I must say that Istanbul had a lot to live up to, given that a few of my friends had recently visited and all gave it the thumbs up. I always hate it when you have expectations of a place, as often they rarely live up to them. But regardless of what I thought of the town, I was just as much looking forward to being able to dump my stuff in a single location for a few days, not having to worry about dragging my bike and all my luggage around all the time. It can get quite tiresome having to constantly keep an eye on everything. Plus, Hannah was popping out to see me, and we’d be spending a lovely couple of nights here, before tripping down to Cappadocia in the heart of Turkey to check out the lunar landscape that all the volcanic activity and erosion has created over the centuries. If Istanbul was, as they say, a city of two continents, then I was very much wondering what to expect!
I arrived two days early, ending up staying an extra night at the Yellow Rose Pension because all the buses were full due to all the Turks returning from their Muslim holiday weekend called Eid. So the first bus available to take me to Istanbul was a night bus which departed Çanakkale at 1am. It would save me a night of accommodation of course, so I wasn’t too miffed, but then the bus ran ahead of schedule and so you could hardly say that I got virtually any sleep on the six-hour long bus journey. Mind you, I have to give Turkish buses a bit of a rap. They have better service and punctuality than any airline, and are a fraction of the price. The seats are enormous, you sink into them and throughout the journey, an on-board attendant serves cake, tea, coffee and juice. The personal entertainment system is great, with TV screens built-in to the back of every seat. And the luggage compartment is so big that I didn’t ever have to disassemble my bike at all – just wheel Bessie on and make sure she won’t fall over in transit. Amazing with a capital A! The only downside is to create all the extra space, there are no toilets, but the buses stop every two hours minimum for a good rest break. Turkish buses – what a fantastic and cheap way to travel!
The coach dropped us off at the main bus terminal to the north of Istanbul. To say that the place is enormous is an understatement. I’ve seen airports that were smaller, and there were over 150 departure gates for various incoming and outgoing routes. Literally hundreds of buses were parked at any one time, and dozens more were constantly fighting their way into the terminal from the highway in a constant traffic jam of luxury coaches and the dolmus minibuses that ran people from the terminal to various parts of the city. It was extraordinarily fascinating, and I wondered how early I would need to arrive back at the bus station in 5 days time in order to find out where my bus left to Cappadocia. Thankfully the gate numbering was in English numerals!
Dawn was just breaking and I was treated to a wonderful, downhill 7km cycle into the city. In hindsight, being on a bus was probably a good idea as there are nothing but massive freeways bringing cars into the city and fighting the traffic on a bicycle was probably not going to be a lot of fun! Eventually I crossed the short bridge across to Beyoğlu and rocked up to the Erasmus Youth Hostel where Hannah had booked us a double room for a couple of nights. I figured I might as well also stay in the dorm for a couple of nights since I was early, and then wouldn’t have to move my stuff. Outside the building, I met this Canadian fellah called Peter. Pete had just finished a bicycle tour of his own – unbelievably he had spent about 5 months cycling from China to Istanbul, cutting through all the ‘stan’ countries along the way, with the exception of Afghanistan. It was a pretty epic journey, and I checked out his rig, which he was stripping down and doing maintenance on in the middle of the street outside the hostel. His was nothing like Bessie – the two could only be compared as perhaps a Datsun to a Porsche (but bicycles of course!). In saying that, Peter’s bike wasn’t ever going to get stolen and it was the kind of thing that even in far-out places like Uzbekistan, he would be able to find enough parts or a welder to fix anything that broke. I was constantly at the mercy of parts availability due to the bike being so new and modern. Well, good on him I thought. I did ask him how he went getting all the visas for the various countries, with Syria on my own mind since I would need to get one of those at the border down the track. Pete had spent a total of 4 weeks of his trip, just idly hanging out in a handful of border cities, just waiting for visas to be approved. The longest one took two weeks, with the religious holidays of the region playing havoc with the approval process and with all the government employees on holidays. Yikes, and I thought the possibility of waiting a day in Syria or Jordan would be a hassle.
