Another normal day on the road

I left Istanbul by bus, a very comfortable one. The service was like in an airplane, I even had my own mini TV. Channel 12 was my favorite one since it was hooked up to a webcam next to the bus driver. The whole journey took about 11 hours, but with all the nice mountainous countryside floating past me eyes the trip was quite a pleasure.

At one of the larger bus terminals along the way there was a Turkish delight shop where you could watch them make this delicous looking stuff. I could not resist buying a small selction, and even though it was very rich, it lasted me only a day and a half.

My reason for going to Antalya was the ruins of Termessos, an ancient city up in the mountains that I had read about. I had also read that it was possible to go there by bus and hike up to the site. So when I woke up the next day and the weather looked great, I decided to just go and do it.

After having breakfast at my pension I bought a tram ticket to the main bus station outside town. Only after buying the ticket I realised that there wouldn't be another tram for a considerable time and so I got on one of the mini busses which are much more frequent and also turned out to be a lot cheaper. At the bus station I had to ask twice to find the right bus that stops at the trail head to Termessos. Half an hour later I was already there, and there was a taxi waiting, offering to take me the 9km to the entrance of the actual site. I declined the offer, walked to a nearby restaurant to buy some water since I had forgotten to get any earlier in Antalya, and then I started hiking up the access road. After half an hour a Spanish coulpe passed in a car and offered a ride - I didn't say no this time. We chatted on the way up and I learnt that the guy was doing an Erasmus year at Istanbul university. Apparently all his courses are in Turkish, which he didn't speak, and the lecturers kept asking him what they are supposed to do with him.

The access road ended into a car park and that is where we split up. The following few hours I meandered though the ruins which have been left in a natural state. Quite amazing what you can find there behind bushes and trees.


In the afternoon I started walking back down the access road. This time I got picked up by two Israelis who happened to go all the way to Antalya which was perfect for me. The woman was working in Antalya for a tomato seedling company (tomatoes are really big business in the area) and we talked a lot about the pros and cons of plant crossing and manipulation.

In the evening I had a tasty homemade kebap at my pension and then had the host explain me the stories on the TV news. It seemed to be a very exciting day for Turkish politics: some generals from the military had been arrested for planning to throw over the government in 2003, whilst somewhere in Spain a Syrian Kurd tried to throw a shoe at the Turkish prime minister. And after reading on Spiegel online a bit more about these latest current affairs, I fell asleep... what a nice day it has been!

My first couchsurfing experience

Just before leaving Istanbul I had the chance to spend the weekend with a complete stranger. Well, Gurcan wasn't entirely a stranger. I met him through the couchsurfing.org project, a social network of people that like to meet local people when the travel on one side, and people that enjoy hosting and learning about other cultures on the other side. I had spent some time during the first few days in Istanbul to fill in my couchsurfing profile including some photos so that potential hosts get a better idea who they might be meeting. Then I looked up possible hosts in the city. With more than 5000 couchsurfing members in Istanbul this was quite a challenge. In the end I picked two guys and sent them a request to either meet up for a few hours or surf with them. And this is how I got to meet up with Gurcan at a subway exit in Istanbul on a Saturday noon.

We spent the weekend together and it was a really great experience of Turkish hospitality. We checked out the cinema program in a gigantic mall...

...enjoyed the view from his flat over one of Istanbul's many living quarters...

...and I got introduced to some new Turkish fast food: Kumpir. Yummy!!

After having spent a lot of time in the busy historic areas it was very relaxing weekend and I even got spoilt twice by Gurcan's cookings skills. Two days and many conversations later, on a Monday morning, Gurcan went back to work and I took a bus to get to my next destination: Antalya. Thanks for this fantastic weekend, Gurcan!

Istanbul, oh Istanbul

I don't really know where to start. There are about 15Mio people living in Istanbul, so the size of the city just blows you away. You could say it is like several cities, each with their own character, like the historic Sultanahmet, old and run down housing areas, modern housing areas with lots of multi-storey appartment buildings, the lively downtown area of Taxim... And with Thracians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Ottomans having resided at this place at one time or other, the history of the area is extremly rich. One of the most striking facts for me however was the cultural diversity with respect to Islam and the strict separation between state affairs and religion. At universities, women are not allowed to wear the traditional headscarf (although there have been attempts to change that), whilst in some areas of Istanbul the majority of them wears at least the headscarf or is complete veiled in black, and at the same time you can watch women show their belly buttons in TV soap operas.

