This is the first of what I expect to be several “post-trip” entries as the number of remaining sabbatical days dwindle. Since traveling by train was an organizing principal at various points during our travels, I thought it would be interesting to look at some statistics. Not including commuter or metro-type, inner-city travel, we ended up taking 33 different trains during the last year; our first was the Paris to Marseilles journey on March 7th, 2023, and our last was the Albury to Sydney journey on February 23rd, 2024. Here are some quick numbers:
Most expensive: London to Paris Eurostar, $0.35 per km
“Almost free”: Aranyapratheth to Bangkok, $0.27 per hour
Aranyaprateth to Bangkok train
The above numbers describe the extremes of the trips we took, but the bulk of our journeys (22 of them) were taken in Bulgaria, Romania, Taiwan, and Vietnam. All but two of these trips were taken on state-owned railroads that set the cost per kilometer of travel between 7 cents and 4 cents*. The express trains in Taiwan averaged about $6.30 per hour of travel, while the local Taiwanese and all of the Balkan trains were similarly about $2.60 per hour of travel. Vietnamese trains were the slowest, which meant that they averaged about $1.60 per hour of travel.
A graphical analysis of train costsBoarding the Istanbul to Sofia Express
Other considerations which easily set these various systems apart are: the availability of food, the condition of on-board bathrooms, and the comfort of the seats. Many trains had no food available for purchase, so it’s relatively easy to say that the Vietnamese trains had the best food available; surprisingly, the train from Albury to Sydney had pretty good meals and snacks, which places it safely in second. Regarding bathrooms, we all know that Bulgaria was the worst, with the Aranyaprateth to Bangkok train coming in second; Taiwanese, French, and Spanish trains likely had the best bathrooms, although I appreciated the separate sink areas on the Vietnamese trains, which were always clean and had a bar of soap next to the tap. As for seat comfort, the Taiwanese trains likely win because the seats always faced forward (they rotate), and because the length of journey was never butt-numbingly long; the French and Spanish trains also had pretty comfortable seats, and I am a little partial to the first class cabins on the Bulgarian trains as well.
*boarder crossing trains between Bulgaria and Romania were a little more expensive, 10 cents per km
My alarm goes off and it’s still dark. This is extra unpleasant because we haven’t had to get up this early for quite some time now. I make sure Sheena is awake and then I go eat some breakfast even though I’m not hungry yet. Then we finish packing everything, lock up the room, place the keys back in the lockbox, and book a tuktuk on Grab. It arrives moments after I push the “book” button and soon we are heading down the still dark arterial toward the train station. It is 73-degrees outside and it feels wonderfully cool.
Outside the station
We arrive at the station almost exactly 30 minutes early, as we were directed by the ticketing agent, and we find ourselves among only a handful of other tourists. We briefly sit down on a bench, but then we see a railway worker head down the platform on his scooter, sign under his arm, and we gather our things and start walking toward the furthest train. Sure enough, the man has placed the sign for Battambang in front of the two-car train at the end of the line, just in front of the Sihanouk-bound one, which will leave 20 minutes after us. We climb aboard a train that looks quite similar to one that was on the platform a few days earlier when we bought the tickets, and select a seat on the left side of the cabin, figuring that once the sun rises this will be the shadier side.
The train to Battambang
Sheena pokes her head out the open windows and notes that there are quite a few other passengers heading down the platform, but then it seems that they are all boarding the other train because hardly anyone gets on ours. In fact, when the train pulls out exactly on-time, there are perhaps only 15 people on the train, and only one other couple seem to be tourists. “Weird, I thought people wanted to go to the UNESCO food city?” Sheena says, and I muse about the nature of that designation, whether it’s usually given out based on a widely acknowledged status, or whether it’s more frequently meant to stimulate tourism.. The train seats are hard and the back rests do not recline, and the bathrooms have Bulgarian toilets, but it’s still pleasant because there is a lot of room to kick our feet up and it’s not crowded. As we start on our way out of Phnom Penh, both of us put in our new earplugs because the conductor uses his horn like a Vietnamese bus driver; frequent honks proceed every street crossing and at any other point that he feels someone is too close to the tracks. Since the tracks are lined with vendors, parked vehicles, and back porches of houses, it is quite a racket.
The sun comes up and shortly we find ourselves outside of the city. We briefly pause at the track switch for the Sihanouk line, where an assistant hops out the door and makes sure we continue heading in the correct direction. At this point Sheena asks me to take the window seat and I realize why she has been wearing glasses. The cool air blasts my face and makes my hair fly around; I fish out my own sunglasses and a hair tie, and then a little while later, my fleece. I’m in very high spirits. When we aren’t smelling the crop burning, the morning air is fresh and fragrant, and the scenery is interesting, full of rice fields and cows and water buffalo, howling dogs and waving children, lotus flowers floating on ponds and brightly painted temples and altars. The car sways back and forth, sometimes more than I would like, and the tracks make a classic clickity-clack sound as we roll by.
