Six Buses… – part 3

Part 3 – Antalya to Cappadocia

With confidence growing, we prepared for our first over night bus journey. Comfortable clothes, an early light dinner and iPhones charged to listen to the music.

The driver from our hotel gave us instructions to take the bus with livery that matched the ticket. Four buses pulled out at 9:30pm, not one of them matching the yellow and black ticket.

Sixteen buses pulled into their bays for the next departure at 10:00pm and not one matched our bus ticket.

It was about that time that a man with limited English asked where we were going. Bruce meanwhile went looking for some assistance.

It turns out that our instructions were wrong and we should have been on one of those 9:30pm buses. And now we were told to bring our luggage and run (after a bus that left 15 minutes ago?)

We were piled into a minibus with the driver who was competing for speed with an ambulance with sirens blarring, in the same traffic jam.

We reached the bus, which had been stopped just out of town and shuffled in. Alas, not enough seats, so after some Turkish chatter, Bruce and I were given adjoining seats at the back of the bus. One young man was asked to give up his seat and sat on the step between the two double seats at the back. Not comfortable for a long night journey.

At the comfort stop in the early hours of the morning, the man who had asked where we were going, reappeared. By now I had learnt he was a policeman in the area of Cappadocia. He showed me photos on his phone of the sights we were expecting to see there. He also warned us about the sharks at the bus station in Göreme.

An amazing sight of thirty to forty hot air balloons hovering over Göreme in Cappadocia greeted us when we arrived at 6:30am, but the Information Office where we were to be met was shut. It was however a shadowy looking guy who knew who we were and where we were staying.

For further encounters with our policeman friend Dilaver, read Bruce’s blog about our run in with the law.