I’m very conscious that I’m, once again, behind with this blog and so I’m going to try and speed matters up. Our plan for the third day was to get a train to Ankara from Istanbul, a process that we thought would be easy, so we had hotels booked in the country’s capital.
The grand metro station of Yenikapi which opened in 2013.
Downstairs in the metro station.
On the metro and it was all going so well.
Safely at Söğütlüçeşme railway station where the high speed train from Istanbul to Ankara departs from.
Some nice views over the city from here.
And a nice old locomotive to look at outside of the station. This was all going ever so smoothly and we wondered which of the main trains we would be getting to Ankara.
The answer was none. There was no signage or ticket machines, just a ticket kiosk. After we meandered pointlessly around a ticketed area and were guided back, we visited the ticket kiosk and the staff member said that there were no tickets available to Ankara today.
I considered this sub-optimal as I had a hotel in Ankara and started to wonder what the options were, especially as I had no Internet (but I didn’t complain). Jonathan was less panicked, he’s a Turkey expert and so had plans to get us back on track. Note the clever pun there. Anyway, this all meant that we realised we were naive to think you could actually book a train on the day between two major cities, something we didn’t think would be a problem.
Back on the metro, this is Jonathan showing me his plan. And it led us into another adventure, but we’ve had quite a lot of those this week….