Sights along the way
We don’t make very many stops, and when we do, they are quite brief. Several people disembark at Sameakki Mean Chey and then some people climb aboard at Kdol and Bamnak. Every time we enter a town the frequency of the horn blasts goes up and this happens again about 20 minutes outside of Pursat. But this time the intensity seems different, and as the conductor lays on the horn and we start to brake with increasing urgency, Sheena and I become more alert to the situation. We look out the window and see a roadway crossing ahead, and at that crossing there is some sort of large cart, coasting, but not stopping as it passes the railroad warning sign, with several men jumping off of it, trying to push it backwards to slow it’s progress. We get closer to it, taking in the detail, noticing the heavy bulk of wooden furniture piled high in the vehicle, and we sense that our train will not stop in time and that the cart will also not stop in time. Shortly after we crash into the front of the vehicle with the sound of wood cracking, and we continue, pushing the cart, for another 2 or 3 meters.
Everything stops and we can’t quite believe what has happened. I stick my head out the window to see the wreck, and then I look behind me and see that Sheena’s head is out the next window. The doors slide open and the train workers jump out to assess what has happened. The passenger sitting across from us also jumps out and coolly walks up the road to take a pee. In a matter of minutes there is quite a crowd on the road. Some of them are waiting to cross the tracks, no doubt, but I get the sense that others just came from nearby when they heard the noise. It’s hard to fathom, because there doesn’t seem to be anything nearby for miles. Eventually the engine of the vehicle is started and a bunch of men help push the vehicle backward, off the tracks and up onto the roadway. We get our first good look at it, which is a strange thing indeed: a long, single-axel trailer that is hitched to another single-axel which has a motor on top of it; steering arms extend some 6 feet from the motor so that a person sitting on the trailer may control the contraption. Perhaps the person steering had no access to breaks.
The crash
Once the vehicle is clear the conductor stops taking photos and starts to berate the driver. His tone is angry and he walks over to the railroad crossing warning sign, pointing repeatedly to the STOP sign and the text sign underneath, which I imagine must say something like “train will not stop” or “look both ways before crossing.” The driver wears an awkward smile and doesn’t say anything. We start up again, appearently no worse for the wear, and pass the vehicle which looks like it sustained damage to one of the front wheels. Before we know it we have arrived in Pursat, where we stop for 20 minutes for food.
Perhaps not learning my lesson from the bus journey to Phnom Penh, I decided that we should plan to get lunch at this stop. Luckily, when we hop down from the train there is a grouping of women with their wears ready for purchase. The first of these has bamboo sticky rice, called kralan, and I look at it and then at the man who is standing next to the vendor, the same man who jumped off the train at the crash to go pee, and I ask, “is it good?” I’m not sure he understands my question, or at least, the only thing that I understand him saying is the word kralan, and then repeating the prices that the woman was telling us (4,000 riel). I look at Sheena and we decide to buy one, and then we move on to the BBQ and fried meats and fish that is piled on several more tables. We pick out a chicken leg and receive rice and vegetables with it (7,000 riel). This feels like a success, especially when we start eating and find both of these dishes to be tasty.
As we work on our food, the man approaches us to chat. He asks the usual starting question, “where are you from?” and from there we learn a bit about him. He’s Cambodian, from a town 20km up the line, a teacher, he used to speak French, and he thinks his English isn’t so good. We beg to differ, and we tell him so. He asks what we are doing here and we use the simple answer, “vacation.” This is interesting because he goes on to tell us that he can’t take vacation, that Cambodia is not a rich country, that he has been saving money for 20 years but that it’s very little; I don’t think he’s trying to make us feel bad, just being matter-of-fact, which is natural when speaking a foreign language. We ponder the appropriate response, thinking that perhaps there isn’t one, until Sheena offers, “we’re lucky.” Which is true. This man also wants to know what we think of Cambodia, specifically if we think it’s expensive or cheap. We start to answer by comparing to Vietnam, which we were surprised to find out was cheaper than Cambodia, and this results in a sour expression on his face. I recall that Cambodia and Vietnam do not have the best relationship politically/historically, and indeed, this man goes on to mention something about the island Phu Quoc, which is called Koh Tral in Khmer, and how it perhaps rightly belongs to Cambodia (quick Google searching makes me think “it’s complicated”). Luckily, our conversation is cut off by the sound of the train engine restarting and we climb aboard. Twenty minutes later we make a brief stop in Beong Khna to let him off and we wave goodbye.
