This is Part Two of my account of travelling by train from the UK across Europe and Turkey to the Caucasus. If you just got here, start with Part One, which details the 72-hour journey from London to Istanbul.
Otherwise, continue reading to find out how I got from Istanbul to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi by train in three more days, and to Yerevan in a further day, for a total of seven days of rail travel from the UK to Armenia.
Day Four: Istanbul–Ankara–somewhere in Turkey on the Doğu Express
Istanbul has a rail terminus in Kadikoy on the eastern side of the Bosphorus. It used to be the case that you’d embark here for trains east to Kars, Tehran, and elsewhere. But while renovating the historic station building, the ruins of ancient Byzantium were discovered. This obviously doesn’t happen every day, and so the site became an archaeological one.
In the meantime, a new high-speed line was constructed between Istanbul and the capital Ankara, with the onward sleeper trains then departing from Ankara instead.
Conveniently for me, this new high-speed Ankara train departed hourly from a suburban station called Söğütlüçeşme – which happens to be on the same suburban line as the train from Halkali. Had I not wanted to stop over in Istanbul, I could simply have stayed on the metro and got off at Söğütlüçeşme to continue my journey.
Turkey is also on the Interrail network, and so I used my pass to get a (free) seat reservation on the 11:55 service, arriving in Ankara at 16:25. At the same time, I bought a couchette (bed) reservation for the sleeper train from Ankara to Kars, which would depart Ankara at 17:55 the same day, allowing plenty of time for delays (although this is uncommon on the high-speed line). The Kars train, long known as the Doğu Ekspres, meanders through the mountains of Anatolia, reaching Kars the following evening – at over 26 hours by far the longest single leg of this journey.
(A note here that buying these two train tickets in cash would have been much cheaper than the cost of the Interrail pass for that day – one of a few tweaks I’d make to this journey if I were to do it again, which I’ll cover in Part Three in my summary of how best to replicate the trip.)
The Istanbul–Ankara train was extremely modern, easily outclassing many of the Western European trains I’d sat on a few days previously, and making an absolute mockery of the creaking Eastern European network. (Of course the on-board WiFi didn’t work, but then it never does.)
Nor was it particularly busy – in spite of what I’d read about seats selling out days in advance, I could have got a reservation on any service that day without issue. Most passengers were not travelling the full distance, the carriage occupancy rotating at each mainline station we stopped at.
It was 16:39 by the time we rolled into Ankara, and I spent some time wandering around the multiple floors of the cavernous high-speed rail terminal, which felt absurdly oversized for the volume of passengers. Perhaps I was simply here at a quiet time – but then almost all of the retail units in what had clearly been envisaged as half-station half-shopping mall were also vacant. I was also hungry, and had assumed that the food situation here would be similar to in central Istanbul, where you can barely take a step without bumping into a street food vendor. No such luck: the couple of sad-looking fast food outlets did little to entice me, and all of the small handful of restaurants seemed deserted. That’s when I realised it was fricken’ Ramadan.
Ramadan is an interesting month to be a traveller in the Islamic world. In the parts of Istanbul I’d passed through, you would simply not have realised – but then Istanbul is the liberal cultural capital of Turkey, so that was hardly a surprise. Here it seemed that things were geared towards the iftar – the meal at the end of the day’s fasting, and usually quite the occasion. I realised that while the restaurants were empty, the tables were set for hundreds of evening diners. Wandering closer revealed special iftar combo menus on every table. I eventually settled in at a little coffee shop called Caribou and staved off the hunger with a brew.
The Doğu Express not being a high-speed train, it actually leaves from Ankara’s original railway station, which is a long walk along a covered overpass, the entrance to which is unhelpfully obscure and unmarked. I hadn’t realised this until quite late, when I couldn’t find any mention of my train on any of the departure boards or platform information screens. There’d been no mention of the need to go to the neighbouring station to make this change of trains in any of the information I’d found online, and eventually it was one of the ticket office clerks who pointed me in the right direction.
On board the train, I located my coupé and found it occupied by a young Frenchman who was travelling overland to Nepal as part of a nine-month backpacking stint. He’d been making his way across Europe for three months already, living, working and volunteering in a variety of spots. His next stop was Georgia, where he was planning to join a traditional Georgian polyphonic singing group for a while (a surprising number of foreigners coming to Georgia seem to end up doing this, by the way). He seemed tired: perhaps of being on the road, or perhaps of the idea of sharing a cabin with a middle-aged Englishman who already seemed to know everything about where he was going.
