubt many want to “experience” their “culture”. The statues and castles, likewise, represent bygone eras, never to return. Nothing of the present generation indicates that they are fond of building palaces and imperial gardens, especially when that land could be used to build condominiums instead. The romance of foreign cultures tends to disappear after the fiftieth Turkish carpet salesman or extortionary taxi ride. Nightclubs are nightclubs the world around, and they all play more or less the same music.

So, “experiencing other cultures” could be defined any number of ways, such as: dislike of one’s own culture, appreciation for particular quirks of the foreign culture, a lust for their women, an affection for a cultural genre for which that country is prominent (”Warsaw has the best DJs”), delusions about noble savages brought on by reading anthropology textbooks, etc.

The reasons for my trip are still not fully clear to me. Apart from the desire for more autonomy and independence, I cannot frame my motives except in the most hackneyed New Agey spiritual stew whereby my contact with remote places will teach me only of the constancy and immutability of all things, of the essential sameness of all human life, in order that I might appreciate my own circumstances better. Thus far, these feelings have been duly affirmed, but it is not really why I’m here. It might just be that all I want is novelty, like everyone else.