Get on the bus

If you have kids, you may have heard of this song by the Doodlebops, well, it has become a regular hit with our family in Turkey given the number of buses we have taken in the last month.

Our first bus was spectacular and I can see why people rave about the Turkish bus system. We started with a bus that was pretty average, only to realize this bus was just the shuttle to take us to the otogar (main bus station) that are all a few km out of the centre of town. A huge coach arrived, seats were assigned, there are two drivers and ticket taker, and then, another guy appears and he is in the in-house flight attendant - no kidding -service similar to that on and Air Canada Jazz regional flight, only better because we also had wifi for the entire trip. Did I mention personalized tv's and direct trip door to door too? So our first experience- pretty good.

Our next trip baffled us as we couldn't quite figure out how a 220 km trip was to take us 5 hours. We started off on the shuttle and found out it wasn't the shuttle, it was the bus and it took 5 hours because it went through every little village en route. We still had drink service, but no wifi on this bus. This bus was direct too...sort of... we had to change twice and the last bus wasn't included in our ticket, we had to pay more.....

The third trip confused us further as we were on an overnight journey and we knew we'd be on a big coach again. But 9 hours for the 450 km still seemed long. Well, a mini bus, another minibus, a few hour wait at a main city to get the 9 hour bus and finally we were on our way. Hmmmm... No flight attendant service, no wifi, Turkish movies played out loud on the one tv screen and a stop every two hours for half an hour with announcements and lights on... Pretty poor sleep quality and when it was time to get off, we were the only ones getting off and we were pretty much tossed off at 6am with not much more than a look of disgust that the attendant had to get off to get our luggage out from underneath... Pretty much direct though.

Bus 4 direct to the north...pretty good and met our definition of direct...no minibuses and it did include inflight service, but no wifi and no tv's.  Emilia was getting a little too much attention too, so she had to move to a window seat just to be left alone for a while. Not much meeting up to that first bus standard.

Bus 5 was the classic. This bus was old. It didn't even stop at the otogar ; we had some bus helping guy show us where to and how to flag down the bus on the road as it drove by. Our seats were taken and the rest were dirty or broken. This bus had no service or tv or wifi, in fact it was more like what we expected before the first bus ride in Turkey. The best part of this trip was that we were to get off at some named town we couldn't find on our map and then just wait on the side of the road for one of the many minibuses to go by to get to our actual destination. Apparently there are lots of minibuses from our drop off point.  We got dropped off at the junction of two highways as the sun was going down. No town, no minibusses going by.  After some deliberation we walked up the road a ways to find help. Glad we did.... The traffic policeman who was the only guy around for miles...lucky moment.... helped us by waving down the most decrepit vehicle and putting us in it with instructions to the driver to take us to the next town. We were way over charged but happy to be on our way along the 10km hike we would have taken with our packs in the dark on a hwy....to the next minibus and then the final minibus.

We are not sure we actually want to get on another bus since they seem to be getting a little worse each time. The best part was that the kids attitudes were great. Emilia told us that the hiking we were doing along the highway was what she had envisioned when we talked about going around the world so it wasn't so bad. Mattias reminded us if all else failed we had the tent with us and we could pitch it and deal with getting to our destination in the morning. I am not sure at 7 or 9years old I would have had the same attitude! Oh, and once we had got our wits about us, we looked at our dictionary for the name of the town we were supposed to be dropped off at, and it wasn't a town, the word meant junction/crossroads. The joke was on us but we laughed pretty hard especially when it made us think back to the bus driver's look when we showed him where we wanted to be dropped off. He needed to know "where".... So we just told him our final destination and all seemed to be okay. We had assumed he just knew as a result of our trip direction. What did we know?!

So, we have learned that the bus company does matter, sometimes you are shuttled and sometimes the shuttle is the bus, and the meaning of direct changes dramatically depending on who is selling the ticket and how desperate they are for a ticket sale.  Our 300km journey to Istanbul tomorrow is 6.5 hours and direct on a large coach.... we will have to see what that actually means.