The City, The Bus, The Cave, The Ocean

Encounters, echoes, and the everyday in Türkiye

I whirled, dervishly, with the experience of a thousand Reddit users on r/Istanbul, past the loud offers of $50 a week SIM cards, ATMs that charge a $20 transaction fee, and $70 taxis into the city; straight into the intestine of the metro where wafts of Baccarat Rouge emitted from women with huge jellied lips. 

The climate revolution that I had planned for, made itself known. I removed my tights and threw them in the train station bin. Finally rising to the surface, the air was now thick with citrus as a man and his teenaged son pressed orange halves into juice. 

My hotel was in the old city, in an area with a surprisingly high baby-clothing-shop-per-square-metre. My room was frigid, and freshly painted hospital white. 

I could not work out how to change it from ‘tap’, into ‘shower’ mode. How is it that I have used hundreds of showers in my life, but each one’s mechanism is perplexing? I had to follow through with the shower for the sake of everyone around me, and for the lifespan of the bedsheets I was about to clamber into. I was well overdue.

I firmly believe that everyone should experience having a mulberry silk button-down pyjama set once in their life, and wear them for years until they are too ripped to stay on your body. Mine were second hand but at the beginning of their life with me. I wore them in this unfamiliar bed with wet hair. 

On my first delightful supermarket visit I converted Lira to New Zealand Dollars. A litre of kefir was $2. I settled under a tree to drink it, and a two-year-old clambered onto my lap and offered me pişmaniye, floss halva, which satisfied my long desire to break off a piece of florist’s foam and press it to the roof of my mouth. 

His family invited me to sit with them and, then, to dinner: fresh fish sandwiches on the pier. Enroute we walked into, and through, mosques (somehow the father of the child sweet-talked the guard to allow me in Turkiye-citizen only lines with them), bazaars, and parks. More family members arrived. We eventuated to be a party of seven. 

My shoes slowly broke over the course of the day. I made it back to the street of my hotel, and settled down into a chair outside a convenience store to cool down with a berry soda. Although I have been chasing summers for years my skin is the colour of milk and I was firmly ushered into the shade by the owner of the shop. 

He then removed my shoes, and put rubber slides on me. He drove away on his motorbike with my broken shoes inside a plastic bag. Twenty minutes later, he returned, and put my, now fixed, shoes on my feet. 

At a café the next morning, I Shazam-ed a song, I thought discreetly. It was not. The owner saw me with my phone held near the speaker and informed me that I could visit the singer’s house. I took two trains, and listened to his music the whole time. I arrived at the empty house and a woman let me in. Barış Manço died a quarter of a century ago, at the age of 56, in this house. A wax figure of him, with his long hair and moustache, stood in his living room. He was a star.

I booked my overnight bus. Twelve hours, shudder. Buses are at mercy to slow traffic, re-filling the engine’s and driver’s bellies at gas stations. 

The bus’s older, sweeter sister, the train, is admittedly a more comfortable journey. A bus holds its breath and sighs irregularly and apnea-like, while a train glides on its tracks, clattering rhythmically. The distinct, bespoke, one-ness of its own road offers a space of no distraction. 

Buses are cheaper though. 

Blindly following Google Maps, and not tapping into any of my own critical thinking skills, I ended up in the bus hub pit. Engines were open, hot oil spluttering, and a shredded cat(?) was being removed, in ribbons, from behind a back wheel. 

My map was luring me to venture in further, but I turned around and after requesting geographical help from no less than six people, arrived at my nondescript bus station two hours early.

Any frequent-long-bus-ride user will tell you the front of the bus is the most comfortable. Those seats were taken, though, so I settled for second best, the entire back row. I wrapped my cardigan around my backpack and willed the minutes it would take to fall asleep to melt away quickly and not demand my attention. 

I woke up as the bus stopped at a roadside restaurant with a sign sizzling ‘24/7’. Despair swirled as I checked the time on my phone: ten more hours to go. A hair was stuck to my face. Disturbingly, it was not mine, and I wondered if its owner was even in the same country as it anymore. 

Plastic chairs huddled around pillowed MDF tables. I lined up behind the bus driver. His bain-marie meal, on a thick, white, chipped ceramic plate, was oversauced and bleak. 

I prepared my Google Translate: “lütfen bir bardak buz alabilir miyim?/could I please have a cup of ice?”. I asked for limonata and presented my phone screen for the other half of my request. They shook their heads and repeated “sorry”, and handed me a room temperature lemon drink. 

The ten hours did their due, as time always does, and I arrived at sunrise. A 1980’s Renault, the colour of cold butter, was parked outside the post office. Bruno Mars’ ‘I Want To Be A Billionaire’ played. 

Two children, around seven, were playing, what I think was, hide-and-seek in, what I think was, an abandoned house. The boy was wearing thick spectacles like the last gulp of water in a glass, and the girl had playful Kirsten Dunst incisors. Whatever sacred manifesto they created for their game had been broken. They both ran, in tears, to reach their mother first. 

I wheeled my bag up the hill where hundreds of hand-dug-out caves from 1500 years ago stood. An enduring and intense longing to create a commune entered my mind. 

I had emailed a cave hotel a month ago and video-called the owner. She told me her cave was under construction but that I could stay with her as a friend. 

I sat on the steps outside her house with a one-and-a-half litre bottle of water and told myself that I cannot go inside until I finish it. I obliged. 

Small apricots finally gave up their grip and fell to the path. One fell at my feet, I picked it up, it was puckered, pitted, and burrowed into. 

Dust swirled around in tornadoes the size of Pringles tubes and tired themselves out in the corners of the steps. 

I was presented with a breakfast spread: menemen (scrambled eggs with tomatoes, green peppers, and onion), kızarmış yumurta (fried boiled eggs), sigara börek (crunchy bread with cheese filling), beyaz peynir (brined cheese, similar to feta), tahin pekmez (tahini molasses), pistachios, olives, coffee, and magnesium sparkling water. 

Electric lines were gouged into the cave walls so a laptop could be charged. A Top 20 Songs From The 1960’s YouTube compilation played while I ate. 

On my first morning I woke up at four-fifty-nine to see the hundreds of hot air balloons, their wicker, woven baskets (something Jane Birkin would sleep in), gliding through the sky. Puffs of fire feed the thin, silk membrane with air. Bizarre, beautiful, and pants-shittingly terrifying. A man shouted from the balloon “want to join us? I can pick you up!”. 

I sat on a balcony watching the port. Trucks slipped effortlessly into a ship’s belly, along with people, suitcases, and caged cats. I counted twelve decks. Its name was painted in glazed black. The letters were taller than me - “Brilliant Star”. It exited fluently out of the harbour. 

I looked at the nazar boncuğu, glass blue eye charm, I bought at a souvenir shop and tied to my handbag with ribbon. I imagined, to a bird flying above, that this is how the ship may look: blue deck, white ship, blue ocean, blue sky.