Because I didn’t want to risk my laptop being in my bag under the bus all night, I took it on board with me and put it in the seat pocket.

I ran back to where the bus had dropped me off not one minute earlier. But it had moved. And there were a dozen buses, all dropping people off. I ran around, desperate to find my bus, the one that said “ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΙΝΟΎΠΟΛΙΣ” (Constantinople) on the front rather than “İstanbul” (it coming from Greece and them getting seriously funny about what other countries call things (see also: Macedonia)), but no.

I had been to Esenler Otogarı a few times before on The Odyssey Expedition, so I knew the layout — each one of the bewildering number of bus companies has its own office and allocated slots for buses at the back end of said office. I dug my ticket out of my pocket — the company’s name was “Metro”. I walked around until I found the Metro office (the one that went to Thessaloniki) and explained what had happened.

The bus was out getting cleaned and refuelled, so I had to wait for it to get back to the station. The guys in the office called the driver to find out if there was a laptop left on board.

That would be a negative.

At that moment I should have just cut my losses and jumped on a bus down south, as it takes around 14 hours to get to Silifke and I didn’t have time to muckadoodle. But instead I clung on to the hope that my laptop might still be there, in the seat pocket or something.

So I hung around, waiting for the bus to come back. I waited and waited. Eventually after over an hour, it returned. They let me get on board and check it out for myself. No laptop.

The driver and his mate reckoned that the laptop had been stolen. It might have even happened in the night while I was asleep. I was so disorientated when I woke up, I can’t remember if my laptop was still in the seat pocket or not. Surely if it was, I would have seen it, but who knows?

This is the kind of thing you have to be aware of all the freakin’ time when you backpack around on your own. The best bit of advice I can give is “backup backup backup”. Which happily I did on the ferry over to Greece for my videos and photos, but unhappily I didn’t for my blog entries. To add insult to injury, there was no way I could afford a new computer. Oh well. Looks like the blogs and videos of the last week of the expedition won’t find their way online for a while yet…