The rest of the ride is more of the same, except hotter. The breeze is no longer fresh and cool, but it is still appreciated because the air temperature is up in the 90’s now. We switch sides of the cabin to avoid the changing sun position and I become a bit more restless, getting up and sitting on my knees on the seat behind Sheena, or stretching out my legs without shoes on. We seem to only honk at cows on the tracks now, passing through fewer towns. But we are making good time and it’s not long before we are getting close to Battambang. I begin to pull down the bags and start to repack things when there is another sudden breaking and a sound of railroad ballast scraping against the side of the train. We come to a stop outside of the station and then we hear a wail, a very pitiful one. I look out the window and see that there is someone under the train, their fishing pole sitting on the pile of ballast next to them. Once again, the employees are thrown into action and the passengers into confusion. We all hang out the windows, listening to this mystery person wail plaintively, legs and arm akimbo. Some additional people are called over from the adjacent buildings and soon a man has been able to help this woman out from under the train. She is older, but how old is probably impossible to tell. I had noticed quite a few people living under tarps by the tracks as we had been approaching and I wonder if she is one of theirs. How did she end up under the train? Did she slip on the ballast as it pulled along side her? Her head and arm are bloodied and we notice them as the train slowly advances the last 100 meters to the train station, at which point we are bombarded by tuktuk drivers.
We grab out bags and walk through the crowd, emerging in the mid-day heat and full sun on the dusty road outside the station. It’s only 2 blocks to our hotel, so we decide to walk and we can’t quite believe what just happened. A bad day for that conductor, we think. Our hotel is fine, acceptable, with functioning air-conditioning, which is a relief.
After traveling mostly by rail in Europe, we were excited about the prospect of more train travel in Asia. We figured that if we could get excited about the Bulgarian rail system, there probably wasn’t a system in the world that we wouldn’t enjoy. As previously documented, Taiwan was a great start, and we were looking forward to arriving in Vietnam where we could take the main line from Hanoi to Saigon, dubbed the Reunification Line. In fact, as initially conceived, the entire SE Asia portion of the trip was put together in a way to try and use rail travel as much as possible. I love a limiting factor when on these types of trips, to put some kind of constraint on what we might choose to do, and rail travel was it this time.
Everyone stops for the train
Most “backpackers” seem to experience the Reunification Line as two overnight train trips, the first from Hanoi to Da Nang, and the second from Da Nang to Saigon (the train station is still called Sai Gon, rather than Ho Chi Minh City). While we did enjoy the experience of our first overnight train, taken from Istanbul to Sofia last spring, we were also both left with motion sickness that lasted longer than we thought it would, and neither of us slept very well. We made a decision to try and avoid overnight travel if we could help it. And, of course, we could help it, because we have the luxury of traveling much slower than just about anyone else, and as a consequence the appeal of “saving a night’s accommodation” by staying on the train is lost on us. With that in mind, we used https://www.seat61.com/Vietnam.htm and dsnv.vn to map out a route that would allow us to travel by train reasonable distances in the daytime, and it was this decision that largely determined the nature of our visit to Vietnam. For example, our visits to Dong Hoi, Quy Nhon, and Phan Thiet were made almost entirely in reaction to distances on the train.
Flooded fields up north seen from the SE1 to HueGetting off the train in Quy Nhon
There are several really nice things about Vietnam Railways. It is cheap (about $1.60 USD per hour of travel), it runs mostly on time (despite long pauses to manage passing maneuvers on the largely single track line), and there are reserved seats. Add to this that the bathrooms are relatively clean (with toilets that flush) and there is not a whole lot more that is necessary for us to consider taking the train as the best way to travel. Because we have been traveling in the daytime, we have always selected upright seats in the first or second car of the train, which is ideally located next to the dining car. These cars consist of approximately 60 soft seats in an air-conditioned car, with half of them facing one direction and half the other, two per side and a center aisle; each end of the car has a bathroom and sink (usually with a bar of soap), and one hot water dispenser. There is also the small cabin for the crew member, usually a 30-something Vietnamese man that could be mistaken for a college student; there was always something endearing about these thin-bodied men, in their crumpled costumes and messed up hair, as they used a small broom to languorously sweep or mop up waste and debris between stops, or when they called out station names in their unique sing-song manner; when, at certain stops, they tucked in their shirts, straightened their collars, and put on their conductor caps and jackets, they looked like bright-eyed interviewees.
