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| WizzAir Flight to Debrecen from Paris ready to take off! Perks of priority boarding - you get to wait in front of the airplane while the cleaning crew cleans the airplane |
It wasn't a completely planned trip! As in, most of the aspects had been covered but I had left some to chance. Like the short connection between Debrecen and the railway junction town where we would catch the train coming from Budapest to Bucharest or Brasov, whichever suited our situation. 4 days before our flight to Debrecen, I realized that there were no more seats left in one of the trains that I had been keeping track of. Without any other choice, I booked the next train, to catch which we had to travel a further 100 km from Debrecen towards Budapest. This effectively removed some places of interest in Romania like the Turda salt mines out of our itinerary. It wasn't as if the place was in our list. In our quest to cover more countries as well as to crunch some flights in Greece, we had to sacrifice some spots en route to Greece, in Romania and Bulgaria.
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| Debrecen trams with the great reformist church and the church square in the background |
The night train to Bucharest from Budapest reaches Brasov at around 9 in the morning. Perfect for us to be fresh and ready to experience the Romanian castles! We booked ourselves a local connection from Debrecen till Szolnok, where our intention was to take this train. Based on the suggestion of our friends, our tongues wanted to taste some Indian food in this Hungarian town. We did not want to miss out on the cheaper rates that Hungary provided us and which we could afford. After explaining the waiter regrading our train, we mutually agreed that we could spend about 40 minutes comfortably in the restaurant, more than sufficient for us to have a take away. We put a time schedule for ourselves for about 30 minutes and then included the time necessary to go till the exchange shop and get some forints converted back to Euros.
The food arrived 33 minutes later and we were out of the restaurant after settling the bill. We had 25 minutes to make it to the train. A safe gap. We got the money converted and we had around 13 minutes or so left for our train to leave. Based on our experience, we knew that the tram would not take more than 3 minutes to cover the distance between the exchange office and the station. On our exit from the exchange shop, we missed a tram. No disaster as there was another following behind. 50 meters from the station stop, the tram stopped for a traffic signal, after letting the tram ahead of us move on. To our horror, the signal did not break for the next 5 minutes. We had 5 minutes to catch the train, after we collect our luggage from the luggage lockers!
It took us a minute to run from the tram stop to the luggage lockers and another minute to get the bags out. After confirming the platform and running up and down the staircase we made it inside the train with a full minute to spare, and our breath missing! This was the second time that we were running for a tram or train in this trip. The first time was when we tried to get into a tram in Nantes, but unfortunately the tram driver didn't wait for us then.
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| Szolnok railway station. A very plain and dull looking station that reminds one of the socialist era as per ones imagination |
After 2 hours we got down in the station where we had to connect with our overnight train which arrived promptly on time, and within minutes we had settled in our seats, sad that the seats were nothing close to the kind of general coaches of Indian railways where one could just stretch their legs and sleep without a care in the world. 3 hours later, we had reached the point that would decide the future of our trip! Border controls. Even after reading from the most trustiest sources you can find online, I still had an inkling of fear that our residence permits would not be sufficient to enter Romania or Bulgaria, what with these countries not being inside Schengen zone.
First came the Hungarians who would exit us out of Schengen zone. Them and their fancy gadgets and instruments! Alas, it couldn't scan automatically our Indian passports! After multiple failed attempts we started wearing our footwear thinking any moment we might get kicked out of the train. But then the policemen just entered the details manually in their machines and that's it. They let us continue with a seal in our passports that had a fancy train symbol in the corner where on usually receives an aeroplane.
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| Passport please! You can travel now. |
Then came in a Romanian policeman, who just noted down our ID details in his diary and let us continue with a nice Romanian entry seal. Only after confirming that he had indeed sealed us in did we remove our shoes and settled back again to have our unfinished Indian dinner, which was actually worth all the running around we did in Debrecen!
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