We had gotten a very good rate on our flight to Edinburgh by flying via Istanbul. Note that we purchased these tickets months ago, before the Atataturk airport was attacked two weeks ago. We opted not to change our flight plans after the attack, since security at the airport was (supposedly) beefed up even more.
After flying in last weekend, flying to Edinburgh, spending a lovely five days there, and flying back to Istanbul on Friday….. things went to shit.
We had eaten a nice dinner down on the waterfront and took the train back to the airport hotel. Everything was normal until we stepped out of the subway to head to the gate where we normally walked freely down the sidewalk to the hotel. We were blockaded, and nobody who spoke English would tell us what was going on.
I remember clearly seeing a soldier in the bushes, rifle aimed at us in case one of us was ISIS or perhaps an opposing force.
Police and security clashed with the hotel staff, who wanted to get us to safety. According to the one person who spoke English there, a nice Argentinian lady, we had just missed two tanks rolling by, headed for the VIP section of the airport.
We hung around on the sidewalk uneasily, along with what I think was a Russian man with three very cute little girls, and still no idea what was happening. After a while, we heard some gunshots in the distance. The hotel and police decided to move us to the hotel shuttle for the moment, rather than having a group of foreigners and their luggage just sitting around as easy targets.
Then the hotel made the decision to get us in, in small groups, via the service entrance. It turns out the reason for the blockade was that the coup was quite literally happening in the parking lot of the hotel, which shares parking with the VIP section that the military had by then occupied.
We went in the second group, scurrying out of eye sight from the parking lot, and into the hotel.
Confused and very tired since it was nearly midnight by then, we made our way to our hotel room.
Only once we got access to the Internet we saw that the country was in the middle of an attempted coup and the military had taken over the airport.
We heard gunfire and one very large explosion, which we later learned was a tank firing on a helicopter. Needless to say, we didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, but eventually exhaustion overtook us. We both slept in our clothes, bags packed and ready, in case we got evacuated.
We woke up about 10AM, and learned that Ertogan had reasserted control and the coup had failed.
We were due to fly out that afternoon, but by then we were out of lyra, so we packed up everything and headed into the airport, determined to get through customs and on our way.
The airport was eerily normal; the only visible sign of a problem was the fact that many stores were closed…. and customs wouldn’t let anyone through at all. That turned out to be the least of our problems, as first our flight was delayed seven hours, then cancelled outright. Customs eventually relented and let American citizens through. We rebooked for the next day — managing to skip a six hour line thanks to two young American Millennials who knew of a secret desk that would rebook us — and vowed to hunker down in the airport for the night.
Many thousands of others were also stranded. Turkish Airlines was completely overwhelmed; between all the cancelled flights to America and other places, and panicked people trying to get out of the country, all flights are booked solid for the next three or four days.
We gave up. Until the FAA lifts the ban, we’re stranded here. Turkish Airlines has put us up in a rather posh hotel and will comp our food and hotel for at least two days, possibly longer if the travel ban holds. Unfortunately, that meal compensation didn’t include lunch today, and it’s another four hours until our hotel’s dinner.
We’re hungry, exhausted, and we just want to go home.
UPDATE: Wow, thanks for the rec list. We’ve got a flight home scheduled for the 21st. Crossing our fingers this one isn’t cancelled.