Coastline between Hue and Da Nang on the SE3Our nicest train was the SE19 to Da Nang
One of the delights of these cars is the endless parade of food that comes out from the dining car. On some journeys, the staff seems to be a bit more gung-ho about this, and I recall one man in particular who must have made 100 trips up and down the train, each time grabbing different things from the dining car to try and hawk, each time pausing next to our seat with a, “xoai? mango?” (everyone thinks Western tourists want mangos). The best part of these trips down the aisle is the hot food, and on our longest train trip, which was from Ninh Binh to Dong Hoi (8+ hours) where we traveled on one of the older cars (Train SE7) which was somewhat less comfortable and more dingy, I recall the rice-plate cart emerging from the dining car heaped some 12-inches high with all manner of steaming-hot fried and baked meats. I couldn’t help but raise my finger and request “one,” which sent the two men pushing the cart into action, generously piling rice and stir-fried cabbage into a Styrofoam container, then asking us to select which meats we wanted to add on top. A heavy squirt of Maggi in the corner compartment of the to-go box, and a little plastic baggy of soup secured with a rubber band, finished off the meal, which was traded for 70,000 dong ($2.87 USD). On other journeys we have opted for the banh mi que, which come in a paper sleeve, toasty hot and deliciously salty from the pate filling. And as if this wasn’t enough food, every train station seemed to have multiple sticky rice sellers next to the platforms, giving us the opportunity to grab a quick bite before the train arrived.
A snack cart comes down the aisle on the SE3 Green fields in the middle aboard the SE3 to Quy Nhon
There are, of course, annoyances. Despite using the helpful graphic to select forward-facing seats, we have found ourselves facing backwards on occasion. This seemed to be somewhat randomly the case on our trip from Hue to Da Nang (Train SE19 – quite nice), which was tragic as this section is known to be one of the most beautiful along the Reunification Line, where the tracks hug the cliffside above the ocean for almost a full-hour; we were left facing backward, on the mountain side… And then it happened again when leaving Da Nang (Train SE3 – a little dingy), because the train station is a dead-end and the seats that we selected as forward-facing had suddenly become backward-facing when the locomotive detached and puttered to the other side of the train to head back the way it came in. We never prefer to face backward, and we long for that beautiful feature of the Taiwanese Railway–rotating seats–but since the train mostly runs through the outskirts of towns, crossing rivers and rice paddies, the open vistas have resulted in less motion sickness than I would have predicted. The regular cigarette smoking in the space between cars has also become a little more accepted, no longer causing the acute annoyance it did on our first ride.
Fellow passengers on the SE21 to Nha Trang Our last train station
After traveling 1,315 km from Hanoi to Nha Trang, we left the Reunification Line to head up to the hill town of Da Lat. There used to be a cog rail line between Tham Cham and Da Lat, but it was abandoned during the Vietnam/American War, so we were forced to take a shuttle bus that drove at incredible speeds around fierce hairpin turns, not hesitating to pass on blind corners; left slightly shaky, despite taking drugs for motion sickness, we tottered around Da Lat with fresh evidence for why rail travel is superior, despite its drawbacks. This trip up to the mountains meant that we missed the section between Nha Trang and Binh Thuan (236 km), but we rejoined it using a special, direct train from Phan Thiet (15 km down a branch line from Binh Thuan) to get to Sai Gon. Watching the dragon fruit orchards go by the windows, with not one, but two babies crying near us, I thought, yes, this is certainly better than a bus.
Dragon fruit orchards down south while riding the SPT1 to Sai Gon
It took us eleven hours door to door to get from Bucharest to Varna, a Bulgarian city on the Black Sea, but the journey was actually quite pleasant. We had a two-hour stopover in Ruse, on the border between Romania and Bulgaria, and both trains were fairly comfortable, and on the Bulgarian side, newer. I managed to avoid the bathroom on the two legs, but Craig told me that it was much nicer than on some other Bulgarian trains we had taken, where you could look down the toilet and see the train tracks passing by.
When we arrived in Varna, I think we both instantly liked it. It was an actual city, but not too big or bustling, and had a laid-back, sea town vibe. We enjoyed walking along the beach and through the large parks and wide, pedestrian boulevards without having to fight through crowds or contend with thousands of other tourists. Our dinner at the Staria Chinar restaurant was also delicious–at least top ten of the trip so far. I guess we really like Bulgaria! Despite another argument (we just realized we’re in our eighth month of sabbatical–just around the time when we began to have serious relationship issues in South America), we had a nice time in Varna.
The beach!
Having worked through our communication issues with more communication, we were in fairly cheerful spirits when we arrived at the Varna train station. A blackened shell of a second-class car greeted us on the platform, its windows blown out, sectioned off with yellow tape. Craig remarked that he thought he saw smoke coming from the direction of the station the day before from our Airbnb balcony. I couldn’t find anything on the internet about the incident, so we will forever be in the dark about it, but it was interesting to see.
We climbed aboard our first-class car (it’s only about $1 more per person than second-class) and found our seats. We were in a six-seat cabin, and two other older ladies were already there, either friends already or super friendly, chatting up a storm. After some halting conversation, we found out they spoke no English, one was Romanian or coming from Romania and going to Plovdiv, and the other was going to a town whose name I will never be able to remember. Just before the train took off, a man also boarded and claimed a seat in our cabin.
