Day 130: 28 Hours From Central Turkey To Sea-Side Georgia

(Her: Joanna)

Like most of our trip, we ended up leaving Turkey 2 days earlier than planned.  After Mount Nemrut, we didn’t know how but we know that we need to go to the Black Sea coast to get to Georgia.  An adventure started!  We have no idea where we will end up tonight.  Cool! 

The adventure didn’t start out well.  We were on the road side waiting for a mini-bus to a small town where we were told we can catch a bus to a transportation hub that hopefully we will be able to find something overnight on the way to the Black Sea coast.  We forgot that it was Sunday and transportation is usually less frequent. 

There’s always something good you can find from the worst situation.  If we hadn’t have to wait for almost 2 hours on the road side for the bus, we wouldn’t meet a friendly guy from Istanbul who gave us home grown figs and something that’s like fruit-on-the-go; then 2 kids from town who helped us find out the bus schedule and bought us ice cold water from their neighbor. 

Finally, we cramped into the bus we needed to catch.  The definition of a full bus is quite different in Turkey.  When all the seats that comes with the car is full, you can always squeeze in a few more people on plastic chairs to take up the tiny isle space.

Someone on the bus knew how to speak English and confirmed for us that the mini-bus will drop us where we can take another bus to the town we planned to go.  We caught the bus no problem and arrived Diyarbakir.  The only problem is that we arrived the mini-bus station instead of the bus station that we passed by but we didn’t know we need to get off.  When we looked lost, a kid popped by to offer help and led us to a mini-bus that he said can take us to the bus station. 

After a good hour of zig sagging through the town where the bus driver seems to want to pile as much people to his van as possible, he told us to get off to walk across the street to the bus station.  Everyone were so confused and later found out that we have to climb through a construction site to get to the bus station. 

Finally we go to the bus station at Diyarbakir and found an overnight bus that can get us to Trabzon on the Black Sea coast.

We got to Trabzon at 8 AM in the morning and found a 9:30 AM bus that can get us to Batumi in Georgia.  Little did we know that this 206 KM distance took over 5 hours.  Firstly, the bus stopped at every single town between Trabzon and Hopa, where the Turkey-Georgian border is.   Then, everyone had to get off and line up at the Turkish border to exit.  The only issue was that there was only 1 officer at the border.  Everyone was pushing and jamming into the queue.  It was chaotic and unexpected given Turkey is a country heading into EU. 

What a contrast to the Georgian side!  We were greeted with a brand new building and friendly staff with proper queue system.  There is even a tourist office within the building at the border.  I think this is the first country that got it right to have a tourist office right at the border.  I’m feeling good about our upcoming visit at Georgia.