I took one look at the Erasmus Youth Hostel and immediately began searching for a bed elsewhere. To call the place a brothel would have been too kind a comparison. I asked Pete if he was staying there, which he was. “Well, the people staying here are very nice people, but yeah it’s a bit grotty and if you don’t like bed bugs… well, there’s a reason this place is the cheapest in all of Istanbul.” Hannah had discovered the place by searching for the cheapest, and it was my fault really, since I harp on about meeting budget all the time. But there was no way I was going to stay here, especially with Hannah. There was nowhere to put my bike, the toilets were shockingly filthy with shit and mould everywhere and tiles falling from the walls. I might be getting used to showers sharing the same space as the squat dunny, but even still, surely there’s only so close together you can place the two, before the dunny hole literally doubles up as the shower drain? Just for a laugh, I opened the room to one of the dorms, to see bunk beds stacked three-high, wall to wall and with virtually no gap between each other. There was nowhere for luggage so bags and clothes and other piles of crap were blocking the tiny walkway down by the front of the beds. I couldn’t even open the door more than about 15cm because some blokes feet where hanging off the end of his bed blocking the entrance; not his fault, the bed was just too small for him.
So Pete led me up the hill towards the Beyoğlu area of town, where he knew of another hostel that he’d stayed at a couple of days before. It was much nicer, and it was rammed full of Germans. We ended up buying some eggs, tomatoes and bread, and cooking ourselves a hot brekkie. They also had free chai tea, which was awesome. But I didn’t stay there, it was too far up the hill for my liking, and a fair way away from the main part of Turkey. With only a few days to look around, hiking an enormous hill four times a day was not what I had planned. I eventually settled on the Orient Hostel in the very touristy area of Sultanahmet. I scored a space in a huge 30-bed dorm – not totally ideal. So I figured that it had been a little while since I’d had a good night on the turps, and tonight was just as good a night to get on it. And that would mean that if anybody could be blamed for keeping 29 other people awake all night, then that person might as well be me, and a few beers would ensure that at least I got a good night sleep! And so that’s exactly what I did.
The first person I met was an Aussie bloke by the name of Chris, and it didn’t take long to figure out that he was actually working at the hostel – the resident barman I believe. He was typical of so many Aussies, guys in particular, who go travelling overseas and work in hostels or on various Mediterranean islands. They spend all summer ‘living the dream’. That is free booze, free or cheap accommodation and an endless supply of chicks to bed. The time I first met Chris was when I overheard a conversation about how he had bedded a Polish bird; she had rocked up to the hostel at 1am the previous night. He was manning the reception desk and it took him all of about 5 minutes to do the talking and they were down to business. Anyway, Chris invited me for a beer at the bar and who was I to refuse an offer of a beer, especially the grouse Efes brew! I met a German, also by the name of Chris (that’s three Chris’ in one day, doing well on the name front!) and a couple of pommie chicks, Hannah (also easy to remember) and Leslie. We teamed up with a couple of other poms, who I can’t recall their names but one reminded me of my mate Walker’s from Putney Town Rowing Club back in London – complete with a cheesy, porn-style mo. The two poms were also just beginning a bicycle adventure of their own, but their bikes were being repaired after Easyjet baggage handlers decided to drop one of the bikes in transit and snapped the front fork off. Now that’s professionalism for you…
The group of us got stuck into it pretty hard, and after a few pints decided that it would be time to go and meet another friend of the pommie girls in another part of town. That never eventuated however, and I must say that I was less than impressed with the tactics of the hostel staff which were borderline ‘keeping us hostage’ for the night. You’d think that the top rated hostels in town would be above this kind of behaviour but apparently not. As soon as they found out we were thinking of leaving, the floor staff did everything they could to make sure otherwise. I looked on with Chris the German (who like me, also had his head switched on) as they convinced us to have just one more drink “because the town isn’t really happening until a bit later on”. Then when we were about to walk to the tram (1.50 Lire) they managed to convince the girls that this was a bad idea and that they should take a taxi where we were going – much better and wait, “I’ll call you my friend who drives a taxi.” And so we were told that two taxis would arrive in about 10-15 minutes and that was time for another beer. Chris and I both refused, seeing the game for exactly what it was. Countless empty taxis drove past but none had been called for us and we waited and waited, we spoke up and concluded that if we didn’t end up going out to Beyoğlu, that was fine, but stop procrastinating. I was genuinely happy to settle in at the hostel for a few more beers but I didn’t want to be arsed around waiting for a group to get its shit together, which was never going to happen from what I could tell.
