Midnight Train to Georgia

The title is misleading.  The train didn't even take me remotely close to Georgia.  This actually looks more like the BC Southern Interior.

Can you even imagine how long I have been waiting to use this title?   The train actually left at a few minutes before 7am and arrived pretty close to midnight the next day.  It cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of $36 and got me as far as Kars, an ex-Russian colonial outpost and once a part of the old Kingdom of Armenia.  I believe it’s now firmly in the territory known as Kurdistan.  In fact, I think I knew the moment we entered Kurdistan when a bunch of Turkish soldiers disembarked from the train and immediately assumed positions and started skulking up hills and around corners just outside of Erzican.  Not the most nerve-easing sight but as two enormous, 8-ft Kurdish freedom fighters on the train assured me, I had nothing to worry about because I was not Turkish.  Then they told me that communism was the way forward, called me a post-modernist because I don’t own a cell-phone, gave me a bisous on both cheeks, and told me to go to sleep because I look tired.  So, don't judge a person because they are 8-ft and 300 lbs of Turkish-hating muscle talking about small acts of civil disobedience.  They can actually be quite cultured.

What's your train threshold?  Mine is 46 hours.

I'll be the first to admit that the Dogu (eastern) Ekspress does not mess around; or rather, it messes around so much that it took me 46 hours to reach my destination.  As the old adage goes, the Germans who built the rail line were paid by the kilometre, which is why it does some formidable zigs and zags across Asia Minor.  But, after several trips to the dining car for the same meal of kefte, several instant coffees, and several intermittent periods in the bathroom trying to charge my iTouch (I had, afterall, just downloaded the entire Wikipedia database onto it and couldn’t wait to read about things like “Kurdistan,” “the Georgian Alphabet,” and  “Kim Kardashian.”

Things get real in Kurdistan.

Kars was a pretty dusty town without much of a grand station to mark the eastern terminus of Turkish Rail but what did greet me was two Turkish students who were putting up two Swiss-French students from Constantinople.  They asked me if I’d like to stay there as well and showed me the way to the Georgian border the next morning after a delicious doner, the first good one I have ever had in my entire life, and one that is worth commenting on.  The dining car of the Dogu Ekspress, however, is getting of the lowest rankings in my hierarchy because of the lack of tomatoes with my kefte and the instant coffee.  I guess the Turks have been taking the Vienna loss pretty seriously.