There are four main ways to achieve any long distance travel in Turkey:
1. Private car
2. Bus/coach
3. Train
4. Aeroplane
So having offered to house sit for a week for a family in Eskişehir, how on earth were we going to get there? Domestic flights are actually one of the most common ways of travelling between cities (Turkey is a big country!) and surprisingly cheap. However Eskişehir is close enough to Istanbul that there are no domestic flights there. Renting a car is expensive and a hassle. So it was between bus and train.
Turkey does not have a well developed rail network in general. There is a high speed line that connects a few cities (the main link being between Istanbul and Ankara) and a few other slower trains. But, Eskişehir is actually located on the Istanbul - Ankara line so my original plan was for us to take the train. And because it is high speed, the train journey would only be 2.5 hours.
Until I remembered that the train station (and there is only one main train station in Istanbul) is on the other side of the Bosphorus and so far out of Istanbul that it barely qualifies as being in Istanbul. It would have taken more time, effort and cost to get to the train station than to actually get the train. And then I read on the website that there were luggage restrictions. I thought we did pretty well at packing lightly for 4 people for a week, but there was no way that our luggage and the pushchair were within the stated luggage allowances. And while we might have got away with it in reality, it wasn't a risk we were ready to take.
That left the bus. Kudos to my lovely husband for taking me at my word and not even raising an eyebrow when I announced our best option was to take our toddler and baby on a 6 hour bus journey.
However, compared to the UK, long distance bus travel in Turkey is much more popular and much more comfortable. As there's lots of bus companies offering the same routes, competition helps maintain inexpensive prices and good service. Buses are really frequent, often running 24 hours a day. The bus company we went with had buses going every hour from Istanbul to Eskişehir (and vice versa) all through the day and most of the night.
Our bus was pretty standard in terms of comfort and service- wider seats and more leg space than the average short haul airline, a bus host who brought round free drinks and snacks, electric sockets to charge phones, and screens in the back of the headrests.
Our return journey was quite a bit harder with the children than the outward journey (lesson for the future: do not travel late afternoon/evening in the hope that your children will sleep half the time.)
But, we successfully achieved our bus journeys with both our sanity and the fellow passengers' sanity mostly intact and we even got to see some Turkish countryside.
Turkey has way more forest than you would initially assume. This picture isn't a very good representation of that, but it's the only one I took.
