I also have a whistle that a train driver gave me. He met me on the platform where Ankara. He’d actually reached out on social media a couple of years ago and said, if you ever come to Turkey, he literally said, you have brother a in Turkey, which was so sweet. And he absolutely kept his word, and he took a day off work. He met me in Ankara. He took us around. He took us to see all the high-speed trains parked downstairs.
He was really baffled by the fact that I love sleeper trains because their high-speed trains are absolutely incredible and so sleek and fast and high-tech and lovely. And he kept saying, just take the high-speed trains. Stop taking these horrible old ones. And I said, “No, but I like them. They’re the best.”
And he brought out a whistle. He gave me a real train worker’s whistle and said, “It’s yours, you keep it.” And told me to blow it through the rafters. And the sound was just amazing. And it was just the most brilliant, childish moment. And I just received another amazing gift a few days before that in Istanbul from someone else who’d reached out, saying, if you ever come to Istanbul, I’m a big train fan and I will meet you.
And he took us around Istanbul and he gave me a really beautiful pocket watch that was owned by, I think a chef actually. And he said, “Here, you’re now an official member of Turkish Railways.” And it was so touching to be not just gifted these things, but to actually be welcomed and taken around by complete strangers who just felt like they had an affinity with me because of our shared love of trains. And to me, it really illustrated how trains just bring people together. That there is something about them that just ties people in a way that I could not imagine through any other form of transport.
LA: Thank you so much for coming on and sharing more of your amazing stories. You are the sort of eternal font of them. If people want to pre-order the book and follow your travels, where on the internet should they go?
MR: My Instagram handle is monisha_rajesh. I will be posting about my journeys and the book release.
LA: I’m just going to add that in the US, at least, one of my favorite places to purchase a book is on bookshop.org.
MR: Okay, perfect.
LA: And you should be able to pre-order it there.
MR: Any great independent bookseller would be lovely if you would like to pre-order the book. Yes, that would be fab.
LA: Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I’m Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram at lalehannah. Our engineer is Pran Bandi. And special thanks to Jake Lummus for engineering support. Our show is mixed by Ammar Lal at Macrosound. Jude Kampfner is our producer, Stephanie Kariuki, our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is head of Condé Nast Global Audio.