My Travels: Göreme To Diyarbakır

I told the guy at the Chelebi Cave Hotel in Göreme that I needed to get to Kayseri, to get my train to Diyarbakır. He said that I should take a local bus to Avanos, a nearby town, and then get a bus to Kayseri from the bus station there. He said the local bus was probably only 5 or 10 minutes away so he took me down to the bus stop on his scooter.

On the bus from Sivas a few nights before we stopped in Avanos, so I remembered what the bus station looked like. I kept looking for it but I didn't see it. Oskar and Julia, a German couple from Berlin, had also been waiting with me at the bus stop in who had also been at the bus stop in Göreme. As we were going through Avanos, Oskar asked the driver when we were going to come to the bus station and it turned out we had already passed it. So we got off and walked to the bus station in Avanos. It turned out that Oskar, Julia and I were all going to the train station in Kayseri to get the same train to Diyarbakır.

After arriving in Kayseri we boarded a "servis", which is a type of bus that the bus companies provide for free to shuttle people from the bus station to nearby points. The driver of this servis told us that it went near to the train station. Not very near, as it turned out. We, with the help of a guy from Istanbul who was also trying to get to the train station, kept stopping people to ask them directions to the station. We eventually found it, about half an hour before the train. Oskar and Julia did not have tickets yet. The line in the station to buy tickets was very long and not moving fast. I figured they were not going to make it in time, but they eventually got their tickets and they wound up in the compartment next to mine.

Once we made it to Diyarbakır the three of us walked into the city together and got some tea. The tea shop owner was very nice and gave us some sort of bread to eat with our tea.

Oskar and Julia were talking about going to Georgia and maybe Armenia, so I gave them my Lonely Planet book for Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. I'm not going to be needing it any more and if I go to any of those places again, I will need a new one anyway. And it's one less thing to carry. They had not yet decided if they were going to spend the night here, but I am set on spending a couple of nights here. So I left them there and went to look for a hotel, which I found with very little effort.