In the next coupé, hilariously, was the same retired German–Swedish couple with whom I’d shared a Budapest–Bucharest sleeper cabin some days earlier! They’d taken a break in Sofia and were also on their way to Tbilisi. Everyone was going to Tbilisi. Why was nobody going to Yerevan? I did my best to sell the delights of Armenia to anyone who’d listen, including the two German students down the corridor, who plied me for information about the road ahead as enthusiastically as the Frenchman did not. Then I did what by now had become a habit, and went down to the buffet car for a tea and a spot of people-watching.
The problem with many sleeper trains is that you end up quite isolated. Typically a coupé – as the private cabins are known – will sleep four, sometimes six people, with the lower bunks providing bench seating by day and the upper bunks folded away. This physically obliges you to hang out with whoever you’ve been assigned to share a coupé with (unless you’re travelling in a group and/or have reserved the entire coupé for yourself, of course). Which you might not want to do.
For that reason it’s pretty common to see people hanging out in the narrow corridor that runs up and down one side of the carriage to provide access to the sliding doors of each coupé. Keen extraverts (not me) might go as far as introducing themselves to people in other cabins – at least, those with their doors left open – in search of new friends.
On trains with restaurant cars, however, I was finding it much more pleasant to take up a small table (assuming the car wasn’t full of diners) and hang out there for a while. That way, I’d be able to observe people from up and down the train passing through for drinks, food, or also just to hang out, as well as listening to the banter of the stewards. In many cases I found this a more relaxing way to spend a few hours than making small-talk with a stranger with whom the only thing I might have in common was sitting in the same room.
The dining car was also set up for Ramadan, with its own iftar special menu, and the shish tavuk (chicken skewers on rice) the staff rustled up was pretty impressive considering that the whole kitchen was rattling around in a space smaller than my own cabin.
Day Five: Somewhere in Eastern Turkey–Hopa
I woke up to snow-clad peaks passing by outside the window. My roommate, who had made a point of telling me he was going to get up early to photograph the sunrise, had obviously not realised that Turkey has mountains (and in any case was still asleep). I quietly got up and assumed my position in the restaurant car.
There’s an annoying gap in the passenger train network between Turkey and the three (six?) South Caucasian capital cities. It’s even more annoying because the physical railway lines do actually exist. There’s the Kars–Gyumri line, which connects these two key cities of the former Russian Empire by a tantalisingly short thread of track, but which has been closed since the early 1990s (along with the entire Turkey–Armenia land border).
And there’s the much-hyped new line, inaugurated in 2017, which skips Armenia altogether and connects Kars straight through to Tbilisi via a new border crossing near Kartsakhi Lake – but it’s currently only used by freight trains (rumour has it the rolling stock for the passenger service has been sitting in a siding somewhere in Azerbaijan for the last few years).
What this means for the traveller is the unpleasantness of at least one road journey interrupting the serenity of the train.
As I looked at the map of the route ahead, I realised that going to Kars and then by road to the next functioning railhead (at Batumi, just across the Georgian border on the Black Sea coast) was actually not the most efficient way to get where I was going. In fact, it looked like Erzurum – where this train would stop four hours earlier – was about the same distance by road from the border crossing at Sarp. Perhaps I could once again speed up the trip by shortcutting the advice I’d found online?
There’s a website called obilet.com which offers schedules and online ticket sales for every intercity bus service in all of Turkey. It’s still little known to foreign travellers, but Turkish residents use it almost exclusively for making seat reservations. I checked the services from Erzurum to Hopa, the city just shy of the border crossing itself, and found one departing at 18:00 from Erzurum Istasyon Caddesı. My Turkish isn’t great, but I interpreted this to mean “Station Road”, and assumed it would be close to the railway station. With the train due into Erzurum at 16:15, it would match up perfectly.
There was just one issue. Just as with the railway ticketing website, the bus ticketing site didn’t accept my UK debit card when I attempted to pay online. I’d heard that foreign bank cards had been blocked by Turkish online card payment providers, for unknown and possibly shady reasons.
After a little detective work I tracked down the office address of the bus operator, which was a short walk from the station, and as soon as the train rolled to a halt I abandoned the backpackers I’d been hanging out with in the buffet car and set off for the bus company office at a quick march. It was in fact at the same location on Istasyon Caddesı from where the bus would depart.
