Bucharest. The very reason I had thought of this trip. The presence of a cousin there pursuaded me to keep Bucharest as my starting point. By the time she told me about her plans to shift by the beginning of February back to India, I had already fixed my mind on a trip involving the Balkans to not re-plan again. From the very moment that I had started looking for destinations for my vacation adventure, I was looking at flights to or near Bucharest. I settled on Debrecen after checking out the railway connections, and the feasibility of a memorable trip. After skipping Cluj due to time, money and travel constraints, we moved to Brasov by the overnight connection from Deberecen. The focus of our trip in Romania was Bran Castle and the Peles Castle. Other than being in Bucharest.
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| Bran Castle (Dracula's Castle) |
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| Peles Castle in Sinaia, also known as Europe's most beautiful castle |
After a slow day in Brasov, we went to Peles and from there we moved on to Bucharest, reaching the capital well after 8pm. It was evident that the plans we had made for Bucharest were no more feasible and thus we decided to check out downtown Bucharest in the night. The parliament palace, basically was the only thing that we saw that evening after walking around for about 10 km. By the time we reached back at the hostel, it was beyond 2 am and since we had a train to be caught at 12.50 pm the next (or that) afternoon, we skipped all plans we had for the morning and settled on having ourselves a decent lunch. The process of making and eating pasta dragged us almost till 12 pm and well, by the time we exchanged some money for the Balkan pass and got in a metro it was already 12.25 pm. 25 minutes to make a metro connection, get ourselves 2 train passes and make it to the train, the platform of which we had no idea where. Disaster! The connecting metro would arrive only at 12.45 pm. It was obvious to us by now that unless Romanian trains followed a system somewhere in between of medium and worse Indian railways, we wouldn't be able to board this train. There was no scope for desperation. I had already begun thinking about a plan B. Little did I know that a plan C should have been kept handy.
On reaching the station at 12.58 pm, the first thing we did was to confirm that the Sofia bound train had actually left. A McD wifi network immediately made me start looking for buses and how to get to them. The border town of Giurgiu would help us now. I had read that the train from Bucharest takes around 3 hours to reach Giurgiu while a bus would go faster and reaches the small town within 75 minutes. By the time I had located where to find the bus stand, the train was 15 minutes ahead of us. We still got the Balkan pass done and took the metro to the bus stand, which was just next to our hostel! We got out of the metro system and had just turned around the exit to see a small minibus to Giurgiu fly by us. We realized by his speed that the stop for this bus was nowhere nearby, even though there were a couple of buses standing right outside the metro exit. On inquiring around, we were directed near a church, or after it or in front of it. We couldn't understand due to our incomprehension in Romanian and the poor English of the people trying to help us. We anyways ran towards the church and then some distance beyond it, but then there were no buses around us anymore. We started walking back thinking that we had almost lost all hopes when we saw another bus towards Giurgiu crawl by, without stopping for us. The bus stop should be nearby, we concluded. It was now an hour since the train had left. When we finally found a bus that was stopped and had the board 'Giurgiu', we were directed around the adjacent compound for the onwards stop. On our way there we missed another bus. We had missed 3 such buses. This confused me a lot because there actually is a website that gives out the timings of these buses and it had convinced me that there are only hourly buses to Giurgiu from Bucharest while we had missed 3 buses in a span of half hour. Even after multiple reviews of the website, it is disheartening to note that such websites can't be still trusted in these parts of Europe.
Since we did not want to spend anymore on buses as we had already spent on the pass, we decided to ensure that we get to the train station in Giurgiu well in advance to board the train we missed in Bucharest and thus we sat in this small 'mini'bus. We watched Romanian countryside pass by while we experienced Romanian roads, sitting and finding out similarities and dissimilarities between what we were looking at and what we knew as our home, India. We decided that staying in this country would make us feel at home, expect for the people and the snow! It was funny to think that all the while that we were running around and missing buses at the bus stop, I was under the impression that the driver was just avoiding us as he was already speeding and he didn't want to stop. But in reality it was pretty evident that the bus does not stop once all the seats are filled and so we would have missed at least one of them anyways. But catching anyone of them would have made me write a completely different story from this point.
When we neared Giurgiu, a thought in my head was nagging me regarding the place the bus would stop in Giurgiu. The driver had convinced me somehow that he was going to the train station. When I opened my map, my heart skipped a beat. Giurgiu train station was a dead end stop. A train going to this station had to come back the same way it had gone. On scrolling up further in gmaps, I realized and remembered that the stop for the Sofia bound train was Giurgiu nord, which we would approach in another few minutes. I immediately went to the driver and told him "Giurgiu nord stazione Sofia", and all he could say was "stop taxi go". And h stopped. On checking in maps, I saw that he had stopped closest to the station that he could from the highway and we immediately got down. Our marathon continued and we started running towards the station that just seemed to not get any closer. The more we ran, the farther it seemed. We came to a railway crossing where we just told Sofia and asked the timings to the gate keeper. All he replied was zero minuti. We watched in horror as the gates closed and a two compartment train went behind us. It was 3 and a half hours since the Sofia bound train had left Bucharest. We had missed the train forever.
Due to the low availability of cars during the communist era, hitchhiking was a popular means of transport among people in eastern Europe. This practice still exists today and these countries are known among backpackers as being very hitchhike friendly. While planning for the trip, I had also considered this option, but then discarded it in favor of cheap train tickets and cheaper train pass. Even though it was expensive compared to Indian standard, the pass was considerably cheap compared to European standards. I had calculated the cost of each and every route that we were taking and found that the pass would be cheaper to us atleast by 10 euros.