първа класа (purva klasa/first class), baby!
Sharing the cabin with three other people was much easier than sharing it with five, so this was worth the first-class upgrade. We settled in for the six-hour journey, doing our various train activities of podcasts, audiobooks, writing, or watching downloaded movies (I do NOT recommend the 2022 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, by the way. It had very pretty cinematography, but could have been called practically anything else, for all the homage it did to that great author’s best work).
Sometimes, Craig or I would get up and stand in the corridor, watching the landscape go by as we stretched our legs. Then, disaster struck. I had to go to the bathroom.
I had previously used the bathroom on the train from Sofia to Veliko Tarnovo, but with my trusty P-style. I thought that would be preferable than planting my bum on the seat, which did not lift up from the toilet bowl. However, I had not contended with the motion of the train, and it was actually fairly hard to keep my balance while holding onto the P-style and trying to keep the stream in the target. It was kind of like playing Duck Hunt while skateboarding, but with bodily fluids! (Yes, this is the best analogy I can come up with.)
So this time, I decided to take a seat (well, hover anyway). The bathroom was fairly clean, although it reeked of urine. There seemed to be soap at least, which was a blessing. What could go wrong? But as I began my business, I felt a draft. A very strong draft. The train was going at a pretty high speed, and suddenly, along with the draft, I began to feel a mist and droplets on my bum. What was happening?
I looked down between my legs and saw fluid, most likely my own, and with traces of the urine of every other person who had already used that toilet, spraying back on me. I let out an internal whimper. Why, oh why, was this happening to me?? I had been holding off on going to the bathroom for awhile, so the unfortunate experience lasted much longer than I would have wanted. I wiped myself off as best I could and spent a long time washing my hands and my arm, which had also, somehow, gotten a blast. A deep sigh left me as I exited the bathroom.
Craig saw my despair as I sat back down across from him. “What’s wrong?” he asked. I explained. He laughed in a mixture of shock and pity. “You didn’t use your P-style?”
Duck Hunt analogies were given and I attempted to scrub the experience from my memory. If I didn’t think about it, it didn’t happen, and so I wasn’t actually covered in urine. Mind over matter.
Craig eventually also went to the bathroom. “I don’t think your P-style would have helped anyway,” he said. “The updraft was causing pee to fly up above the seat, it was getting everywhere! I had to stand as far away from the bowl as possible.”
This made me feel marginally better about not using the P-style, although it also had the unfortunate effect of reminding me of my pee-covered state.
We are now in our very nice Airbnb in Plovdiv. I’ve showered thoroughly and my clothes will soon get a wash (Airbnbs have been really awesome in that respect; they’ve almost all had washers).
I’ve read that Bulgaria has invested a lot of money in its train network, which is really quite extensive. Our voyages, aside from the urine incident today, have all been pleasant and comfortable, if slow. We’ve seen piles of train ties and tracks on all the routes, as well as stations in the middle of remodel and reconstruction. If only Bulgaria would just upgrade its actual trains first, then I would be a much happier camper!
Disgusting bathroom experiences aside, we really have been enjoying our train journeys. The seats are more comfortable than buses, and it’s been cheap. People have asked if we have a Eurail pass, but we’ve done the calculations and it actually wouldn’t have been worth it for us because the trains here in Eastern Europe have been so inexpensive. I think you would have to really price it out, too, in order to decide for any region, because a lot of Western European trains require seat reservations that can cost up to 30€ for each journey. From Sevilla to our future destination of Paris, we will have traveled ten days in two months for a cost of $308 per person. The Eurail pass for ten days of travel in a two-month period is $344, and that does not include the extra seat reservation or night train costs.
It also doesn’t include the mental cost of having your own pee sprayed back onto you in a very undignified manner. Alas.
A nice dinner in Plovdiv now beckons, and although I still shudder a little at my experience, I at least learned something today. Never, ever, go to the bathroom on a Bulgarian train when it’s running at high speeds!
Contemplating my life and my cleanliness as I stare out the window.
It had been a long day and the last thing I wanted to hear was an American accent offering a joke. He said, “you can’t buy those chips here, because you’re American, it says right there.” I gave him my “I’m not impressed” glare, which seemed to have worked, because later he was surprised to learn that I was from the west coast. What is it about a familiar accent heard far from home that has the power to annoy to such a degree? For him, perhaps it was a treat to find someone familiar in a grocery store, the type of thing that doesn’t happen all that often once you decide to relocate to Romania. But for me, at the end of a day that included 9-hours of travel, a frustrating search for dinner through the touristy central neighborhood, and a wander in a grocery store that was more crowded than I thought it had any right to be at this hour, I just didn’t want to be his captive audience, and I most definitely didn’t want to hear his advice on how we ought to change up our travel plans.
