As the postings here at Woolgatherer have been lagging significantly behind schedule (I’ve actually been in India for over a month now), what follows is a condensed version of the rest of my time in Europe and Turkey.

Back in Istanbul with ten days to kill before my flight to Munich, and feeling maybe a little sick of the streets of the Sultanahmet tourist area (sadly, a very unavoidable place), I decided to slip into Bulgaria for a little while. I took the first overnight train to Sofia, the capital, sharing a room with a 19-year-old Australian kid who’d spent the last year traveling Russia, the Baltics, and the Balkans. I don’t need to tell you how old this made me feel. He was on his “gap year”, which is something many Aussies and Brits take before entering university.

The kids today. In Austria I’d met a 19-year-old Brit girl with model looks and a stunning maturity who’d spent half a year in Laos and Cambodia. I can’t imagine not only having the money to travel the world at 19, but having the interest, or even the idea to do it. Not to mention the courage. When I was 19 I was still getting over being allowed to buy beer without having to cross the Quebec border, and beaming with pride whenever I’d get IDed.

Travel often brings about feelings of inadequacy. You feel that you’re doing the same ol’ thing as everyone else, experiencing the same things, following a predetermined path set out by the gods of Lonely Planet, and so on. And you meet people half your age doing the same things and having identical reactions to their surroundings. Or people twice your age. Travel is sort of ageless that way. The 19-year-olds are indistinguishable from the 45-year-olds. All your life experiences and wisdom, all those years of paying your dues in the real world, don’t seem to matter very much.

Anyway, Bulgaria. It’s lovely. Probably my favourite place on the trip so far. It could be that in contrast to loud, aggressive, messy Turkey, Bulgaria appeared to me as a calm sunset after a long day of pounding heat. The city of Sofia is a gentle place. The trains run on time, the pedestrians don’t spontaneously break into wrestling matches, nobody yells at you or offers you a tour of their handicrafts shop.

You can get a pizza slice the size of a football for about a dollar, and the Bulgarians go ahead and put ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise on the thing. As a devout condimentophile and sauce-ist, I approve of this conduct. They also have these strange convenience stores (or dépanneurs, if you prefer) in the basements of buildings, visible to the public only by a tiny knee-high window opening out of the sidewalk. You’re supposed to squat down and tell the clerk what you want (in Bulgaria, usually cigarettes), and they reach up and hand it to you. It is like sticking a tin cup into a hole in the wall with five bucks inside, ringing the bell, and pulling it back out full of whiskey. Why can’t we have nice things?

I made a half-hearted attempt to day-trip to the top of the mountain just outside Sofia. The gondolas up to the summit weren’t running that day, and I was instead chased by two enormous dogs and one bearded woman. But I still love Sofia.

Even better than Sofia was the hillside town of Veliko Tarnovo in Central Bulgaria. I have a fondness for places where you’re always walking either uphill or downhill no matter where you’re going. Veliko offers a most vertical experience of small-town life.

I stayed for almost a week, in the Hostel Mostel, one of the best hostels I’ve seen. Only two others guests were there (low season), a funny Dutch guy and an enormous, bear-like Englishman, and we spent the week dining on pig knuckle and mashed potatoes, having a beer, playing chess, cavorting about with the Bulgarians, and generally doing not much of anything. It was like a vacation from my vacation.

I returned to Istanbul to catch a flight to Munich via the distant galactic outpost known as Sabiha Gökçen International Airport. Now, in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, around the end of September and into the start of October there is some kind of “beer fest” happening. I hear it’s a pretty big deal. So I arrived in downtown Munich via the express train from the airport, stuffed my bag into a storage locker, and made my way to the fairgrounds of this supposedly popular festival to meet my pal Steve.

The week or so that followed was an enormous black hole. I think of the periods of “de-tox” taken by serious drinkers (a “corporate restructuring” as called by J. Tesauro and P. Mollod in The Modern Gentleman), and can only conclude that Oktoberfest is something like a yearly “re-tox”—a flushing-out of all the body’s health, a severe tax on the immune and nervous systems, and a prolonged period of self-afflicted morning malaise. It is like taking a nourishing retreat from human dignity.