Part of the daily routine is the muzzein's call for prayer. They do this five times a day, at dawn, noon, afteroon, evening and night. To me the calls sound like some beautiful singing. They are broadcasted via speakers from the minarets. Every mosque seems to has their own muzzein, and given the density of mosques in cities you can often hear overlapping calls. But that still sounded nice to me. In fact, after attending one of the evening prayer sessions I was able to pick out "my" muzzein later on during the night time call when I was already far away and heard at least four or five of them "competing" in their singing skills.

Friday noon prayer is a special one. If you are a moslem man, you should turn up at least for this one, the other prayer times, so I understand, can be conducted at other places if you can't make it to your mosque. So, Friday noon it gets really busy in mosques, even the gigantic Blue Mosque filled completely.

This is a snap of the Basilica Cistern, dating back to the days of the Roman Empire. It was used to supply the city and the palace with water, rather than being some cool underground swimming pool (which was my initial thought given the pretty design of the pillars).

Majestic Aya Sophia, once upon a time it was a church but got converted into a mosque by the Ottomans. Nowadays it serves as a museum that you pay an addmission fee for (mosques on contrary are always addmission free).

Galata bridge across the so-called "Golden horn" water way, with Galata tower in the background. Fishing off the Galata bridge is a favourite past-time for many a man from Istanbul.

A visit to the archeological museum almost resulted in a brain overload. It is a collection of several indivual museums of which I tried to visit two. The amount of information and number of artefacts on display is just overwhelming. Given the rich history of the place it is no surprise I guess: whereever you start digging, you are likely to find some kind of artefact or other.

Side street in Sultanahmet, the historic quarter of Istanbul. Unlike on the main roads there were almost no tourists there, and no touts, a very welcome change. If you spend your time only around the main attractions, having to deal with touts can really get to you. Everyone wants to sell you something, and you are approached in a friendly and often even charming way that it is hard to just ignore and walk past the guys. A friendly "No, thank you, I am not interested" is usually not accepted but will prompt a tout to start over, asking where you are from, followed by some story about his relatives living in your country or he will come out with some compliments about your country of origin. They know so many lines in so many languages to lure you into their shops, you almost have to admire them for their skills.

A little bit further away from the touristy main streets this could be a common sight: plenty of men watching one man dig a hole or sweating with their pals playing backgammon or nine men's morris (deutsch: Muehle) on the sidewalk.

Turkey's national drink #1: Turkish tea, here being delivered to a bazaar salesman.

I had many a glass of tea here already, and with a single exception they have been as tiny as this one. The idea behind the small size is that you get to enjoy it hot, whilst the glass allows you to admire the colour ot the tea.

That was a must-take photo! Spices and teas sold at the bazaar. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the nice and rich smell here...

The narrow streets in the old town area can be quite taxing for traffic...

...and in the bazaar it gets so narrow and busy that people often just resort to carts to deliver goods.

An hour or two after closing time, and after the garbage collectors have been through, the bazaar seems like a ghost-town...

...whilst at the same time it is getting busy in the Nargile cafes.

After 30 days on the road I treated myself to a hair cut at a Turkish baber. The whole treatment took 1.5 hours and included a haircut, shave, face mask, hair wash and a short head + face massage. For only 10Euros, I could get used to that treatment on a weakly basis!

"Hello friend, welcome to Istanbul"

After a total of nine nights I left Veliko Tarnovo with a very happy feeling in my stomach about what I had seen in, and learnt about Bulgaria. My plan was to go to Turkey next, Istanbul to be precise, but the only option to go there from Tarnovo was an over-night bus. Although popular with travelers (you safe time and money on accommodation) I prefer to see where I am going and so I took a 4.5 hour bus ride to Plovdiv from where there are day-time bus runing to Istanbul.

