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Wednesday, November 20th – Kayseri to Ezurum (train)
I am always a bit anxious when I have to travel by plane or train on any given day. I worry about making connections or running into unexpected complications over which I have no control. Yesterday, on the way to the train station I had some of these anxieties even though nothing I was worried about would have been hard to work around. Today I not only know the price and departure time of our train, but I also have a ticket in hand and we have located the train station and have brought plenty of food with us, enough to last for the next couple days.
We leave the hotel before 8 am so that we can check our bicycles and find our seats twenty minutes before departure in case there are any problems. There are none. We choose two pairs of seats that face each other so we can play cards and talk. The train isn’t full as we pull out of Kayseri. I watch the scenery as we leave. It is often exciting to enter a city by train but usually anti-climactic to leave. We move away from the interesting parts of the city into the uglier urban sprawl of suburbs, stadiums, airports and factories.
Kayseri is a medium-sized city and the sprawl gives way to open fields in a matter of minutes. The crops are in so the fields are now exposed dirt of fields left to fallow with grasses or brown and gold. There are no forests in this dry steppe plain. We roll on at a steady pace without much to look at. We play cards for the next hour or so. The train stops for 15 minutes each in the towns of Gemerek and Sarkisla before continuing onto Sivas. Just before Sivas there is an interruption in the plain as we pass through a low canyon onto an adjoining plain. We arrive in Sivas just after noon.
Sivas is a major centre a bit smaller than Kayseri. I hope to catch something of interest through the train window entering or leaving, but trains pass through the ugliest parts of every city. More accurately, the ugliest parts of cities grow around them. We are stopped for half an hour here, but we aren’t aware of how long the stop is. We could use a stretch but we don’t want to leave our seats. Many more passengers are boarding here and the train is full when it leaves the station. A mother with a young baby takes the last seat in our pod. She carefully avoids looking at us. Since it is inappropriate to chat to married women in Turkey, we keep to ourselves, and when the baby falls asleep we are obliged to remain quiet. Coen and I watch the passing scenery while Vincent reads his guide book and a novel. 
The scenery is improving slowly. Distant snow-capped hills come into view as we glide through the second valley – a reminder that winter is just around the corner. We stop briefly in Hafik and Zara over the first hour and a half out of Sivas, and shortly after Zara the train enters the mountains, climbing a thousand metres to a pass. Suddenly, the snow is all around us. Winter was literally right around the corner.
Progress during the climb is slow and at points we wait on a side track for on-coming freight trains to pass. We briefly enter another valley but within a few minutes begin to climb into the mountains again. After another half hour we emerge onto a flat plain that is as flat as a lake but surrounded by high mountains. Within minutes we enter the city of Erzincan, another city the size of Sivas.
Coen and Vincent take turns stepping out to stretch and smoke cigarettes here – they are desperate by this point. The sun is steeply in the west by now and some of the city is in shadow. Many passengers disembark. They are replaced by locals on the way to Erzurum. Several of them are carrying bags of produces or other market items that they pile in the aisles, rendering them almost impassable. I never do get my chance to step out.
The last four hours of the trip are the hardest to bear. The sun sets not long after we leave Erzincan and over the next hour the outside fades to black. Our car feels especially stuffy and the baby has decided she is fed up with the trip and begins to cry. I sympathize with her. I try to sleep but I can never really do that in a moving vehicle.
By the time the train rolls into Erzurum with its wheels complaining, it is 9 pm. I am groggy and not looking forward to collecting our bags and bikes. It is freezing outside at this height of 1900 metres. I am ill-dressed for it so I don’t stay groggy for long. “Netsimukelut,” (‘piece of cake’ in Dutch) Vincent says as we set about our unpleasant task of finding a hotel in the freezing dark. The biting cold and hunger are all the negative reinforcement I need to keep me moving. Thankfully, most of the hotels are within a few blocks of the train station and the first one we try has reasonable prices and storage for our bikes at the back.
Vincent and Coen are stoics who never complain, but they are as happy as I am to collapse on the bed when we get into our room. I thought I’d pass out as soon as I hit the bed, but the cold and hunger has revived me. The town is mostly dark and we have no interest in leaving the hotel anyway. We put together sandwiches from the food supplies in our bags and talk about our plans for tomorrow.
I have been curious about Erzurum for a long time, partially because of its ancient roots dating back to the Hittites, but mostly because it was a major deportation and execution centre during the Armenian genocides of 1894-5 and the spring of 1915. The city was historically part of Armenia and a large percentage of its residents were Armenian before WWI. Fewer than a hundred of them survived the war. The mass genocide and coinciding property theft by the Turks was used as a model by Hitler in his genocide of the Jews. The Turks got away with it. No one much cared about the Armenians who were mostly rural mountain people. The Turks have never officially acknowledged or been punished for their crimes against humanity here.
PHOTO 1: the farmland NE of Kayseri
PHOTO 2: near Sivas
PHOTO 3: hills growing nearer
PHOTO 4: snow capped mountains and the Erzincan Plain
PHOTO 5: Esence Mountains near Tanyeri
PHOTO 6: Karasu River valley between Erzincan and Erzurum
PHOTO 7: in the mountains
PHOTO 8: Mt Koroglu
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