I bought my ticket with cash, and with a couple of hours to spare embarked on a second failed attempt to find food before iftar, ending up shamefully eating a disappointing pastry outside a supermarket, drinking a carton of weird smoothie (I think it was cherry, carrot and kale, or something like that), and wondering when I was going to get a proper meal.
I don’t have much to say about the bus journey. Darkness rapidly descended, and all I can really remember is peering out at the distant streetlights of mountain towns through lashing rain, with more than a few tunnels and switchbacks.
We stopped once (for an extremely hurried iftar), and at 22:32 I was dumped unceremoniously in Hopa at the junction with the Black Sea Coast Highway, rain still pouring down (did it ever not rain on the Black Sea Coast?!). I’d already found a cheap hotel nearby on Booking.com, so I dashed the last few hundred metres through the rain, checked in, and called it a day – at the end of Day Five just a 20km minibus ride separating me from the border of Georgia and my goal of reaching the Caucasus.
Could I have travelled on to Batumi that night? Yes – at that time of night, it would have been a few lira in a taxi to the 24/7 border checkpoint and a few lari in another taxi on the other side. I’d probably have been in Batumi by midnight, and if my onward train schedule had involved catching the morning train to Tbilisi, I would have done exactly this. But I had a bit more time to play with the following day, for reasons I’ll shortly explain.
Day Six: Hopa–Batumi–Tbilisi
I woke up, dashed down to the restaurant for kahvaltı, slung my bag onto my shoulders and was on my way. Another cold and dreary day awaited me outside. I walked back the way I’d come, reached the same T-junction at which I’d been dropped off the previous night, crossed the River Hopa, and walked another 600m to a small parking lot. This was the departure point for minibuses to Sarp, the village at the absolute northeastern extremity of the Turkish part of the Black Sea coastline. I hopped on the first of many buses waiting to depart, and half an hour later was spat out at the border crossing, which had been rebuilt and quadrupled in size since I’d last been there.
A maze of walkways and a passport stamp later I was in Georgia. The Georgians hadn’t quite finished their half of the building. Bare concrete and trailing electricity cables greeted me in unilluminated corridors, and I began to wonder if I’d taken a wrong turn and walked into a construction site (2024 update: they’ve finished it now). But apparently not: I rounded a final corner and there were the border control booths. Another passport stamp; a conveniently placed ATM; another jump forward in clock time. More rain.
Taxis and minibuses lay scattered about the muddy parking lot outside as if washed up by the ocean, fringed with a high-tide mark of money exchange kiosks. I found the first marshrutka (Soviet for “minibus”) and was soon on my way to Batumi. I disembarked a couple of blocks shy of my favourite lunch spot, then trudged through the rain until a familiar-looking frontage appeared. There was only one local dish worth ordering to celebrate my return to the Caucasus.
Now seems like a convenient moment to explain why I’d taken it kind of easy and not even bothered rocking up to Batumi until lunchtime.
To travel seamlessly by train from Batumi through to Tbilisi and then onwards to Yerevan (my final destination), one of two external factors need to be in your favour.
The first scenario applies between early June and mid September, which roughly corresponds to the Armenian school summer holidays. During this period, there is a daily sleeper train between Batumi and Yerevan. It does tend to get busy, as it’s used by Armenian holidaymakers travelling to and from the seaside, but it’s by far the easiest way to get across the region by train with minimal stops and changes. The only downside is that – being an international service with a border crossing in the middle – you can’t buy a ticket online. You still have to go to the station in person with your passport. And by the time you arrive there and do that, it might already be full.
Outside of these dates, the picture is different. Firstly, there’s no direct train between Batumi and Yerevan at all – only daytime trains from Batumi to Tbilisi, and then a sleeper train from Tbilisi to Yerevan. Secondly, the sleeper train from Tbilisi to Yerevan (which you’ll take instead) only runs on odd-numbered dates of the month (ie: every other day). Again, this creates two alternative scenarios for the determined overland traveller coming in from Turkey:
If the sleeper is departing in the evening of the same day you cross the border, you’ll have to be in Batumi early enough to catch one of the morning trains to Tbilisi (either 08:00 or 10:25). These can be booked online, so you can be sure of getting a seat in advance. There’s certainly enough time to stay the night in Hopa, get up early and make this connection, or to continue to Batumi the previous evening and have a slightly more relaxed breakfast. I, however, arrived in Batumi on the 30th of March, putting me in the second scenario:
If the sleeper is departing the following evening, you basically have 24 hours to burn, and there’s lots of things you could do with that time. My preference was to have a lie-in in Hopa, take the 17:05 afternoon train to Tbilisi, check in at Fabrika (a few minutes walk from the station) and then meet up with some friends in Tbilisi for brunch (darling) the following day.