Like before in Bucharest, I made a 2-day stop in Plovdiv to make my connection to Istanbul and with the intention to have a look around town. Our bus arrived in the town centre in the evening and after about half an hour of walking I stood in front of Hikers Hostel (thanks for pointing me to them, Fedio). Yanni opened the door for me and whilst walking me through the backyard, I could already sense that Hikers was a potential traveler trap. The house and garden were very cosy and Yanni (the guy behind the bar in the photo) and company made me feel like a friend rather than just a paying guest right away.

Plovdiv is culturally and historically rich, and with Hikers being the place it was I knew it would be hard to stick to my schedule. But I did. In fact, I didn't even try to discover much of the town, knowing that I could be opening Pandora's box. Instead I spend a lot of time talking the the folks at the hostel. Some friends of the staff, travelling musicians, stayed over night and made for good conversation. One of the young rasters had started a course at university but was disliked by his professor for his looks, to the extent that passing the course became an impossible mission without changing his appearance first. So after dropping out he could have tried to get a full-time job, he explained, earning him maybe 200€ a months, bending his back for someone else to get rich, but barely enough to survive himself. Taking on a “slave job” didn't agree with his attitude however, instead he is trying to survive as a street musician and taking up the odd little job. When we were getting pizzas later that evening we could see what “slave jobs” do to people. A young and rather grumpy guy asked us what topping we want and when we said 4-seasons he snapped back at us saying that we were not in a restaurant. Sorry for asking, dude! Anyway, together with my Polish and Bulgarian companions from the hostel (latter translated the whole unpleasant scene for us later) we did manage to get some pizzas in the end and we used the waiting time to make jokes about that sad character of a pizza cook...

After two nights at Hikers in Plovdiv I boarded a Metro Plus bus to take me out of the EU and all the way to Istanbul. Passing the boarder was quite a procedure. We had to get off the bus four times: first the Bulgarians checked our passports. Following this we stopped at a huge duty free mall in the no-man's land between the Bulgarian and the Turkish checkpoint, where many of the passengers stocked up on fags...

Shopping stop in no-man's land

Then we drove a few hundred meter further to disembark again at the Turkish passport control, that didn't check the passports but just collected them all. We boarded again and then had to get of at the customs checkpoint, where the luggage got checked manually or, in case of complicated pieces with too many pockets (like my backpack), it got x-rayed. At 1.5 hours in total it was a very lengthy procedure, and a bit nerve wrecking, especially when we had to board the bus without getting our documents back first. But everything smooth: we drove on a nice motorway (something sorely lacking in Bulgaria), got our passports back, and a few hours later we reached Istanbul.


On my march from the bus station to my hostel I got some nice first impressions, but also I got hustled a lot by all kinds of dubious “friends”, offering jewellery, women, fags or try to convince me that my hostel was no good and suggested I instead follow them to their “cheap” hotel. But I kept smiling and walking... Istanbul, here I come!

Feeling home at Nomads in Bulgaria

For the last week or so I have stayed at the Nomads hostel in Veliko Tarnovo. As far as hostels go, this is a very special place. It is the home of two Bulgarians, Georgie and Fedio, who decided to share their home, cooking skills and life philosophy with traveling folk like me. They live with their guests, they live through their guests (they don't need to travel because the world travels to them) and they live because of their guests (obviously you do pay some money for the accommodation).

The homey front room at Nomads...

For most of the nights I was the only guest and Fedio acted as a kind of personal chef, cooking up tasty Bulgarian meals.

No matter what dish he had prepared, it was always accompanied by bread, pickles, cheese and Bulgarian salami. Similar to the tradition in Hungary, meals where started with a glass of fruit brandy. Here they call it Rakija. Ours was self-distilled and the stuff was so strong that we always had to thin it down with lots of water.

Feta cheese is so popular, it comes in huge tins. Hopefully your fridge is big enough to fit it in.

The hostel is situated on top of cliffs in the beautiful historic part of the town...

...and offered magnificent views from the balcony

Almost every evening we had friends of Fedio around. One of them was Ludmil and he explained to me that the town of Tarnovo is a miracle. According to his estimates, about 80% of the population live in survival mode, and yet the town has three big home electronics shopping centres. He reckons the only reason that they have survived the last few years is because they are a cover up for money laundring.

