Okay, so perhaps opening a post about scams in the Orient with Orientalism perpetuated the myth a bit so perhaps it’s best to turn to another primary source, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. You may remember LMWM from when I left her travel diaries inside a pair of gumboots with a towel, a can of shaving cream, and a cardigan outside of Prishtina and “made some scrounger’s day.” Lady Mary spent a fair amount of time in Constantinople in the palace district, Pera. She passed the time with ambassadors’ wives and sat in gardens drinking sherbet while servants waited on her; I bought a carton of 100% orange juice and sat in a park next to the ocean. We basically experienced Constantinople on the exact same terms, though I admit by 2010 there was considerably less palace intrigue going on than in the early 18th century.*
So, much like my arrival in any city, I immediately set to work trying to get out of it. I was in Turkey for one reason: to cross it. Luckily on my hour-long walks between the different train stations I was able to see quite a bit of the city. One idea was to purchase the Balkan Flexipass, which would allow me to cross Turkey and back over 5 days in the space of one month. It was also good for rail travel in the rest of the Balkans, the only network of use being Romania’s and the only networks directly linking to Constantinople being Serbia’s and Bulgaria’s. But this would mean that I would have to be in the Caucasus for only one month, which severely strained my freedom of movement.
Another restriction to me was my visa to Turkey expiring in three months’ time. So I was basically able to spend up to three months in the Caucasus should I wish to return to Europe by land via Asia Minor. The price for the Flexipass was 120 lira, and would you know it, at the time there were no trains running in Thrace (rendering what was left of the Orient Express to a rather precarious state of existence) and the customer service woman at the train station was a raging cow so these three powers combined convinced me that I should a one-way ticket to Kars at the end of the line and just see what happens when I get there.
*Palace intrigue is one of my favourite things in history. Not only is the name very agreeable to me, but I also picture bishops and counts whispering in corridors with wide eyes about how “intriguing” a certain palace intrigue just was.
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