Istanbul - 50 Years to get there

Blue Mosque from the Bosphorus

Fishing from the Galata Bridge

Colin Buchanan & Partners offered me a job in the mid-1970s to help prepare a Strategic Land Use and Transportation Plan for Istanbul. I was ready to go when the Scottish Office asked me to lead a team to do the same for the Strathclyde Region. I had no regrets about accepting the Scottish Office option, it galvanised my subsequent career path. I always wanted to visit Istanbul to see what I had missed but life got in the way, Fifty years later, I finally got around to taking the plunge as a birthday treat.

The sun was shining, the flights were cheap and I seized the day and booked at 3 days' notice, The flight times were good and even Edinburgh Airport was unusually efficient. We left on schedule and the Turkish Airlines flight was an upgrade on UK airlines. They were on schedule and well-managed, the seats, food, hospitality and in-flight entertainment were good. I watched The Outrun, based on a favourite book by Amy Liptrop about a young woman healing from alcohol and drug addiction in London by returning to the place she had grown up, Orkney.

The massive and over-designed Istanbul Airport was a statement of intent of Ottoman proportions. After landing, it took 15 minutes for the plane to circumnavigate the airport to the stand, and almost the same time to promenade along the lengthy walkways to passport control and baggage pick up. I can never understand the obsession of creating structures too big to function. It took another 10 minutes to walk from the airport to the M11 Metro station buried deep underground. By the time I had figured out the automatic ticketing machine and descended to the platform I had missed the train by 10 seconds, They are only every 20 minutes.

Turkey is 3 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time and by the time I changed Metro lines at Gayrettepe and walked a good kilometre on a labyrinth of underground passageways to the M2 Metro so I could get a train to the nearest station to my hotel, it was 9pm.. It was a mile or so to the hotel at Kumkapi and even on Google Maps the dense network of narrow roads in the dark would make finding the hotel like finding a needle in a haystack, so I grabbed a taxi. The driver had no more idea of how to find the hotel than I had. After passing the Blue Mosque, which was twice the distance further from the station than my hotel, I looked at the satnav directions on his phone and instructed him to turn back in the opposite direction to reach the hotel. I jumped out a couple of blocks away from the hotel rather than chancing him extending the merry-go-round, gave him 200 lire, the fare on his meter and walked to my hotel.

It was 9:30pm in Istanbul and already Sunday in the UK. Time for bed, said Zebedee. Tomorrow was waiting.