The plan was to get from Cyprus to west Turkey so we could hop over some Greek islands to get into mainland Europe. With our no-flights rule, this meant catching a boat from the port town of Girne in Cyprus (pronounced Girrnay).
We'd checked and found a fast boat that left on Sunday morning at 11am. Having said our goodbyes, we caught a couple of shared taxis in time for the ferry... except there was no ferry! The harbour was deserted, local security informed us that the next boat to Turkey was leaving the following night at midnight, the timetable we checked was for high season only which begins in May. Right, so looks like we're spending the night in Girne (such a great word - Girrrnay).
We were pretty hungry and tired at this point, wondering around Girne thinking what to do. To make things worse I got chased by a wild dog! We eventually checked into a hotel and got acquainted with the Pakistani manager who really couldn't figure us out. "So you're Pakistani, she's Indian, but she doesn't speak Urdu... and you're married..."
We took the next boat to Turkey, slept in a cabin through the whole thing. There was another snag with the boat. The original one we wanted would have taken 3.5 hours to get to Alanya. The one we had to take was an 8 hour slow overnight boat to Tasucu (tashuju), which is quite a bit more eastern which meant a longer journey to west Turkey. We were aiming for the port town of Kusadasi, on the west coast of Turkey. It's about 20 hours of coach ride from Tasucu so we took a break in Antalya which falls roughly half way between.
While we were in Antalya we through it'd be nice to see our cousins K-Money and Ms Sheen.
Those cats were holidaying it up in Lara beach, holding things down. Afternoon came and it was time to catch our onward transport to Kusadasi, the Turkish port town which serves as a gateway to the Greek islands. Mandeep found a 5 and a half hour bus that would get us straight there, so we boarded. Just before we set off we asked the driver for our piece of mind, how long will we be on this bus?' He replied 7.5 hours - another transport fail. Lesson for future, always check details BEFORE you board. What's worse, it wasn't even going to Kusadasi, it was going to Izmir, a big city 1.5 hours away from Kusadasi! It was 2.30 am by the time we arrived in Kusadasi, absolutely exhausted! We'd racked up 21 hours of bus travel in 2 days!
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