The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

Previously, on The Grants’ Bulgaria Blog…

“We left the three intrepid muskateers in Bansko, amidst the mountains of southwestern Bulgaria. Unbeknownst to them, they were being pursued by a giant green dragon (common in Bulgaria, don’t you know?) as they packed their bags and headed for the bus. Will they survive this encounter? Read on…”

Friday 23rd Oct: Boris seemed to get quite sullen after we told him we were leaving. I wonder if he was disappointed to hear we were ready to leave Bansko? He’s a Banskovite born-and-bred so perhaps he thought our 36-hour stay didn’t do his lovely town justice. We told him we’d try to come back in winter! Are you keen for that, Mum and Dad?

We jumped on a nasty old bus to Sofia in the morning and chugged our way west from Bansko and then north towards the capital. As you can see from the map above, we were sidling around the Rila Mountains which are just south of Sofia. We would have liked to visit the Rila Monastery (a stunning, thousand-year-old monastery about 1100m up in the mountains) but these things are hard to access by bus. We should have taken the lead of some of the backpackers we met in Plovdiv and done more hitch-hiking!

We made it to Sofia in the early afternoon with about 5 hours to waste before our train left. Elly and I don’t really like Sofia. It seems to have all the ugliness of a large city (smog, traffic and lots of busy, grumpy people) without the usual benefits (like good shopping, a larger range of shops/cafes, great architecture etc). Maybe it was our whingeing beforehand, but Humphrey took all of 3 seconds to take a strong dislike to Sofia. It smells bad; I think that was his main impression. I think it’s a telling statistic that we failed to take a single photograph of the city… except the horrendously Communistic train station:

Then we jumped on the train! Best part of Sofia we saw all day. (Sorry, that’s a bit mean.) We had debated all day whether to take the train or the bus… but once we saw our cabin we were glad we chose the former! It might not look much, but it’s so much more comfortable than a tiny, upright bus seat! Eauch!

There was the extra cool factor for the train: it was bound for Moscow!! The surprisingly friendly lady at the ticket office told us to make sure we set an alarm for approximately 5:45am – the ETA for Bucharest – or else we might end up in Russia. We thought that sounded quite appealing, in some ways.

The train ride was uneventful. We got up at about 3am to hand over our passports – firstly to the Bulgarians and then to the Romanians (who looked at them and said “kangaroo?”, to which we all laughed). We also stayed up to watch the crossing of the Danube River. I think a few of you even got special international SMSs as we did so!

Saturday 24th Oct:

The train arrived slightly early. That may sound like a good thing, but it meant stumbling off the train at 5:30am. I even have proof; check out the glorious expressions on their faces! Oh, did I mention it was about 6 degrees C?

We wandered around the train station for a while until a sudden realisation came to us: we literally didn’t know a word of Romanian; nor did we have even the vaguest clue of the layout of Bucharest… Time for a quick google to find some of this essential info! So we found ourselves in McDonalds drinking some very ordinary coffee so we could use the wi-fi internet.

Before long we’d scratched a map onto a piece of paper and took ourselves and our 15kg packs out onto the streets.

Immediately we noticed that Romania has a very different feel to Bulgaria. While we saw glimpses of the same rows of faceless concrete apartment blocks that characterised Bulgarian cities, Bucharest still has oodles of buildings with character!

The language is vastly different, of course. We didn’t find this out until later, but quite a large proportion of people in Romania actually speak Hungarian – especially in Transylvania (the northwestern third of the country), where we were headed. It was quite a thrill to hear a Latin-based language and recognise a decent percentage of the words because of it!

I’ll talk more about our thoughts on Romania in another post, I think.

—

We decided to walk to the bus station from the train station. Doesn’t sound too hard, does it?

Well, it was a daft idea. Luckily, we don’t know who to blame for it, but we do know (don’t we, Humf and Elly?) that I, Stu, was the one left to do all the navigation in the streets of Bucharest.

After three-and-a-half hours of resolutely refusing kind offers from greedy taxi-drivers, we arrived on foot at our bus station. Within half and hour we’d jumped on our maxi-taxi (which is what Romanians call mini buses) and departed for Târgu Mureş. It was a very strange way to make an impression of Bucharest. I don’t recommend it; we’re hoping to be able to see a little more of it on the way home!

—

Ta-da! We had made it to Târgu Mureş. It was there that we met up with our good friends Jon, Margot and James Nairn who are living and working in Romania.

We had adventures, some of which Elly will thrill you with next time. Stay tunes for descriptions of the wonders of shopping in Romania and possibly even how fun playing paintball is!

Cheers,

Stu.

Tags: holidays, mountains, Romania, trains, travelling

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