Lessons in Bus Travel Part 1:

There may be prisoners on your bus.

I would really like to tell this story to make it sound like Rebecca and I narrowly escaped serious danger, but for the sake of my parents' health and, well, reality, I won't.

When Rebecca and I got to Ankara, we bought our bus tickets to Adana, thinking that since it was the fourth largest city in the country, we'd have to transfer there anyway.  People were quoting outrageous prices, but one bus company said they'd take us there for 25YTL.  Naturally, we bought those tickets.

Well, as we were checking our bags, we noticed that our bus was actually continuing on to Antakya.  The attendant wanted 18YTL for us to stay on the bus for another three hours.  Ridiculous, we thought.  As Rebecca was trying in vain to negotiate a price, I noticed two soldiers lead a man in handcuffs onto our bus.

Rebecca had told me that she had seen soldiers escorting unimportant prisoners on and off busses at rest stops.  Still, all sorts of outrageous scenarios rushed through my head.  

The reaction of everyone else finally convinced me that this was indeed a normal occurrence.  Aside from the shuffling around that resulted from one of the soldiers and his older commander who we hadn't seen board sitting in our seats, nothing seemed too out of the ordinary.  An old man talked with one of the young soldiers about military service, and a couple girls around us seemed entirely in awe of the fact that they got to sit so close to such cute young soldiers.  The man in handcuffs was even asked what he had done.  I couldn't understand, because I'm not exactly up on my crime vocabulary, but judging from the reactions, it wasn't all that serious.

All this happened before we left the station, and if it had been any different, Rebecca and I were prepared to waste those 25YTL and get on a different bus.  But we decided it was safe, so we relaxed and went to sleep.

That is until we were awakened by a blood curling scream.  It seems the bus company had chosen to play some zombie/demon possession movie, and they had just gotten to the part where the man dumps holy water all over his demon possessed wife.  

I think the soldiers felt sorry for us, because they kept offering us cola, which we refused on the basis of it being 3AM and us wanting to sleep.

We eventually got to Adana.  Well, sort of.  At about 5AM, the bus stopped at the side of the road, where a small van was waiting to take us to the otogar.  A bunch of us, including a family carrying five giant bags of fish feed stuffed into the van.  We got to the station just as the ticket offices were opening, and still with no bargaining power spent 18YTL on tickets to Antaka, where we were greated by a war-hating, democracy-loving talkative man who generously told us exactly how to get to the Catholic church where we were hoping to stay.

And look!  A bus to Batman!  Apparently it's a gross truck stop of a city that used to be worth staying in until the town next to it became a dam.