Another Turkish bus trip.

Aleppo, Syria

 

A quick note about the bus trip from Goreme to Kayseri. On it, I shared the front seat with Koray Ozyurt, a really nice guy that started talking to me. Turns out, he's been serving in the Turkish Air Force for the last 16 years as a service technician, currently working on the F-16 (if I understood him correctly), but previously working on some of the cargo planes the air force flies. He was coming back from some other town in Turkey where he had flown to in the morning to go fix a plane. When there is no plane to get him back to Kayseri, he has to take the bus. He'd been as far away as Afghanistan to fix Turkish airplanes, though for the most part stays in Turkey. In 6 years, after he retires from the Air Force, he's hoping to move back to the west coast of Turkey to a town called Izmir, I think. A really nice guy and we had a great conversation covering the usual politics and the not so normal of women and girlfriends (he's married, with a 13 year old boy), I of course had to inform him I was single, which kind of surprised him went I said I was 29... Cultural differences I guess...

 

So, why is this of any importance? Well, it's not, I guess, but when he heard I was traveling around the world without any set schedule, he offered me a place to stay in Kayseri and wondered if I wanted to spend the week with his family, since he was about to take 10 days of vacation. For a moment I wanted to at least take him up on the offer for a night or two, but with a bus ticket already purchased for Antakya and the desire to keep moving forward, I declined. At the bus station, when he found out I had around 2.5 hours to wait, he again offered to take me out for a drink with his Air Force friend who had come up to pick him up. Again, and with even more reservation, I declined, since I'd rather be around if the bus schedule changes or anything but part of we wishes I had gone with him. Sometimes you just get a feeling from people that it's ok to take them up on an offer, this guy clearly wasn't the type of person you meet while traveling that you need to stay clear of.

 

Anyways, we said our goodbyes and exchanged email addresses. I'll probably never hear from him again, let alone see him, but it's meeting and talking to people like this that making traveling alone all the more worthwhile. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for any of you readers to join me (really, I would!), but taken in context, had I have been sitting beside someone I was traveling with, I would never have met Koray.

 

Kind of ironic that you meet more people when you're by yourself...

 

Kenny