We left Veliko Tarnovo that morning, under sunny and cold skies, walking the 2 kilometers to the train station while enjoying the closer view of the Soviet-era hotel and skirting to the side of the recently repaved roadway that lacked any pedestrian accommodation. The town was alive with maintenance crews, planting flowers and mowing grass. When we arrived at the station there was the Swedish couple from Gothenburg, whom we had met in Sofia and run into in the train office the day before, sitting with their luggage neatly lined up on the front steps. Since I begged off seeing them the night before, I had to answer questions about the state of my health (still with a cold, doing a little better thank you) and then ooh and aww at photos of the Tsarevets Castle light show that we missed. When we moved around to the back of the station, we met a cute, older Bulgarian lady. Unfortunately, she didn’t speak a word of English, French, Spanish, Swedish, or any other language that our group of foreigners could offer. I was able to establish that she was going to Sofia, and that we were going to Bucharest and Varna, respectively. That meant that we were all getting on the same train to go to Gorna, where we would all transfer to other trains. Sheena suddenly remembered that she had downloaded the Bulgarian dictionary on her Google Translate app, so I was able to ask the old lady a couple questions (I had been patiently trying to communicate with her while everyone else had given up, not understanding what “fisica” and head pointing had to do with my questions), but then the train arrived and we all knew that we had approximately 30 seconds to get inside before it would start up again.
This was a small, two-car train that moved along at a good clip, swinging from side to side. We had located our own cabin, somewhat surprised that the Swedish couple or the old lady and her companion hadn’t followed us. But after a few minutes one of the Swedes did find us and he promptly sat down across from us and started telling stories. He had been a high school music and art teacher, but I think it’s also his Swedish nature that contributed to his complete lack of pretense and unbashful character. He told us how Gothenburg used to be the testing ground for new bands, that if you could succeed in Sweden then you were going to be a hit elsewhere too, and that he had seen big acts before they were big, specifically referencing Rod Stewart and Jimi Hendrix. “Did you see the Beatles?” we eagerly asked. “Of course, of course,” he replied with complete nonchalance. You see, what he really likes is The Boss, and he told us he has tickets to see Springsteen later this summer. After almost 10 minutes the Swede jumped up, knowing that we were approaching the station, and wished us good-bye and safe travels after taking a photo of us, and we never saw him again. We did collect his wife’s contact info though, so we’ll probably see what intel they can offer from Varna.
In Gorna we had almost an hour to kill until our train toward the border would leave. The station was nice though, with an old-timey schedule up on a big board and a sparsely occupied waiting room. The old Bulgarian lady and her companion found us again, and I got out Sheena’s phone to try a few more questions. We were only able to ask her questions, not the reverse, because we didn’t have a Cyrillic alphabet on our phone. It was a bit like playing a frustrating game of 20 questions. We established that she was going to Sofia for a concert of some sort, potentially an orchestra, but we couldn’t work out the significance of it. Sheena took a picture of us, and then they departed for their platform. We did the same a few minutes later, finding our car as it was disconnected from their Sofia-bound train.
We selected an empty compartment, but we were soon joined by a young Finnish gal who had also been on the train to Gorna. She explained her 3-month itinerary to us, which was about half way completed and involved coming all the way down from Finland via train. We have learned that it is very popular for Europeans of many ages (but especially post-school age) to go “interrailing,” which means to go riding the trains on a discounted pass; it’s like the Eurail pass, but for Europeans and much cheaper. For example, the Finn had purchased a “50%-off” pass that allowed her unlimited travel over her 3-month time period for only $300; she did have to pay a little extra in some places for seat assignments or for overnight berths, but holy cow that’s a great deal. Our conversation stopped when several Bulgarians joined our compartment, and we spent the rest of the time staring out the window, eating our packed lunches. In Ivanovo, about 20km from Ruse, we paused for a long time and eventually a train employee came by our compartment and announced that we would need to de-board and wait for a bus to take us the rest of the way. This created quite a bit of confusion among the non-Bulgarian speaking passengers, but we eventually understood that the connecting train (many of us were continuing on to Bucharest) would wait for us, as its sole reason for existing was to take passengers from our train.