In the initial stages of the planning, when I had not yet stumbled on the timings or the fares of the Bucharest - Sofia train, I was very stressed out by the problem of being able to cross the Danube with less effort and without breaking any law! I had considered taking a bus or a train to Giurgiu from Bucharest, get myself to the starting of the bridge, cross it either by walking or by hitchhiking and then take the bus from the other side to the Bulgarian city of Ruse. Ruse had an excellent network of city buses as can be found from the municipality website while Giurgiu hardly had 5 regular city bus lines. A train then to Sofia from Ruse was the most ideal option, and if not a train there were buses too. This option also came with a scope to go towards the black sea if we reached Ruse early in the morning. Right now, the time was 4.45pm. Not particularly early.
To have a better idea regarding our options we continued ahead to the station where we confirmed that there would be no more trains to Sofia, as there's only one train per day, and the next train from Bucharest wouldn't be there till 6.30 pm. Second week of February, winter was waning, and thus temperatures was not particularly low in these marshy areas. But the sun wan't on our side either. It was getting darker and the mist wasn't helping either. We started walking back towards the highway with thoughts of walking on till the bridge. An empty taxi was approaching our way in the deserted road. We stopped it deciding to try our luck. I had 7 lei, equivalent of 1 and a half euro with me, our only money.
'We, go, Bulgaria. Treni perdu.', I said. I had no idea if that was Romanian or Italian or my own Latin based language. I had recalled the words the guy at the railway crossing had said. The taxi driver indicated to us that he would take us to the border checkpost which was on the Bulgarian side of the Danube, and he would drop us at the Bulgarian toll booth for the bridge. I asked him how much it would cost, and he took a piece of paper and wrote 70 lei. We smiled at him initially and pulled the best sorry face we could. I covered the 0 in the 70 he had written and told 'set lei', indicating my 7 lei. We asked his forgiveness and started moving away from the vehicle.
'Romania control', he told, indicating the Romanian side of the toll booth for the Danube bridge. We realized that he was doing us a favor and he had nothing else to do, too. We quickly put our bags on the seat and sat in the rear. We tried to have some conversation with him, where we managed to let him know we were from the land of Bollywood. At a point 5 minutes after we had got in the car, he mentioned that it was the point till where 7 lei would have actually gotten us to. He kept going on and finally joined the highway after passing through half of the town. After 15 minutes and maybe around 8 km, we were finally at the Romanian toll booth for the bridge. He gestured us to try our luck with hitchhiking and bode farewell. We thanked him again, and prepared ourselves for 'fait du stop'.
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| The Romanian side Friendship bridge toll booth, just where the taxi dropped us. |
After a couple of cars and a truck passed by, our stars shone bright on us when a truck driver pulled aside and signalled us in. Our first truck hitchhike in Europe was here. Amidst all the renovation and construction around and on the bridge, the traffic on the bridge was slow but steadily moving ahead due to it being less crowded. We had a grand entry for ourselves over the mighty Danube where we could see glimpses of the city, the marshes around us and the heavy mist passing over the forests and the river. It was an old two lane bridge, not very European and had quite its share of potholes. The driver of the truck told us that he was going towards the black sea and would drop us right before the border point. Strange part of being in the EU but not in the Schengen zone meant that both Romania and Bulgaria needed to have their own border control where a simple European ID was sufficient for EU zone while people like us needed to be sealed in and out. But lucky for them, they could do the job in just one place, together. The friendship bridge, as it is called is the only bridge crossing between Romania and Bulgaria, the rest of such crossings being on land. We were dropped just before the border and toll booth, and the driver left wishing us luck for our journey. He was let off due to his Bulgarian ID while we had to wait a bit and answer some innocent seeming questions of the border police. After 5 minutes our passports, which we had given to a senior looking border official, were returned with the exit seal of Romania and entry seal of Bulgaria, both with a nice car on the top right corner! A first for us, again! An unexpected too. We had successfully entered Bulgaria.
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| View from the truck from the Romanian side |
We exchanged 2 euros to around 3.8 lev at the border exchange office, for the bus tickets and stood at the bus stop which was around 200 m from the border post. After waiting for 20 minutes we were sitting in a bus going towards the city center and the railway station. It was almost 4 and a half hours since our train had left Bucharest, and we had no idea what time it would pass by Ruse. At this point we were not even expecting ourselves to catch hold of this train, and we didn't either. When we reached Ruse central railway station, we were told that the next train to Sofia would leave at 11.35 pm! We had around 6 hours to kill. After killing 3 and a half hours in the station, we went around the railway station for a stroll. Our stroll made us realize that the warmth of the station waiting room was more worthy. The city was desolate except for some youngsters running around probably for partying, it being a saturday evening. Most of the restaurants and bakeries had prepared themselves for the upcoming Valentines day, the next day. Other than that there was not much to see near the station. We were back inside the station by 10.45 pm and were at the platform by 11.15, not wanting to miss another train.
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| The Bulgarian border post approaching |
We had booked a hostel in Sofia, anticipating ourselves to board the Bucharest Sofia train, which would have reached at 10.50 pm. A patchy wifi network inside the station helped us send an apology mail to the hostel explaining our situation, but the wifi also helped us prepare well for Sofia. We could collect more than enough information about Sofia, where we had around 10 hours to spare, before taking the train towards Greece.
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| Looking back at the bridge, it is definitely old! |
At 11.30 pm, the Sofia night train promptly arrived from Silistra, another border town. We were pleasantly surprised to find individual cabins with doors in which we could comfortably stretch and sleep. Not a bad way to spend a night, we thought. Once we lied down after our pass was stamped for the day, we did not wake up till we reached Sofia, the next day morning at 6.30 am.
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