A word of warning: Batumi Central station is anything but central. In fact, it’s 4km up the coast from the actual centre of Batumi. Bus routes 3, 6, 8 and 10 all serve the station, but I didn’t discover that until I’d taken a Bolt (Georgia’s Uber) and then located the bus stop to check (you’re welcome).
Georgia’s modern, Swiss-built, high-speed cross-country train spirited me east to Tbilisi in comfort and style, 1st class tickets being the only ones left by the time I’d got round to buying one. And by midnight I was lying in bed in my dorm at Fabrika, a converted knitwear factory-turned-cultural space and hostel in the hip Marjanishvili district of Tbilisi.
For peace of mind, I bought my Tbilisi–Yerevan sleeper ticket as soon as I arrived in Tbilisi, so I knew the final leg of my journey was secure.
Day Seven: Tbilisi–Yerevan
Let’s skip brunch and go straight to the final leg of my train journey from London to Yerevan, which began at 20:20 on the evening of Day Seven (and could have been a day earlier, as noted above).
It had been several years since I’d taken this train, and I was genuinely shocked as I climbed aboard. The old Soviet-era wagons I used to love/hate (16 hours is a long time) had been scrapped, replaced by what looked like a brand new sleeper train, albeit of exactly the same design. It looked barely used!
I’d bought a 3rd-class ticket to punish myself for having to pay for a 1st-class ticket the previous day, but I was soon glad I had. For only in the West is sleeping on a night train a matter of personal privacy. In many other places – including the whole of the former Soviet Union – the day seats convert into bunks and everyone sleeps together in one big rolling dormitory. This was at least the case in platzkart class (4- and 2-person coupés were also available).
There were plenty of foreign travellers in my carriage. From what I could overhear, it seemed to be primarily Russians, with a handful of Europeans, and seemingly no Georgians or Armenians at all. The chap opposite me was a young British schoolteacher who, with his friend in the next unit, had bought cheap WizzAir tickets to Kutaisi for a week in the Caucasus and were making it up as they went along. He told some entertaining stories about the Armenian and Azerbaijani kids at the boarding school he worked at and how their personal security details would sit in blacked-out cars outside the premises – the offspring of the two countries’ oligarchs, shipped off to the UK for an expensive private education amongst other future politicians and business leaders. I responded by recommending a few good bars in Yerevan.
If you’re taking this train from Tbilisi to Yerevan, the border crossing is just about tolerable: you get off to be stamped out of Georgia at around 10pm, the Armenian border guards do it all on the train with cool little wireless passport reading machines, and it’s lights out by midnight. The service used to be renowned for arriving hilariously late, but something seems to have changed, for at 06:55 local time I found the platform of Sasuntsi Davit station sliding past the window, precisely as scheduled.
And that, dear reader, is how I travelled by train from the UK to Armenia in a fraction under seven full days (and it could’ve been six if I’d left a day earlier or later).
And the answer to your next question – but how much did it cost? – is £323. (That’s €369 or $407 at the time of writing.) That includes a 5-day Interrail Global pass, all of the seat reservations and sleeper supplements, all overnight accommodation, and the handful of buses, minibuses and taxis I took as well.
By way of comparison, according to a quick search, a flight from London to Yerevan tomorrow with one checked bag would be anywhere from £234 (via Istanbul with Pegasus) to £555 (via Vienna with Austrian Airlines) – and that doesn’t include the cost of getting to the airport.
So if you’re considering a visit to the Caucasus, whether to hike the Transcaucasian Trail or otherwise, what I hope this story will demonstrate is that – first and foremost – flying to the Caucasus is optional, and that travelling here by land is possible, practical, comparable in price, and far more enjoyable.
Come back soon for Part Three, where I share a summary of the logistics of this journey and the steps I suggest you take to replicate it.
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