Traveling by bus in Turkiye

 In order to get from Pamukkale to Istanbul, which is similar to traveling from Vancouver to Calgary, we had two choices:

A) 

- Transfer by taxi (1hr) to the Denizli airport 

- short flight to Istanbul

- transfer by taxi (1hr) to our hotel

B) 

- Taxi to Denizli (20min) bus station

- 10 hour bus ride to Istanbul main bus station (8am-6pm)

- Metro 12 minutes / 7 stops

- Taxi 2km to out hotel (5min)

Why did we choose B? 

The cost wasn't too different. But we really didn't want to add more flying and more driving by taxi. We struggle on this trip with a huge ethical choice. How to experience the amazing world of travel, exploration, and learning as we see new places and meet new people WITHOUT such a huge carbon footprint? We wanted so badly to try to see many places with our family without flying or driving a car. We have already booked more flights and taken more car rides than we feel good about. 

Besides, our kids need to experience the suffering of a really long bus ride in order to appreciate life, right?

And maybe we'd have fun seeing the country side? And maybe we'd see more locals this way?

Our hotel host was able to help us buy tickets ahead of time and choose seats all together. It was really important to me that we could sit together for the trip and have actual seats. 10 hours with assigned seats all together is quite different than 10 hours on a packed chicken bus with strangers and no seats.

I'll pause here to discuss gender for one second. I live in a world where I intentionally treat people as people regardless of gender / race / culture / appearance. And now we are in a country where gender really matters. I've never been so AWARE of being FEMALE as I am since arriving in Turkey. We are doing our best to respect local customs. I'm grateful to be able to have a husband to take the lead on most communications and interactions here.

When we buy train tickets or bus tickets here, we must put in our gender. The intent is to avoid having a single female sit next to a single male. 

And children are treated very well by everyone, but also people really get close to our children and want to joke with them and be in their personal space. People also don't ask our children questions directly - they ask us parents questions and talk about 'the children' as though they are very very young and can't talk for themselves. 

This definitely wasn't a packed chicken bus with standing room only. This was a lovely clean coach bus with tray tables, power outlets and individual screens. I played about 100 games of a new solitaire game on the screen and the kids watched two movies we downloaded. We left on time and the schedule of all of our stops was adhered to. It was totally fine and we got through the day without much suffering.

The best part of the day was about 2 hours into the trip, when another passenger approached me at one of the bus stops. She was in traditional Muslim wear for a woman - head covered, long dress, long sleeves. She smiled and showed me on google translate on her phone "for your children" and she handed me two chocolate bars she had just purchased from the snack stand. How nice is that?!?

Denizli marked with red dot and Istanbul at the top of the photo

olive trees and smog dominated the country side

cities came and went

I briefly joined in at the Rise Health Christmas Party

Our longest stop was here (15 min) at the Bursa station

I'm not convinced our bus ride was actually that much better for the environment than 4 plane tickets. By the time we bought snacks at every turn and been served snacks and drinks with plastic cups and napkins, perhaps it ends up being about the same. I'm not sure. But we keep talking about these choices and doing the best we can while we are still choosing to see as much as we can. We know that travel is a huge priviledge and not easy on our planet. We don't take that lightly. 

We arrived at our hotel and were happy to check in and get settled for the night. We are in Istanbul for a little while so we look forward to getting to know this city next.

The view from our hotel room

stray cats joined us at our restaurant for dinner

Happy to be in bed for the night

The kids' observations from our long travel day:

1) "It was long"

2) "Always pick flying instead of driving or bus"

3) "Next time we have to triple check our technology and see what movies have actually downloaded successfully"

4) The 'angry birds' video game on the screen: the white bird/black birds were totally rigged and the game isn't quite fair.