I won’t lie, today was boring.

All the action was over by 08:00. I had to get up too early for breakfast, load the bike on to a truck, drive to the station and load the bike on to a train. It was all a bit of a faff, with U.S. Being told to go all over the place before finally finding the cargo carriage. 

   

 It would appear that I was the only passenger who bought a ticket for the posh (1st class?) sleeper car as I had the whole carriage to myself. I had breakfast in the restaurant car and a brave young lad struck up a conversation with me, another family joined in and we had a great chat for well over an hour. Odd conversation given that I don’t speak Turkish and their English wasn’t great (The Google Translation app is brilliant!) but it covered; the woman’s solo trip to India and Nepal last year, the fact that non of her friends have ever visited the east of Turkey (it would appear that many Turkish people see the east as bandit country), the young lad and young woman both liked Eminem and tried (but failed to explain it to me), the fact that Turkish elections are a sham, the young lad was agnostic, the family all atheists (at this point two young Muslim women who had been listening in, stood up, said something angry and left), the woman had been married and divorced 3 times…. Fascinating conversation a real eye opener for me to talk at length to local people, interesting to see that they dispelled many of my preconceptions about local people, somehow I can’t see such a conversation taking place on a train in the UK. 

The rest of the journey involved sitting and lying in my sleeper, looking out of the window and reading. Reading. Reading. It’s the first time since university that I’ve read a book from cover to cover. But, by God, I was bored.