On my excursions through town I kept coming across these death notices. They could be on anything and anywhere, in groups or individually, usually however on front doors. In some streets there seemed to be so many, I started wondering if they were struggling with some deadly disease or other. When I enquired about it, my host explained to me that it is custom not just to publicly announce when someone has died, but also to re-announce the death after certain intervals (like after 40 days, 3, 6 and 9 months, 1, 2, 3 years and so on...).

Planing public transport by bus in Bulgaria has been the most diffucult so far. Bus stops are easy to recognise (here in Tarnovo they are marked by these concrete pillars, or the standard bus signs) however there are no bus schedules to be found anywhere, they simply dont exist. At the tourist information they confirmed this for me with a “Yeah, that's the way it works here”. In the busy town centre, a bunch of people hanging around the bus stop is a good indication that there should be a bus soon, but you still don't know whether it will be the right line taking you to your desired destination. For long distance bus connections there is at least a website, and it even comes in an English version. It doesn't work with the Latin spelling of town names however (Bulgarian is based on the Cyrillic alphabet), so don't get too excited. At first I thought there simply are no bus connections to the places I wanted to visit and it took me a while to figure this out. So what you have to do is this: first you go to the website for train connections. There you can pick from a long list your departure and destination. The lists are of course in Cyrillic, so you need to have some idea what the Cyrillic writing of your destination looks like (thank goodness I had Russian classes at school!). From the next page you can then copy the Cyrillic names of departure and destination and paste them one by one into the bus connection website. Hit search and voilà, there are all your bus connections.

There are numerous monasteries in Bulgaria with beautiful wall paintings (this one was a 2 hour hike in the woods from Tarnovo) and it was places like this that helped religious traditions to survive the years of communism.

One of my day trips took me to the town of Tryavna, but the whole trip was really about using local trains. People getting off the train didnt seem to care about closing the doors behind them and being old trains as they were, without automatic door closing mechanisms, the train would just roll with the doors wide open. As a result, sooner or later it got quite cold in the train and only at that point someone would take care of the door situation. None of the doors seemed to shut properly however, there would always be a gap big enough to squeeze your hand through.

These old trains had one very nice feature though and that was those 4-person wide benches with foldable armrests, giving you plenty of space to stretch out. For my return to Tarnovo I again used a local train, but this time it was called a fast train. Since my return ticket was valid for the slow category trains only I had to pay some top-up to the conductor. The funny thing was however that it took virtually the same time as on the way down, a solid hour for a distance of just over 40km.

On my last day trip from Tarnovo I went to the Shipka village to have a look at a Thracian burial mound. The Thracian people inhabited the Balkan region around 2000-3000 years ago and according to my host left over 100.000 of these burial mounds in Bulgaria alone.

It was only six years ago that someone discovered a tomb inside one of these mounds. Being a snowy day in early February and at a location off the main tourist track, I stood there all by myself inside the burial chamber – and I started feeling somewhat intimidated by the place. The chamber was made from a solid 3x2x2m granite rock into which a room had been chiseled, and then it had been covered with another huge piece of granite. The imagination of finding ones final resting place in a room like this was a very unpleasant thought.

From Shipka I wanted to hitchhike back to Gabrovo, a town about half way on the way back to Tarnovo, and then take a bus from there. Before I even managed to fully stretch out my arm a car pull over. Inside was a friendly big fellow and he indicated I should get in. He was a truck driver who had just come back from a tour to Hamburg. When he mentioned Hamburg I got my map of Europe out and showed him where I come from. He got really excited then and I had to put it away again quickly because it seemed to distract him a little bit too much. We were driving on a bendy and snowy road up to a mountain pass, and he was driving rather fast as it was, way too fast for my liking given the road conditions. I was clutching to the handle above the passenger door and really surprised that we didn't skid, not even in the sharper bends. I asked him about this and he smiled at me and said that the car was a VW Syncro, a 4-wheel drive. We were virtually glued to the road in this thing. His kids had been bugging him to replace the 25 year old banger, but he felt a reliable car like this one (it had 400.000km on the clock and still its first engine) is hard replace.
My driver spoke in broken German, that is how we managed to communicate. At some point he started with politics, but communication was just too difficult for this subject. Apparently a lot of money has disappeared (“Zapp ze rapp”) during the political change, which he was not very happy about, especially as his pension, after 32 years of truck driving, will be just 60€ per month.
Despite the communication problems the ride was very enjoyable and interesting for me and so I scrapped the idea of getting off in Gabrovo and went all the way back to Tarnovo with this guy. Take care, man!

