We filled in time at the station last night chatting to a young man born in America with an American mum and Moroccan dad. He lives in Paris and is travelling around Europe on a student Interrail Pass. We encouraged each other as we headed out of Turkey in dubious fashion.
We arrived at Kapikule on the border with Bulgaria at 1:30am and followed the cryptic gestures and instructions from the surly staff through customs and immigration. The train from Sofia arrived after an hour and we boarded the carriage that was due for Bucharest. There was no sign anywhere on the train to indicate its destination. If we had got on the other carriage we would have ended up in Sofia again. The train was ancient, dirty and staffed by people with poor English and smoking habits. The toilet was marginally better than the one we had from Belgrade. Fortunately we sat in a cabin with eight seats and no one came in to share it. A lady deposited a backpack on our luggage rack for the duration of the border crossing. She showed us that it contained cardboard packs of some sort and touched us on the knees saying "No problem, No problem", a phrase almost as universal as OK. She also showed us a packet tucked in her waistband. She seemed tipsy.
We passed through a very beautiful valley of deciduous trees for an hour or more, so we passed the day napping and looking out the window quite pleasantly. We fed on fruit from the hotel, Pringles and dried apricots from Istanbul station and bottles of water. The landscape reminded us of Austria at times.
At each Bulgarian station an official in a beautiful red cap held up a red/green wand to direct the train driver.
This was a large Bulgarian Station.
Malcolm's reading of cyrillic is slow and incomplete still.
At the Rumanian border we changed trains and had to find the right carriage again. We had no opportunity to buy food or water since we left Istanbul. This carriage was more modern but had no air conditioning and we sweated it out till we got to our hotel's cool room at 7pm. We collapsed on the bed after 21 hours of hot travel. We saw the train for Budapest departing just as we arrived in Bucharest, so we really did need an overnight stay in this nice hotel. Bed and Breakfast for just AUD55.
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