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. 

Orient Expressing Myself

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 18^th 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.