It is, after all, 12 hours by bus to İstanbul, 14 to İzmir and 10 to Antalya. Of course we can fly to İstanbul from Nevşehir or Kayseri, but there are only two flights a week to İzmir and none at all to Antalya. In any case, I’m none too keen on all the hanging about and security hassles that characterize the contemporary air-travel experience. Call me perverse, but I still prefer to hop on the bus, and cross my fingers that I won’t have a mother with three ticketless children sharing the seat beside me. By now I must have made the journey from Göreme to İstanbul so many times that I know its every last twist and turn. Bypasses and dual carriageways are gradually stripping the scenery of everything that used to make staring out of the window for hours on end enjoyable. However for the time being at least, the first stretch west from Göreme to Aksaray is still quite interesting since it follows one of the old trade routes with the ruins of several medieval caravanserais crumbling away in the fields and the more substantial remains of the imposing Selçuk Ağızkarahan right beside the road.
At Aksaray the road cuts north, bypassing one of Turkey’s most striking and under-mentioned geographic features, Tuz Gölü (Salt Lake). I first drove this way in June, 1974, with my then-boyfriend. In those days we didn’t know what the words “tuz” or “gölü” meant, and, size aside, on the map there was nothing to distinguish this lake from any other. Consequently we were completely unprepared for the hellish conditions we would be passing through. Even now I can still remember the stupefying heat of the summer sun beating down on un-air-conditioned metal as we skirted the lake. It was a no-win situation. If we kept the car windows wound up, we felt as if we were melting, but when we wound them down salt clung to our hair and clothes, and insinuated itself into our ears and noses.
Eventually we decided to take a closer look at the lake. We walked and walked, but no matter how far we advanced the water just kept receding into the distance until at last we realized that we were chasing a shimmering desert mirage and returned to our sun-baked vehicle to beat a hasty retreat.
A few years earlier a young Scottish gap-year student called Craig Moir traveled from Ortahisar to İstanbul. In “A Time in Turkey” he describes a winter journey of almost inconceivable hardship. In lieu of any heating on the bus, coals were placed inside a potty that was passed from passenger to passenger so everyone could take a turn at steaming their bare feet over it.
Whenever I’m tempted to whinge while being whisked to my destination in centrally-heated/air-conditioned luxury, it is these stories that remind me how lucky I really am.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