I wanted to write a sprawling epic of drunken mayhem here, not unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, but I am no Good Doctor, and am in fact, badly in need of an appointment with same.

Without a doubt, the very greatest thing about Oktoberfest is an antiquated contraption known as the Teufelsrad (Devil’s Wheel).

The Teufelsrad is nothing more than a flat, spinning wheel on the floor, surrounded by thin protective padding and a crowd of screaming, leiderhosen-clad Germans. Contestants pile onto the wheel and find their grip, while the sweet sounds of Bavarian drinking music fill the air. The wheel spins faster and faster. The contestants try to hang on for dear life, the devilish wheel trying to throw them all off. Then, slowly, a large padded “wrecking ball” descends from the ceiling, controlled by one of the “hired goons”, whose sole duty is to knock you off that wheel with it. If you somehow survive that, the goons try to hog-tie you with ropes.

The wrecking ball knows no mercy. Whether you’re a man or a boy or a little old lady, the wrecking ball swings the same cruel path. In the spirit of German schadenfreude, I couldn’t help but laugh cruelly at the sight of glassy-eyed teenaged girls and small children getting cold-cocked in the face by this thing, necks snapping back violently, their screams muffled by the crowd noise. The degree to which the Teufelsrad would not be allowed in Canada is immediately evident; after all, not only is it vicious, sadistic, and dangerous… it’s also fun.

And if that weren’t enough, every so often they have a “boxing round”, where the contestants are given boxing gloves and instructed to beat the hell out of each other in the midst of all this. The whole spectacle of the Teufelsrad is augmented by the fact that nearly everyone involved—participants, crowd, staff—is drunk. It is almost the Platonic form of human debasement. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

Next stop, India.

A year of travelling is a long time, and there are moments when you feel defeated. The travel schedule can be exhausting, and there is no comparable frame of reference to your ordinary life. I often think about home, imagining a typical week and the passage of time over that week, of how long I’d spend sitting at a desk at the office, or riding the subway, or grocery shopping and cooking tomorrow’s lunch, and try to imagine what I’d be doing right now if I were at home. Maybe I’d be on the computer, or reading a book, or doing nothing much. I certainly would not be riding a 12-hour bus to the next town on a Wednesday, or negotiating the price of a dormitory bed with the hostel staff at five in the morning. Nor would I think nothing of spending five hours in a café playing backgammon with a couple of Turkish university students. Life is short.

But when you’re travelling, life is long. Unless you’re visiting a country with some kind of job or volunteer work or task to do, you’ve got to find ways to fill the time. You can go sightseeing, but that lasts only for an hour or two, so what now? It’s only 2 PM. Most towns don’t perk up until the sun goes down.

After weeks of sightseeing, buses, trains, border crossings, and hostel staff, what should be considered a “vacation” starts to feel like an immense chore. My spirits were flagging a little bit as I reached the Goreme Valley. I’d had a busy day exploring the Goreme open-air museum with the Dutch guy I keep running into in every town I visit. He had an overnight bus to Istanbul leaving at 8 PM. We ran into some Canadians we’d met in Selcuk who had plans for the evening that involved an open bar and five-course meal, costing about 60 YTL (50 bucks or so). Too rich for me. With the Dutch guy leaving and everyone else I know having other plans, I was left with nothing much to do for the evening, and not much energy to be bothered.

I retired to my hostel. In Goreme, the thing to do is stay in a cave hotel. Mine was a small, musty dormitory room with heavy blankets and almost no air circulation and very little light. It was the sort of room that offers no compelling reason to stay there except for sleeping. You couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t even sit. The hotel itself was virtually empty (it was low season), and the entire town was dark.

Restlessness took over me. I wandered into the town and into a crowded bar, which I quickly left, not being in the mood. I went back to my room, got into bed, and thought about things. Today wasn’t fun. What’s so great about volcanic rock formations? I could just look at photographs of those. This hotel sucks. There’s nobody here. Can’t meet people. And if I did, what would we do? Go to a bar and drink? Is that all I know how to do?

I was feeling depressed. I know that feeling when I see it. And the next day, I had an overnight bus to Istanbul, so I had the whole day to kill. And now I’ve “done” Goreme, seen all the sights I wanted to see. Tomorrow would be the worst and most boring day of my entire life.