Waiting for the bus, we met a young Finnish couple and another Swede from Gothenburg. The Swede was younger than his compatriots that we left behind in Gorna, probably in his late 50s, with salt and pepper hair and goatee, wearing Birkenstocks and a type of hat that I can only describe as “old timey train conductor-y.” This man had a type of magnetism that drew us in for the next 15 minutes as we waited for the bus and swapped stories of our travels, trying to decide which trains were the worst (it seems that the consensus is that Bulgarian trains are the worst in Europe). Once the bus arrived, we boarded and found ourselves seated across the aisle from the Swede, so we continued to chat with him about this and that. The topic of smoking came up (Bulgaria has one of the highest rates of smokers in Europe) and he related a conversation he had had the other night at dinner. “I asked the waiter to relocate me to a different table, because I can’t eat near people who are smoking. Everyone here smokes and eats. How do they do that? It kills your taste,” he said. He then described the laws against indoor smoking in Bulgaria: “They are the strongest laws in Europe, with the highest penalties! But no one follows them. In Sweden, we have weaker laws but everyone follows them and smoking indoors doesn’t exist. I told the waiter about the laws, and he got really mad at me! I tried to tell him I meant no offense, that I just found it interesting… but I think he thought I was an undercover European agent…” I laughed because there was something so Scandinavian about this situation he had gotten himself into.
When we arrived at the Ruse train station, we were quickly whisked away from the crowd waiting to board (heading in the opposite direction) and ushered into the empty station. We were directed to a small train, something that looked more like a light rail car than a medium distance train, and we all boarded. The glass in one of the windows was a spiderweb of cracks, and another few were completely covered in graffiti. The floor was disgusting, covered in gum and trash and dust. But we were a big crew now, and we were all in this thing together, so the atmosphere was cheerful. Soon the immigration officers for Bulgaria boarded and collected our passports, returning them 15 minutes later with stamps affixed on top of other stamps. Then we embarked and shortly thereafter crossed the Danube. On the other side the immigration process was mirrored by Romanian officials. The total journey from Ruse to Bucharest takes about 3 hours, but at least an hour of this is consumed by the process of collecting, analyzing, and returning passports. Another hour is likely taken up by the circuitous route taken to Bucharest, heading northwest for an hour before turning and heading northeast, instead of say, taking the hypotenuse of the triangle… At times the train hummed along through fields of flowers, with big, puffy clouds overhead. At other times we crawled through small towns. And we eventually arrived at the Bucuresti Nord station, greeted once more by a large crowd of people heading in the other direction, slightly worried about their connecting trains, no doubt.
I felt rather smug handing Sheena my phone with a screen shot of a bus route to our apartment that I had taken earlier in the morning when I had wifi, but reality is always a different thing and I hadn’t accounted for rush hour traffic. The bus arrived after 15 minutes of waiting and then crawled along big streets for 30 minutes. We had brought along a fair amount of snacks, but it was getting late and we were both getting a little irritable, so the delay was challenging to take in stride. We got off the bus and walked a few minutes down to our building, an imposing and ugly concrete behemoth along a street with a surprisingly active tram line. Puzzling for some time over the lack of building address number and the black gate where our check-in directions indicated a white one, we finally entered and found the door to a rather strangely laid out apartment, but one that appeared extremely comfortable and quiet. The ordeal of finding dinner and of being accosted in a supermarket would follow.
We had a good time in Sofia; it was laid-back, as promised by our guidebook, and we actually varied from our solitary routine and went on a free food tour called Balkan Bites. There, we not only enjoyed the food and the tour, we also met a pair of Brits, two women who had literally met one month ago at a wedding and were now spending several days together in Sofia.
“But wasn’t that a bit risky, going with someone you barely know?” I asked.
Janita shrugged. “We spent two hours together at the wedding. How much more time do you need to know if you’ll get along with a person?” She said this after she had already invited Craig and I to stop by her place outside of Cambridge when we were in London, so I guess this was a compliment!
We went out with them that night for dinner and had a really great time. Tanya had a hilarious story about a Lord near her town (yes, they still have those!) with whom she had recently butted heads. Janita told us about her super interesting backstory and how she grew up. I tried a cherry rakia, which I would never order again, but in order not to waste it, drank it all, grimacing after every sip. The food, however, was great – Bulgaria has not disappointed us in that regard so far.
The next morning, we took the metro to the train station that we arrived at a few days earlier, and found our train. We had bought our tickets when we arrived on Friday with the help of a guy who was wearing a USC hat–we rightly assumed he spoke English! He had told us that there wasn’t much of a difference between first and second class, so he helped us buy second class tickets.
Super nice metro station. Supremely uncomfortable bench.
When we got to our train, we climbed into the car and found our seat numbers. “Wow, this is pretty nice!” we said to each other. All of the trains we have taken in Europe thus far (aside from the sleeper train), were like airplane or bus seats. This was more old-timey with cabins and six seats in each, facing each other.
We saw a lot of trains that had been graffitied. Is it sanctioned art? Notice the large “2” on the car. This became confusing when we boarded.
