I slept for a few periods of maybe 3 hours or so. I don't know why, but this didn't bother me at all and felt quite comfortable and restful. When the sun came up around 8:30, I found that the landscape we were in was really beautiful. Lots of farmland covered in snow and many mountains in the background. As the day went by there was less and less farmland, until we met the Euphrates and began following a route totally disconnected from civilization. There were no roads paralleling our course and no signs of human habitation for much of the day. They seem to have built the railroad into the bottom of the canyon carved by the Euphrates and they couldn't have chosen a much more scenic route - the drive was absolutely stunning for hours on end. It only started to get more mundane around dusk. I napped, I read, I snacked, but mostly I just watched the world go by. I actually really appreciated the time to just do nothing - it was exactly what I needed to reset after the exhaustion and overstimulation of the previous week or so. That said, it may have been a little more than I'd have liked - once the sun went down again and we lost the view I wasn't thrilled, especially since we clearly were nowhere near being on time. The other guy from my compartment somehow managed to sleep for almost the entire time - really not sure how that was possible given that he was onboard for probably 26 hours. He left a few stops before the rest of us, though that was still probably 4 hours before we arrived at our destination. I met some Turkish sisters from the cabin next to mine and they made me some coffee. Their English wasn't very good but it was enough to have some limited conversations, especially with the aid of Google Translate. We talked about relatively basic things like geography and language. They've booked a hotel room at the cheapest place in town, and since there aren't any hostels in Kars, I booked there too. According to my new Turkish friends, the train had just had its wheels replaced and for some reason that was making it go slow. That doesn't make any sense to me but it's all I have that might explain why we ended up being 4 hours late. We left Ankara a little before 6 PM on Monday and arrived in Kars around midnight the following day, for a total time of about 30 hours.

At the station I saw a woman with a characteristic overstuffed hiking pack like mine and immediately clocked her as a foreigner travelling to Georgia, since it's not like Kars is much of a destination in and of itself. I asked and was correct - she's Brazilian - but my plan of piggybacking on someone else's transit plans were foiled when it turned out she also has no idea how to get to Georgia from here and was herself planning to piggyback on someone else. Oh well. We exchanged contact info and are going to figure out something tomorrow, though it's unclear when she'll actually leave for Georgia. I'm thinking I'm going to spend the night here tomorrow as well, in part because I have friends here now but in part because I have no idea what I'm doing tomorrow. I went out to with the Turkish sisters to get kebab at about 1 AM and I was so exhausted by the end of it (they tried to teach me Turkish) that there was no way I could even think about making travel plans for the following day, especially since it doesn't seem to be a straightforward task. My time is running out but I think it's still manageable to see a decent portion of Georgia before spending a day or two in Armenia to fly out of Yerevan.