At breakfast the next morning, I met a British lady who was living in Turkey. She had a long braided ponytail and a t-shirt saying “NOT IN MY NAME”—an anti-war slogan, apparently. We talked about my travel plans. I told her I was off to India next, and she’d been to India five times, and told me all about the place, and also about some of the other places she’d been like Columbia, Sri Lanka, Iran, and so on. Her enthusiasm for travel was endless; she’d been on the road for almost 19 years, stopping to work for a few months in each place before heading off to another destination, sometimes doing humanitarian/UN work, other times teaching English. Talking with her, I began to feel the pangs of anticipation coming back, the feeling of looking forward to the next place. I was excited again.

She gave me simple advice for nights like the previous one: when you start to have more of those nights than the good kind, it’s time to go home. And the truth was, I’d had weeks of great times punctuated with a boring night or two. Hardly a cause for concern. I felt good.

With newfound resolve, I decided to take a day trip to the underground villages of Derinkuyu. At the bus stop a guy sitting on his backpack began talking to me. He asked if I was going to Derinkuyu and I said I was. So we sat on the bus together. He smelled rather bad (or as my pal Dave would say: “He smelled rather poorly”) and looked to be in shabby condition. His backpack was like a large, dirty duffel bag that he strapped to his shoulders. He looked like neither his clothes nor his person had been washed in weeks.

His name was Raphael, from Australia. His English was with an Aussie accent, but it seemed either that English wasn’t his first language or he was a little slow. I didn’t press him on that.

We began the usual gambit of fellow-traveller questions. Our conversation lacked rhythm. His manner of speaking was peculiar to me: he seemed to think everything over thoroughly before talking, and only when he decided on what to say did he say it. I started in on how I was going to India and how I was a bit nervous about going there, India being a tough place and all. As I spoke, I became aware that I was bragging about this. He hardly said anything, and waited for me to finish talking.

Then I asked him where he’d been before Turkey and he said “India.” He did not offer this fact while I was discussing India. He’d been for five months “this time”, as well as to Pakistan, Iran, the “stans”, not to mention Eastern Turkey. Wow. Did he find it difficult? How did he get around? Any trouble?

“No,” he said. “Most people will give you a ride for free.”

Wait. You… hitchhiked?

“Yes.”

This guy hitchhiked across India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey. Suddenly my travels felt so mundane, riding government buses and staying in touristy hostels, drinking beer with people from Germany and California. This guy was one of those rare creatures we see in the wild, the Serious Traveller. I was merely a dabbler. But how does one get the idea to hitchhike across that part of the world? I suppose it’s cheaper that way. I had so many questions.

“Did you make it to Sri Lanka?”

“No.”

“Aha!” I thought. Got ya. As people tend to do when they meet someone far more interesting than themselves, I began trying to make myself appear more than a total novice. I said something along the lines of “I’d like to try some challenging places like that too. But I’m not about to go to Afghanistan or anything.”

“Why not?” he asked.

Oh man. Tell me you didn’t hitchhike across Afghanistan too…

“It’s not that dangerous. You just read the newspapers and pay attention to the political situation, and when things aren’t busy you just go in.”

He did! He spent two weeks in Afghanistan, not only in Kabul but in other places. He was confused at how I might find that a strange thing to do.

“I’m not about to go to Baghdad,” he said. Good to know.

We arrived at Derinkuyu, a fascinating series of underground caves shaped into a little village, where people lived for months at a time while their real village was under siege. Raphael very much wanted to worm into the very narrowest, darkest passages, unimpeded by such things as claustrophobia or discomfort.

I pulled out my camera. “Take your pictures,” he said. He wasn’t taking any. Didn’t even have a camera. The more time I spent with him, the more I began to feel like the strange one. Why did I need pictures of everything? I have a memory, don’t I?

And why don’t I visit Pakistan and Iran? How bad could it be? Millions of people live there, for God’s sake. I began to realize that travel is a skill, and I was still learning. Raphael was a master. He had no tourist accoutrements whatsoever. No modern synthetic-fibre’d clothing or state-of-the-art backpacks or expensive hiking boots. He dressed simply. He could fit in anywhere. And he didn’t travel to show his friends his pictures or brag about where he’d been, just as he didn’t speak without thinking first about what he would say.