We settled in and soon a middle-aged woman came into our cabin and pointed at my seat. I shook my head. She shook her head. She didn’t speak any English and we still don’t speak any Bulgarian, so we pulled out our tickets and compared them. After a lot of hand gestures and repeated words, we finally understood we were in the wrong car!
“Vagon 1?” we asked (we had worked out that was the word for car). We followed her out the car and she pointed to where the car number was situated, along with the origination and destination. “Blagodarya!” we said. Thank you!
This was “Vagon 1”.
We realized the difference between first class and second class then. The whole car seemed to be more full and there were eight seats instead of six in each cabin. Still, the seats were fairly comfortable although falling apart a little, and we again settled in, but in the wrong seats because one of our seats was already occupied by a seven-year-old girl, with her grandmother next to her.
Craig gamely tried to involve them in conversation to find out their destination. Things were going poorly until the woman finally said, “English, no. Español, sí.”
Well then! That made it a lot easier. We immediately launched into Spanish. It was clear she was fairly rusty, but she still spoke enough that we could have a basic conversation. It turned out she lived in Burgos for seven years awhile back. She never studied Spanish formally, but had picked it up while she was working. She didn’t live in Sofia, but had visited for the baptism of her grandson, and now they were headed back to their small town.
More people arrived at the car, a young boy, 12-years-old, and his mother, a gregarious woman who asked us, “Vous comprenez français?”
“Oui, oui!” I said. “On parle un peu.”
The first lady laughed and said, “Español, français, English!” The two women exchanged pleasantries in Bulgarian and we all figured out our places in the cabin. The woman who spoke French told us her name was Sylvie, and she and her son had been traveling for three days from Strasbourg, mostly on buses, and she was exhausted. She was back in Bulgaria to care for her sick mother who had recently had her legs amputated because of diabetic complications, but it was clear she had lived in Strasbourg for a long time and she was much more comfortable speaking French than the first lady was at speaking Spanish.
It felt like an incredibly strange and happy coincidence that we could actually communicate with these Bulgarian women, and not, as you would expect, in English. Another woman boarded and squeezed in, and the cabin was filled with the conversation that Sylvie kept going. We could tell that she was a very sociable person, and she often engaged us in the conversation by translating into French what the others were saying. She seemed to have a million photos on her phone and at one point showed us one of her as a young woman. “I was très sexy before, wasn’t I? Now I’m a cow.” Appallingly, her son mooed! But she just laughed.
We got confused when there was a somewhat heated discussion about whether we would arrive in Levski or Gorna first. Sylvie went and asked the conductor, but the third lady didn’t believe it. Sylvie’s son explained to me what the point of contention was. It was funny to see that teenager attitude is universal when he leaned his head back, rolled his eyes, and groaned. Craig and I solved the argument by showing our tickets with our arrival time.
Later on in the ride, I noticed the son twisting his fingers around themselves and I pointed it out. There followed an interlude where everyone tried to do weird hand gestures like the Vulcan salute, which the little girl was actually super good at. In a strange way, it made us feel connected to everyone else for that brief moment.
Our cabin slowly began to empty, and new passengers would come on. One woman actually understood a little French and Sylvie told us she had gone to a French school when she was young, but had forgotten most of it as it was 20 years ago. Finally, it was Sylvie and her son’s turn to leave. She gave me her phone number and we took a selfie. “Un souvenir!” she said. “Ciao, ciao!” we called to each other (they say Ciao here for goodbye). “C’était un grand plaisir!“
This was the one-car train that took Sylvie and her son to Svishtov from Levski.
The cabin was quiet from then on to Gorna, even though we kept picking up more passengers. The route actually traversed almost the whole of the country to Varna, on the Black Sea. We stopped off about halfway because we were taking another small train to Veliko Tornova, a town in central Bulgaria.
We deciphered the Bulgarian and found our connecting train without too much trouble. A young girl came on and asked in accented English, “Is this seat free?” We nodded and she sat down next to Craig.
I decided to be social and struck up a conversation. It turned out that she was Polish and was visiting her Bulgarian boyfriend. Then we learned she had met him when they worked together in a fish factory in Westport, Washington, a very podunk town a couple hours outside of Seattle that’s known only for its surfing. “Err, why??” we asked. She told us it was one of the few ways to get a travel work visa to the US and so she decided to go for it. I’m not sure if she really ended up seeing much in the way of tourism, but hey, she got a boyfriend out of it! (They speak English to each other, in case you were wondering…)
We finally made it to our Airbnb here (our host gave us a ride from the station!) at around 3pm, six and a half hours after we left our place in Sofia. It was more French practice than we thought we’d get at this point in the trip, but what a fun and improbable ride! Lots more train travel to come–let’s hope it’s as interesting and entertaining as today’s was.
The Wongenbergs 