Travel Stories: From The Boudoir To The Bosphorus

“Full”, she said sternly from behind her perspex screen. It was one simple word but its implications were huge and I struggled to take it in.

“Full”, she repeated, just a little more sternly than the first time.

“No, no”, I pleaded, “we must get to Istanbul tonight. We have to…”.. but the stern woman was just shaking her head and looking past me.

We hadn’t considered for a single moment that there wouldn’t be room on the boat – after all, how can a large passenger boat crossing the Sea Of Marmara from Bandirma to Istanbul even get close to full capacity? How can there even be such a thing as full capacity? 

This whole journey had been a bit of a strange one from the off. With a train departure from Izmir due before dawn, we had purposefully chosen a hotel close to Alsancak station, only to then discover that the train’s start point had been moved to Izmir’s other main station about two miles away. So as we checked into our hotel, we now knew that we would need to be up and about and looking for a cab while Izmir’s streets were still dark and empty.

Hotel check in was a desk in a hallway which looked more like the lobby of a residential block. No fuss, no showing us to our room, no conversation, just handed us the key and pointed to the lift. Opening the door to our room, seemingly alone in this strange rambling place, our jaws simply dropped as we looked in on the incredible scene before us: if this room wasn’t what a brothel looks like, then brothels aren’t how the uninitiated like us would imagine them.

Black and red silk everywhere; a circular black silk bed; a bathroom with a mirrored ceiling; mirror fragments as wall art; scattered items of leather clad furniture each of which were big enough to….err…..do things on. We slept with one eye on the door, half expecting unwanted visitors, yet with large amused smiles on our faces.

As we sat next morning on the railway station platform eating dry pastries and cheese biscuits for our makeshift breakfast, it slowly dawned on us that the 6-hour train journey to Bandirma only covered 184 miles – so not exactly an express. We left on time, climbed painfully slowly over mountain ranges, trundled through villages where children ran alongside the train (and kept up!) until eventually rolling the last few miles at walking pace – literally at walking pace, as a man with a flag walked along the track ahead of us, slowly guiding us home.

Finally, we pulled up in Bandirma some two hours behind schedule: that’s eight hours to cover 184 miles, you can work out the average speed. And now she’s telling me there’s no room on the last boat of the day. We have a room bought and paid for ahead of us in Istanbul, we’ve had an 8-hour train journey, we’ve been up for nearly 11 hours already and we haven’t had a proper meal. And she’s telling me there’s no room on the boat.

“We have to travel. I need two tickets”. I decided my best bet was to stay at her window and not move. The queue behind me was growing, as was the look of despair in Michaela’s eyes.

“Full”

“No, we have to have tickets”

After repeating that single, offensive word several more times, the lady’s expression suddenly changed as she fixed her stare on her computer screen.

“Except”, she said, and started scrawling something on a scrap of paper which she then held up for me to read. She’d written the words “BUSINESS CLASS”. My heart beat a bit faster.

“You have to pay”, she barked, “you must pay. Pay”

“OK OK, I pay”, I responded, fumbling for my credit cards and wondering just how much “business class” would set me back. She scribbled the cost on a second scrap of paper and pushed it through to me. It was £2.