The Dolmuş

Finally, a brief blog entry so you don’t have to spend your entire lunch hour reading one of my postings…

There are, I’m happy to report, other transportation options in Turkey besides driving to your own death in a car or braving the seatbelt-less, albeit clean and efficient, taxis. There is a uniquely Turkish mode of transportation called a dolmuş, which means stuffed in Turkish. A dolmuş is a small minibus, and it might run within a city, or between cities and small towns.

A city dolmuş runs a prescribed route through the city - unpublished, but fixed. The sign in the window gives a general destination, but the only way to figure out the specific route is to get on and ride it to the end. There usually aren’t any prescribed stops, so you can pick it up anywhere along this route simply by waving your hand. You get on and ride it for as long as you want for a fixed sum (equivalent to about $1) and get off wherever you want.

For such an informal transportation method, there are some rules to be followed. When you get on, you immediately sit down. Do not, under any circumstances, approach the driver. You hand your money to the person in front of you, who passes the money through each passenger up to the driver and then the driver passes the change all the way back to you. Now, the driver does all this while navigating the city streets. You’re lucky if he keeps one hand on the wheel, so I figure by giving him exact change I decrease our chances of hitting something.

At the beginning of a route, the driver will wait until the bus is full (ah, that’s why they call it a dolmuş!) before he starts. You may not, under any circumstance, wait around until the next empty one leaves. You will be yelled at.

And there are advantages to riding the dolmuş - it’s cheap, easy and you finally get to be the in the vehicle that stops without warning, instead of the idiot driving behind him.