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… should really be done on an airplane. We were cheap and decided to buy return bus tickets on the daily Öz Troy bus leaving TârgoviÅŸte for Istanbul.

Little did we know what an adventure we were signing up for! It took forever (almost 18 hours overnight, with no sleep), the other passengers were ignorant and loud and rude, the bus staff smoked continuously, the mosquitoes ate us alive whenever the bus stopped, the bathrooms at the stops were beyond disgusting (as Ian would say, îngrozitor!) …

… the border guards treated us like criminals, and we had to pay five times as much as the Romanian passengers for our Turkish entry visas (50 euros each instead of 10!). Thank goodness my mom had given me some of her left-over Euros before dropping us off at the bus station, or we might have been stuck at the border, short the 100 Euros cash we had to pay for the visas (no ATMs in sight … extortion!).

The bus schedule is timed to allow Romanians to do their shopping in Istanbul all in one day – the bus arrives in Istanbul first thing in the morning (usually 4 am, but for us around 6 am), and goes back at 4 pm (or earlier, on the whim of the driver).

Fortunately, the Öz Troy otogar is much closer to Sultanahmet than the main international otogar, so we had a short way to go before we crashed at our hostel and slept until the afternoon. We woke up to a very different Istanbul – at 6 am, we had been the only ones out and about, the streets were freshly washed and the air was clean and crisp. At 2 pm, it was steaming hot and packed with tourists.

At the end of our Turkey trip, we debated throwing away the return portion of our bus ticket and flying back to Romania, but the logistics were too complicated so we bit the bullet and got back on the Öz Troy bus. We arrived at the otogar about 30 minutes early, but as soon as we had loaded our bags the bus departed! We were assured that it would have waited for us until the scheduled departure time, since we had made reservations. It turns out they had a good reason for rushing – we made the border crossing to Bulgaria just before the 7 pm border guard shift change, so we were waved through in less than an hour (record time, since we were stuck there for almost 4 hours on the way down).

We were starving so it was nice that the bus stopped in Bulgaria for about half an hour. We wolfed down some sketchy meat and fries and enjoyed some surprisingly good Bulgarian beer at a roadside stand. I also bought some of the best cheese ever! Those Bulgarians, they know their caÅŸcaval.

I regretted the food over the next couple of hours – no toilet on the bus, and roads in Bulgaria are awful. The bus had to negotiate a lot of tight situations, including an oncoming runaway horse-and-cart, a very narrow switchback road leading to a mountain pass, and even an unpaved mile or two.

The Romanian border crossing would have gone smoothly, but for those pesky Canadians on the bus (“măăăăă, ăla are canadieni!”). The guards threatened to inspect the luggage hold and tax everyone on their imported purchases. We were fine since we barely bought anything in Turkey, but the rest of the passengers worriedly handed over enough cash to ‘avoid’ the search and to keep the border guards happy (about $100 USD per person).

… Enough whining from me! It was an awful trip by bus (fly if you can), but if you have to make it, grin and bear it – Turkey is totally worth it. More photos and details about that, to come.