We left the village, and he asked me if I wanted to stop for tea. But it was Ramadan, and drinking tea in public during the day would be impolite. So we shook hands, and he wandered across the street with his backpack over his shoulders, stuck out his thumb and began hitchhiking, hoping to reach Antalya by sundown.

Antalya is yet another Mediterranean paradise, with sprawling beaches cut into cliff rock, palm-lined boulevards, and of course, many Turkish men trying to huck their goods. I arrived in the early evening at my hotel, the Sabah Pension in the Antalyan ‘Old City’. After passing a quiet evening with a plate of lamb kebab and a borrowed Lonely Planet guide, I went to bed early to wake up at sunrise and walk along the waterfront and take a picture or two:

I quickly took a standard “Turkish breakfast” (boiled egg x 2, feta cheese, tomato + cucumber salad, olives, bread, Nescafé) and walked out into the cool morning air while the sun slept, towards the Hadrian Gate at the entrance to the Old City.

A shoe-shine man stood next to the gate, and tried to lure me over to his stand.

“Hello my friend, where you from? Come here please.”

Pointing to my sandals, I offered him a glance that said “oh ho ho, good sir, but the un-shoelike nature of my footwear has thwarted you!” and continued on. But he persisted.

“Yes please, it’s no problem. Come here, I show you.”

With such a stern manner did he say this—as a command rather than a request—that in my early-morning stupor (Nescafé offers a meagre caffeine kick, after all) I did exactly what he said.

This proved to be a grave mistake. In Turkey, as anywhere else where tourists are regularly accosted by street merchants, it is usually the correct move to ignore anyone trying to strike up conversation using any of the following intro lines: “My friend…”, “Hello sir, where are you from?”, and that Turkish peculiarity, “Yes please…”. You’ll note that none of these lines can be responded to with “no”. Their aim is to get you talking, and where there is talking, so begins the selling. Just walk away.

But I didn’t. Instead I wandered over to his shoe-shine stand. It was little more than a metal foot rest with some creams and brushes scattered around it. He kept talking, and without looking down, scooped up some paste with his finger and tried to apply it to my sandal. I anticipated this, and moved my foot out of the way.

“No no no no, it’s OK sir. Just to test. A test.”

I told him I didn’t want any.

“Where from? France? Belgium? Ahh, Belgium! You from Belgium, yes?”

And with a bit of legerdemain he quickly thrust his finger out and smeared my sandal with the paste before I could move.

Now I was angry, and told him to wipe it off at once.

“OK sir,” he said, and reached for a cloth. But his hand veered away from the cloth and instead grabbed a wire brush, and he began scrubbing the paste into the leather. I was livid, but powerless to do anything, lest I walk away with a single paste-encrusted sandal. So as he scrubbed, I continued to scold and berate him for being so rude.

“Is this how you make your money? Ripping people off?” I said.

“No, it’s OK, no money, no money!” he replied, as if he expected not to be paid. Hospitality has its limits, even Turkish hospitality.

When he finished with my right foot, he lunged forward with both hands to try to grab my left foot. I shook him off, and simply walked away. He offered no protest, and I offered no money, for it would be wrong to reward such rudeness, would it not?

So what was a man with one polished shoe to do? With the bitter taste of the attempted con job still in my mouth, I went down to the beach and scuffed up the sandal real good. Take that, shoe-shine man.

I spent quite a few days at the lovely ANZ Guesthouse in Selcuk. The place sits just up the hill from the Selcuk bus terminal, behind a small carpet shop (”Ali Baba’s”). It’s operated by three Turkish guys, one of whom spent something like eighteen years living in Australia (and speaks English with a proper Outback twang), hence the Australiophile motif (”ANZ” = “Australia/New Zealand”). The ANZ is a fantastic hostel. The rooms are cheap and clean. For dinner they offer BBQed meats prepared by a pro chef. And the staff were some of the nicest folks I’ve met.

