Ask the pilot

What's more enjoyable than flying? A ride on a Turkish bus, of course.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Airplanes, Airlines, Business, Airports, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

April 21, 2006 | VELIKO TARNOVO, Bulgaria -- Every one of the contoured, softly upholstered chairs is immaculately groomed. Each has a leather headrest, tray table, cup holder, three-way adjustable footrest and coat hook. At the window seats, heavy fabric curtains help block the sun. The glass sparkles and the floor is vacuumed clean. Everything looks crisp, new and in perfect working order. We depart on time, and within an hour the attendant has come around twice, handing out snacks, coffee and tea. Later, after sunrise, there will be complimentary champagne.

One of those fancy foreign airlines I'm always going on about? Well, it could be that too. Except this time, I'm not on an airplane at all. I'm on a Turkish bus, speeding up the highway from Istanbul to Bulgaria.

Now, most of the world I have never seen, but I've been to enough places to confidently submit that there is nowhere else with a long-distance bus system quite like Turkey's. The nation has only a skeletal web of railroads, but a massive network of more than 120,000 modern, comfortable motor coaches, many of them designed and manufactured in-country, go everywhere and anywhere -- comfortably, reliably and inexpensively. If you've ever seen the mammoth otogars (stations) in Istanbul or Ankara, you have a sense of just how truly vast the system is. Inside these airport-size depots, miles of counter space are divided elbow-to-elbow among literally hundreds of independent operators, each with its own ticket stall. Garishly painted signs advertise each company's routes and departure times, while touts scour the crowds rounding up customers. "Izmir! Adana! Göreme!" There are enough billboards and hawkers to make you think each of Turkey's 70 million inhabitants has his own private bus line. For the tourist it's explosively colorful and a bit overwhelming, yet sensibly organized and easy to navigate.

And safe. It's no secret that Turkey is a world leader in traffic accidents, with about 400,000 wrecks annually. And, unfortunately, many people's perception of Turkish buses is drawn from the highway crash fantasies of Orhan Pamuk's "The New Life." But after four visits to Turkey, all featuring bus trips of one kind or another, I have witnessed no roadside carnage and can happily attest to the professionalism and courtesy of the nation's bus drivers. (Taxi drivers, on the other hand, are a totally different story.) Unless I've just been lucky, since according to a 2002 report from the U.S. State Department, Turkey's buses were involved in over 36,000 accidents that year alone.

There is no smoking on Turkish buses. Or, more accurately, only one person is allowed to smoke on a Turkish bus -- the driver. Which makes sense, maybe, since the last thing you want on such notoriously hazardous roads is a jittery driver in the throes of a nic fit. (That nobody else is permitted to smoke is nothing trivial in Turkey, where approximately 100 percent of the population over age 12 is addicted to tobacco.)

As elsewhere around the globe, air travel within Turkey is expanding rapidly. Turkish Airlines, the government-controlled national carrier, founded in 1933, is a highly respected operator with an ultramodern fleet and reasonable fares, but a growing number of upstarts are putting the pressure on. More than a dozen carriers -- Atlasjet, Onur Air, Pegasus, SunExpress -- have sprung up over the past 15 years, catering both to the local population and to the approximately 18 million vacationers, most of them European, who flock to the country's beaches and historical sites. What this means for the bus lines isn't really known, though effects are likely to be minimal. But strange as it might sound, it's the buses whose example the airlines ought to be striving to emulate, and not vice versa. The bus companies are clean, cheap, cordial and punctual. How many airlines nowadays can lay claim to all four of those adjectives? At Istanbul's Büyük otogar, settling into my Bulgaria-bound coach, noting its spotless decor and the many useful accouterments of my seat, the question that rushed to mind was: Why can't more airplanes be like this?

Granted I'm romanticizing to some extent. A bus is still a bus, even in Turkey. The seats are too small, the border crossings interminable, and that hostess dispensing drinks and snacks looked more depressed than a Comair stewardess just handed her furlough notice. But my emphasizing the unexpected pleasures of a journey by bus is to underscore the ever-worsening distresses of a journey by plane.

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