We pulled into Istanbul station at 07:30 hrs. after about 24 hours continuous travelling and scant sleep. We made our way through the crowd, and armed military patrols, to the Sultanahmet district and the famous “Pudding Shop” area where we booked into the Hotel Güngör. This cost 1,000 Turkish Lira (£1=365 Image Turkish Lira) for a room with 3 beds, which was rough but relatively clean and suited our purposes admirably.
The Pudding Shop is the nickname for the Lale Restaurant in Sultanahmet, Istanbul, Turkey. It became popular in the 1960s as a meeting place for beatniks and, later on, hippies and other travellers on overland route between Europe and India, Nepal, and elsewhere in Asia: the "hippie trail". The restaurant got its colloquial name as a result of "word of mouth" from numerous foreign travellers that could not remember the name of the restaurant but did remember the wide and popular selection of puddings sold there and thus referred to it as the "pudding shop".
We had changed up some money (had fun changing Drachma as the Turks are not too keen on the Greeks) and set out to discover timetable and price details for buses to Zahedan, a city and capital of Sistan and Baluchestan Province in Iran. We found the cost was about £20 and headed for the Iranian Consulate to obtain a visa. “O.K.”, said the Iranian official after thumbing through our passports, “but you must wait 5 weeks”.
This decided us that our best interests lay in a flight over Iran, so we returned to find a budget travel agent. One seedy agent said that the British Consul could speed up our application so we set off with hope in our hearts across the Galata Bridge. This bridge spans the Golden Horn, connecting the old city with Beyoglu, the northern district of Istanbul.
The Golden Horn was not as choppy as it had been when the seven intrepid Swagmen had crossed this floating bridge in the past, but the memories were there and our photographs of the minarets and the busy riverside were recalled in my head. We trudged up the hill and killed 50 minutes before discovering that our quest was in vain and all the consul could offer was a worthless note which would lighten our wallets by £2. We returned to our room to relax and forget the £220 to £260 quotes we had received for a flight over Iran.
We had a meal in the café we used this morning and had a feast including rice, beans, chicken and spinach for under a quid and retired with a bottle of wine. We slept like dead’uns until 20:30 hrs when we set off to the covered bazaar. It was shut so we continued along the road passed the Burned Tower (The Column of Constantine, also known as the Burnt Stone or the Burnt Pillar, is a Roman monumental column constructed on the orders of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great in 330 AD. It commemorates the declaration of Byzantium as the new capital city of the Roman Empire) and several beggars to find a nice bar-type place full of locals.
We had a few beers and talked again of future trips and the living hell of large cities with their romantic façades. We paid the bill, a pitiful 160 Turkish Lira for 5 beers and one tea, and headed back along the now dead streets to the hotel. The only place with any life (much to our disgust as the beer had made us peckish) was the famous Lale Pudding Shop which was still in full swing with it’s jaded traveller hippies holding sway. We grabbed a few titbits from a fast food stall and returned to bed in our newly lit room, as we’d had to change the flickering fluorescent tube because the old one was putting on a performance that would have done a disco proud.
A glum mood descended today which was a far cry from the joys of Thasos. If we wait the 5 weeks until November for our visas the roads into Iran will be blocked by snow.
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