Mehmet was one such guy. He spoke not much English (and when he did, he somehow spoke it with “a Turkish accent”, his words), but he looked after all of us with the most sincere generosity. On my first day there he took me out for soup and Coca-Cola (old-fashioned glass bottle), and talked about small-town life, and about his girlfriend in Vancouver. They kept in touch by Internet, and hope to marry soon. I couldn’t help but fear that this girlfriend was, if not a fictional creation, at least some cruel woman giving him the run-around. What does a Canadian girl want with a small-town Turk who barely speaks English? But he insists they hoped to be married, and Mehmet is a good man, so I give him the b. of the d.

In talking with a few Turkish men they seemed to have a very practical approach to marriage. “If we cannot be married,” Mehmet says, “I marry someone else, it’s OK.”

Selcuk has many attractions, such as the ruined Greek city of Ephesus:

The highlight for me was the mountain town of Srince (shrin-JAY), home to the Selcuk wine industry:

Srince is one of those Mediterranean postcard dream-lands, where grape vines cling to Spanish-tiled rooftops, pomegranates hang at eye level from bushy trees, wrinkled old men ride around town on bicycles, and the rain always seems to fall elsewhere. I went up there via dolmus (taxi-bus) with a newly engaged Canadian couple from Calgary. We found a wine vendor in a three-piece suit who let us sample each of the fifteen or so flavours of fruit wine local to the region: apple, peach, cherry (regular and x-tra strength), blackberry, black mulberry, blueberry, kiwi, apricot, pomegranate…. All were delicious, and my Canadian friends and I picked up several bottles, to be drunk that afternoon over games of backgammon.

The most amusing sight in Srince came as we were having lunch in an outdoor restaurant on Srince’s main street, and a series of open-roof tour jeeps full of passengers made their way past. It is something of a local tradition in Turkey’s small towns to douse tourists with water, and while we were spared this fate, the tourists in the jeeps were not. Each of the restaurants on this strip had evidently prepared hours in advance for the jeeps’ arrival, and brought out enormous jugs—more like oil drums, really—of water, and with expert timing, launched litres of water into the air at the exact moment when it would provide the most thorough drenching to the helpless tourists inside. The final jeep in particular received an almost unbelievable dose; easily enough to leave them sitting in six inches of water when all was said and done. Our laughter turned into a cringe, not only in memoriam of all those poor digital cameras, but for the fact that drums of water can’t be all that easy to come by in rural Turkey.

The wine got us good and drunk, and that night I had a memorable conversation with two Turkish guys around my age, university guys who were in town to do some skydiving (”better than sex!”) at the local drop zone. One of them was an accountant, the other an aspiring mining engineer. The Canadian guy and I talked Turkish politics with these two, or at least what we knew of the subject. It was most enlightening. The common wisdom is that Turkey is torn between the secular, Euro-flavoured government of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the conservative Islamic movement which hopes for a thoroughly Muslim Turkey ruled by Shari’a law. The latter faction is currently in power after having squeaked out a victory in the general election on Jul 22, and the accountant guy gave me a sample scenario of how this result has begun to play out.

He took and passed a difficult exam to become a chartered pro accountant, fully qualified to step into a lucrative job in Turkey’s civil service. But when he applied, he was passed over for another, less-qualified candidate who happened to be a supporter of the AKP. He insists this is because he is a secularist who wants to work “for Ataturk”, and this government will always choose “one of theirs”. So he has been rejected as a gov’t accountant and has had instead to take a job with Deloitte and Touche, or as he calls it, “some fucking French or English”. He explained how the new prez won his power not with his ideas, but by giving the people simple things: roads, infrastructure, budgetary prudence. “Just like Hitler,” he says.

I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong, of course. But Turkey strikes me as one of those countries where everything people say about it is exactly true. For example, everyone says “Turkey is part European, part Asian”, which is not only literally true (Istanbul straddles both continents) but a more or less exact description of Turkish culture. And when people say Gen. Ataturk “created” the modern Turkish state, they are not merely suggesting he passed a few simple reforms through the Parliament or appeared as a head of state for a few treaty-signings. No, he single-handedly stirred Turkish nationalism after the occupation of Anatolia during WWI, leading to the Turkish War of Independence. He then shoved Turkey into the 20th century, giving them a Euro-style secular government and even a new language, for chrissakes. The guy really did create the country called Turkey, and Turkey is truly everything people say it is.

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.