The floor manager then overheard us talking and seeing that he had nearly won us over to stay, offered a free water-pipe for the group. Not a bad gesture in the end, it wouldn’t cost him much and was a nice token gesture. And so we sat at our former seats, even had free popcorn handed around, and were soon smoking shisha over another beer. I kept an eye on the floor manager, and as we settled in for a second round, it was evident that the floor manager had never even bothered calling his taxi ‘mate’. We would have waited forever, and that really rubbed me up the wrong way that he’d blatantly lied to us. And in Turkey, I’ve found that it’s just all too common to come across some tout or salesman spinning this kind of bullshit. Quoting one price then changing it at the last minute and pretending that you were the one who heard wrong. Or just trying every trick in the book to get you to agree to buy something or take up a particular service that you never knew you needed. Some of the lines they use just to get people to stop and listen are extraordinary! The buggers that prowl the parkland outside the Blue Mosque would yell out “G’day mate!” before I’d even opened my mouth. And so I stopped wearing thongs, made sure to wear plain, indiscriminate clothing and that soon stuffed them. I’d mentioned before that I’d fallen for this a couple of times now, but I’d been in the country long enough to see it for what it was. One of the most important lessons is to figure out that you are not being impolite if you just walk on past, because this is exactly what you have to do, and what they expect you to do. You can’t feel bad about it. Even if they do pick your language and are very polite, pretending that you never heard them addressing you, or that you don’t understand them, is simply the best way to avoid it.
Anyway, the night did end up being pretty big. Some bottle of Turkish ‘raki’ was handed around. The stuff tasted like fermented battery acid and I could only stomach one shot of the stuff. The pommy boys and a few other Aussies we picked up along the way, were drinking it by the gallon, and trying their hardest to get one of the cute Czech girls sitting in our group to do the same. Sitting next to her, I had to admire her mental stamina at being able to fend off the countless offers of a free shot from no less than six guys. Any one of them would have ended her night, as was obvious because the guys surrounding her soon began dropping like flies. The poor idiots, if just one of them had stayed sober enough to maintain speech, they would probably have stood a good chance, but none of them played their cards right. And so it was an amusing finish when the hostel bar closed. The pommie girls, Chris the German and I had not had enough however (the four of us had consumed a little less of the moonshine raki than the rest of the table) and we carried on with take-out Efes from the mini-market across the road. At about 4am, we were rolling around ourselves in the courtyard outside the dorm, and at that point I figured that I’d be able to get a decent night’s sleep now with any noise caused by 29 other backpackers being a distant disturbance that would probably barely register in my furry mind. And I was right; it did just the trick and I slept like a baby for 10 hours.
I’ll be honest and say that Sultanahmet really didn’t do it for me. After cycling through countless small Turkish towns, and having been in the country for over a week, I found that I was not too keen on being stuck in an über touristy location. It wasn’t so much the tourists, but everything that comes with them – touts who won’t leave you alone, a lack of ‘authenticity’ to many of the restaurants and shopping areas, and prices that I knew for certain were triple-inflated compared to the rest of Turkey. About the best thing going for it was the free wifi internet in the park – that was awesome. Location wise, Sultanahmet also wasn’t too bad, because it was very close to the Blue Mosque and the other major attractions. But after two nights at the Orient Hostel, I couldn’t wait to get out of the place – the hostel and the suburb. A little bit of searching on the Internet and with some help from Hannah, and I found a lovely hotel about 10 minutes walk closer to the bridge in a suburb called Sirkeci. There were a lot more hotels as opposed to hostels and pensions, and even though it should have been a more pricy area, I found that the restaurants weren’t much more expensive, the vibe was less forced and actually there were plenty of cool little bars and shisha joints, all for the same or cheaper prices than in Sultanahmet. And it was much closer to the river and still just as close to the Fortress, major mosques and only a stone’s throw from the bazaars – all these wonderful sights which I was saving up for when Hannah arrived. (Jeez I’m good to you Hannah, just quietly).
And so I think that in the coming days there will be plenty of good stuff to report about Istanbul – hopefully I haven’t made it sound like a touristic dive that is good for only ripping people off! I will assure you now that actually the city does have a lot going for it, and it is quite a thriving, buzzing place. But like any town, there are good bits and not so good bits. I mean, for example I love Sydney, but I think I’d go insane (and broke) if I spent all my time around The Rocks or Darling Harbour. There’s a lot more to see, and over the next two days, I would get out to explore the ‘wider’ Istanbul…
