The title of this post is something of a hint about just how long this rail journey took. As a spoiler, it was meant to take 22 hours and it actually took nearly 36 hours. Without Internet. I’m still recovering.
Jonathan was excited about the trip ahead…. As some background, this train from Ankara to Kars (we were getting off in Ezrurum, which isn’t far short of Kars) can be done on a tourist train or a local train. The former has frivolity and fun, the latter doesn’t. Guess which one I wanted.
This is the marketing on the platform for the tourist train, the one that we didn’t take. I like peace and quiet on a train, not dancing.
I don’t want to overwhelm my two loyal blog readers with excitement, but I’ve made quite a few videos of this trip and I’ll get around to uploading them at some point. I did record our train arriving onto the platform, but here it is. Yes, it doesn’t look entirely modern…..
We found our carriage and were excited about the trip ahead.
And off we go. I have better photos of the carriage (I had enough time, without having any Internet, to take them) but more of that later. I was pleased that there was power on the train, but very annoyed about the lack of Internet.
I accept there’s hardly much to look at in the photograph, so readers will have to use their imagination. This is Kırıkkale, which means ‘broken castle’ in Turkish, and which has a population of 190,000.
The seating was comfortable, it’s 2+1, so that was spacious enough and there was plenty of leg room. Although Jonathan and I had seats next to each other, the train was rarely that full that we couldn’t spread out elsewhere in the carriage.
Jonathan’s decadent slippers.
This is the small town of Şefaatli, with a population of just under 10,000.
I have quite a lot of photos like this….. This was still on the same day we boarded the train, just before midnight, so we’d been on for fewer than six hours at this point.
This passenger had a lovely time, but I was taking a photo as we had arrived in the large city of Kayseri at 02:00.
At this point we decided to have a walk about the train. There are four carriages and a buffet car on the service, with the carriages being somewhat of a mish-mash of different designs, temperatures and lighting arrangements. The carriage we were in seemed a reasonable compromise between them all, primarily it wasn’t too hot.
On this first visit, I resisted the temptation, although I can’t say that I managed that throughout the entire journey. I do have some snack reviews of food that I took on board, but there’s plenty of time to write about those…
The buffet car menu.
Jonathan got a tea and I enjoyed watching the country go by in the dark in different surroundings for a while…
And at 07:00 we arrived into Sivas. I’m going to leave this post here as I have a lot to say about this, as we were still at Sivas nearly eight hours later…..