My epic 30-hour rail journey through Turkey — with tickets from £10

My journey began not in Ankara, but in Istanbul, where I’d hopped on a high-speed train after flying in on a Wizz Air flight from London. I’d scored a business-class seat on that train for £15 and four hours later I was in Ankara, stocking up on bureks (pastries stuffed with cheese or spinach) and preparing myself for the slower journey east that same evening.

By 5.30pm Turkish tour groups packed the platform, taking photos outside the worn but dependable carriages of the waiting Eastern Express. Trundling out of Ankara at 5.55pm on the dot, the buffet car did a roaring trade in cay and greasy kebabs as the flat landscapes rose high.

The Eastern Express made its first journey in 1936, but in recent years the train has become a social-media sensation; in Turkey, at least. Inspired by images of snow-clad scenery en route to Kars, the local train became so popular that a dedicated Eastern Express tourist service now runs four times a week between December and March.

This latter service — mostly luxury sleeper carriages — takes 30 hours to reach Kars, including stops at Erzincan and Erzurum that allow you to jump off for a few hours. Thanks to tour companies buying up entire carriages of seats, tickets sell out in seconds, and even when I found a last-minute cancellation on the Turkish booking app it had a £300 price tag; last year the same tickets were priced at about £30.

By comparison, the local train — which departs daily year-round — is a bargain, and I built an overnight stop into my itinerary by booking one seat from Ankara to Erzurum and a second seat for the following day from Erzurum to Kars. Get lucky and you can score a sleeper cabin on the local train too (priced at about £150).

The local train is just that: the wagons are dated, toilets are often squats and there was no chance of a good night’s sleep as the train stopped in every forlorn village station and provincial capital on its ponderous journey. Ticket inspectors did a never-ending round in the night; one elderly lady couldn’t find her seat quietly and someone spilt a crate of oranges along the carriage just after midnight.

But as I settled into seat 51 (a single chair with two across the aisle) Turkish passengers cracked open bottles of wine and a family put fairy lights and tinsel across the windows. As darkness cloaked the encroaching mountains on the approach to Cappadocia, a couple set up a small dinner table in the corridor, lit candles and enjoyed a romantic evening picnic.

The large mass of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Caucasus Mountains was named “Anatolia” — or “Land of the Rising Sun” — by the ancient Greeks, and after finally falling into a deep slumber sometime after 1am I was awoken only when sunlight burst into the carriage the next morning.

“Are you a stranger?” a fellow passenger asked as the train crossed the Euphrates River 15 hours into the journey. “I mean foreigner! Or is ‘tourist’ a better word?” A teacher who had embarked at some point in the night and wanted to practise his English, Ibrahim explained how he was taking his family to Kars for a long weekend. “The Eastern Express is a special train for Turks,” he said, offering me a mug of cay. “It’s the oldest train in Turkey. We always take it for our family holidays because it’s such a beautiful route.”

He returned at lunchtime with a plate of yaprak dolma (stuffed vine leaves), sundried tomatoes and bureks as his family shared their home-cooked picnic around our little section of wagon No 4.

At 5pm, only an hour later than scheduled, I hopped off the Eastern Express when it rolled into Erzurum, some 2,000m (6,500ft) above sea level. After 23 hours in seat 51, I was ready to stretch my legs in the highest city in Turkey. Erzurum is the country’s winter sports capital — population 450,000 — and is overshadowed by the monstrous ski jumps on the slopes of Palandoken Mountain.

The next morning — after a night at Grand Catalkaya Hotel — I slid my way around the icy city. This is the gateway to the east, more than 500 miles from Ankara. I explored an imposing 5th-century fortress that hadn’t stopped the Seljuk Turks — nomads from Central Asia whose descendants, the Ottomans, would conquer Constantinople in 1453 — from storming Byzantine-held Erzurum in the 12th century. Opposite the castle a magnificent double-minaret madrasa — an Islamic place of learning built in the 13th century — has an open-air courtyard. The rare Seljuk style of architecture is a big hit with visiting tour groups from Istanbul, I was told, who are more accustomed to Ottoman designs.

Before long I was boarding the Eastern Express back at the station and, now in seat 47, I left Erzurum for the final 180-mile leg to Kars. The setting sun lit the snow banks like fireworks, but the last few hours of the journey were in darkness. Three days after setting off from Istanbul I arrived at 11pm outside the hulking station in Kars, where an old steam engine sat like a frozen statue on the platform.

“The lifestyle in the east is so different from the west of Turkey,” said Can Yolac, a tour guide I met after a night’s rest at Kars Konak Hotel. “They’re like different countries; they have different climates, altitudes, cuisines and histories.”

Deep in eastern Anatolia, where Kurdish is spoken and Armenian ruins stand among Orthodox churches, Kars is a distant place even for Turks. For Brits the distance is even greater, and the last time I visited eastern Turkey in 2016 red or orange Foreign Office warnings applied to much of the region. Now, though, it’s all green, and the Eastern Express is opening up cities such as Kars to curious British travellers looking to explore the eastern borders of Turkey.

At an altitude of 1,800m it’s a chilly minus 5C at the end of January, but I brave the cold and walk to the gates of Kars Castle. From the viewing area high above the old town I can see a mosque, an Armenian church and a Russian Orthodox cathedral.

Once a Byzantine outpost, Kars was conquered by the Seljuks in 1064, captured by tsarist Russia in 1877 and taken then quickly relinquished by Armenians in 1921. The mix of architecture and influences in Kars — where many buildings are 19th-century Russian constructs — tells of shifting borders and boundaries, but nowhere relates the story so powerfully as Ani, the once great capital of the Bagratid Armenian kingdom.

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The next day, after a half-hour bus ride, the mist shrouds the tall towers and crumbling cathedrals of Ani. Known as the “City of a Thousand and One Churches” it’s on a peninsula of land guarded by jagged cliffs that drop sharply to a riverbed far below. Earthquakes and Seljuk attacks brought Ani to its knees by the 14th century and now the watchtowers of modern Armenia stare across the gorge into the remnants of their former capital. An hour’s bus ride north of Ani brings me to Cildir, a frozen lake crisscrossed by snowmobiles and sleighs (and in summer buzzed over by sightseeing boats). A combined day tour to these sights can be booked through any Kars hotel.

Back in Kars I’m told by Yolak that many tourists make the trip on the Eastern Express just for Kars gravyer, an Emmental-style cheese brought here by the Russians and now lauded in the new Kars Cheese Museum.

Kars, with its lake and ruins (and cheese), is a worthy end to the Eastern Express. While the local train is certainly cheap, I’d be lying if I said that the lack of shut-eye didn’t have me yearning for a sleeper cabin. I know, though, that I’d never have had the same experience on the tourist train.

For now, the Eastern Express remains almost exclusively in the domain of domestic tourists, so get in quick, before the far east of Turkey is discovered by the rest of the world.

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Richard Collett travelled independently; B&B doubles at Grand Catalkaya Hotel from £50 (grandcatalkaya.com) and at Kars Konak Hotel from £39 (booking.com). Discover the World has five nights’ B&B and one overnight couchette on the Eastern Express from £395pp (discover-the-world.com). Fly to Ankara

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