Some statistics:
distance travelled this year since leaving home: 1937km
transportation costs: 5.5cent/km
shortest wait for a hitch: 3 seconds

Last stop Bucharest

After leaving Braşov I stuck to my plan and went to Bucharest for just two nights. It was a short stop but long enough to figure out how to get to, and where to in Bulgaria, and I still had sufficient time for a nice long stroll through the city.

My mode of transportation to Bucharest was by minibus. I would have preferred the slow, lowest category train, but there was only one option at an inhumane early hour, so I opted for the Mercedes Sprinter bus instead, spent a bit more on the fare and got to sleep in. These minibuses are very popular for long distance travel. Depending on the length of the journey there will be 10-15min breaks now and then. Our driver pulled over to a roadside diner after just over an hour where he had a hearty meal waiting for him, and every one else rushed of to the toilet or had cigarette.

I managed to get the last seat in this Sprinter and sat for 3.5h in the far left corner of the back row, talking to a Bulgarian medical doctor and a Dutch Samaritan next to me. Apparently doctors are paid so little that they ask patients for gifts (cash or otherwise) when they seek treatment. There doesn't seem to be a moral limit to it however; one local told me you can be asked to pay 1000€ for the doctor to have all the right equipment read in case there are complications during giving birth. Ouch!!!

My last post might have given the impression that the whole of Romania is one giant scrapheap, but that is not quite true. In the surroundings of Braşov I saw quite a few newly setup companies, the old town looked pretty decent and in Bucharest too there were signs of investment. In fact, the run-down and abandoned factory yards I have seen here don't really differ from some places in East-Germany (just take a train that passes through Leipzig), but the frequency of such sites is much higher here.


This shot is showing the backside of the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest, where dogs feed of the garbage dumped by locals. There was a small park that I wanted to pass through, but there were just too many dogs, some of them seemed to operate in packs, and with no other people around I opted for the street instead. When one of the dog gangs came running over to my side I got a bit nervous for a second. I didn't want to turn around though, instead I caught up with some other people and followed them at close distance. This seemed to work, the dogs ignored us and I got to keep my sandwiches this time.

The whole area where the Palace of Parliament is situated got completely “restyled” by Romania's last communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. Huge housing quarters had to be demolished to build his new “concrete city”. As sick as this may seem, looking at these concrete blocks I find many of them have a lot more style than the ones I grew up in in East-Germany.

Communism did not go too well with religion. The modern concrete buildings were often placed in such a manner that the view of churches and monasteries was obstructed. I had already heard of and witnessed this practice in Warszawa, but here they seemed to have mastered it.

I had read on the internet that buying an international train ticket at the station can stretch ones patients well beyond the limit. The hostel staff however saw no need to buy my ticket to Bulgaria in advance, being the quiet winter season and all that, but since I had no plans for the evening I decided to pop over to the station anyway. I was the only customer there at the international ticket booth, and despite the fact that there were three sales women in the office behind the window it wasn't until half an hour later before I was handed my ticket. First they had some important money counting to finish and then one of them went off to get new calculators for everyone (they use them to show foreigners like me how much tickets cost). I was glad I wasn't in a rush for my train.

Check out the big bottles on the bottom shelf of the fridge. They are plastic beer bottles and come in 2l, 2.5l and sometimes even 3l. At about 35 cent for half a liter it is the cheapest drink to buy. I had quite a few already during my time in Romania. They last me for more than a day (of course!) and go flat pretty soon, but if they come chilled from the fridge, I don't care that much.