On the midnight express train across Turkey

On the final journey in our long-distance rail series we take the Doğu Express, which runs east from the Turkish capital, Ankara, towards Kars and the border with Georgia

‘Whatever you want to pay me for, you can have,” a masseur named Karim tells me with a laugh, as we face each other in Ankara’s Tarihi Karacabey Hamami, one of the Turkish capital’s oldest bath houses. We’re both wearing just a small towel, and Karim also wears a grin.

What I pay for is a rigorous skin scrub and massage in the hammam’s steamy communal room, whose nourishing ambience is occasionally punctuated by whiffs of tobacco breath from the clientele.