So after getting to sleep for what felt like 10 minutes, we were loudly awakened by continuous banging on the door and shouts of POLIZIA! PASSPORT! This was border control #1. A horrible bastard of a policeman, who happened to be one of the ugliest men i have ever seen, came in and woke us up, examined our passports as though they were made of dog excrament, and then gave mine and Graham’s back. However, as Stephen’s surname is Paveleck, the guard took extra care to check and re-check his passport just in case he was an Eastern European who had acquired a fake UK passport and was using it to sneak out of Croatia with two genuine UK passport holders.
I drifted back into sleep when BANG BANG on the door and POLIZIA PASSPORT was again heard, but this time with more banging to boot. This was our Serbian border inspection. We got a little taste of what it must be like to live in a dictatorship; uniformed police banging on your door and shouting at you, shining light in your face. I gave my passport to the first policewoman and she started shouting at me to get up so she could see my face, but then when i did just ignored me. Again Ste had his passport thoroughly examined, because everyone knows the Poles are trying to sneak into Serbia all the time. The police then left, though didn’t bother to close our door. At the time i was quite pissed off, but thinking about it now it’s no surprise really: 8 years ago the UK spearheaded a NATO bombing of Serbia, which while i think was justified, can’t be very popular with the Serbian people. I guess i’d be pissed off if i was Serbian and some spoilt brats from the UK were keeping me up at 4am.
Eventually we got back to sleep, though it wasn’t easy because the night train people have this fantastic idea: it’s called drive really really fast, and then come to an abrupt halt so that all the people and asleep nearly fall out of their beds onto their faces. This is not how they describe it in the interrail booklet.
I woke up about 11, and it was already roasting. The train was supposed to get in at 17.40. How naive of us to think that it might. At about 1pm, we stopped in the middle of Serbia, and just stopped. The train waited at this station for literally 2 hours, in the baking heat, and nobody bothered to even try and explain what was going on. We leaned out of the window desparate for air, but I didn’t want to get off because my friend the ticket inspector was glaring at me with a look of death. Eventually i plucked up the courage to go and fill up our water bottles from the drinking fountain, keeping and eye on the corrupt-looking Serbian policemen. I know you can’t tell they’re corrupt just from looking, but well they didn’t look very nice.
Eventually the train got going again. The only bareable part of the trip was when we passed though a mountain range in southern Serbia, with cliffs rising up on either side, shooting through tunnels and over rivers, hanging out of the windows to cool down and check out the scenary which is some of the most beautiful imaginable. But it really was hot. The temperature must of been at least 35, and i spent most of it in my underwear reading the same page from Norman’s Europe: A History. Apart from that it was all old men with goats and people living in absolute grinding poverty, trying to grow crops on land that didn’t look like it had seen rain in 6 months. Again, some perspective for a rich kid who thought it was a bit hot.
Eventually we approached Sofia (had another border check, but as Bulgaria is now EU we passed through quickly, although Ste’s passport did get studied a lot longer than mine and Graham’s, again) at about 8pm. The run up was quite something. Sofia is surrounded by shanty towns that look like something from Brazil,. where people live literally under four pieces of wood and a sheet of corrugated iron, whilst horses and dogs abound. I suspect these areas were mostly populated by Romany people, but the poverty was shocking, and it made the estates of Croatia look like Belle Air.
Sofia central station is a monstrosity, a legacy of the Communist era. The central area rises about 100ft into the air, with the sides decorated in modern sculpture, presumably with some originally intended propaganda purpose. Nowadays, with half the lights not working, they look like giant demonic spectres, looming over tiny people on the dirty linoleum floor. It’s hard to describe just how forbidding the station is. Outside there was a giant statue, which now covered in dirt and pigeon shit looks like the petrified guardian of some ancient satanic temple.
Undeterred, we headed for our hostel: we booked this specially on the internet because it looked amazing. Free pasta, free internet, a widescreen TV with a choice of films, our own room, right in the city centre. In short, the works, and all for about 5 quid a night. However when we got there, the hostel staff were genuinely sorry to inform us that there had been a mistake and they had given our rooms away. They were actually really nice about it, and sat us down with a glass of beer each. They sorted us out with another hostel down the road, and then actually gave us a lift there.
The lift was quite something. On Bulgarian roads, there are basically no rules. On some stretches there are simply no traffic markings, and the lights are only nominally acknowledged. The guy driving us, who was actually incredibly nice and helpful, asked us where we were from. We said near liverpool, and commented that it was somewhat different on the roads. He laughed and said “yes, the further East you get, the more chaotic it is!”. He then proceded to explain that in Bulgaria, nobody cares about cars much; if you have a bump, then you apparently you can tell by the impact and noice what damage there is, and if it’s not bad the drivers just wave at each other and drive on. As he put it “many crashes, very few fatalities!”. He illustrated this by pointing to his two wing-mirrors, which were part of the car only by virtue of masking tape, and then proceded to swerve the car around the road to show just how much fun driving in Bulgaria is. For someone who hates rollercoasters, i was shitting myself. When asked about insurance he replied that if you have a bump, you just tell the insurance your car was parked and somebody hit it “after all, you pay insurance in case car gets hit, so if car gets hit, insurance pays: if nobody hurt, insurance don’t ask for police report”.
We got to our new hostel, which was a bit rubbish really, and where the door didn’t lock properly, and quickly dumped our stuff to go looking for something to eat. We hadn’t eaten since 9pm the day before, and it was now 10 in the evening. We wandered about, then found a restaurant with an English menu (Bulgarian writing looks like Russian; we didn’t even have a chance of deciphering even the word “pizza”)
In delight, we proceded to order food that WAS NOT PIZZA. Graham and I are vegetarians, and finding vegetarian food in Europe is hard enough, especially when you can’t read menus. This has meant that pretty much every day we have eaten cheese sandwhiches for lunch, and margharita pizzas in the evening. And believe me, bread and cheese starts to get really fucking boring when it’s all you see and taste for 10 days. But tonight we had glorious salad (i made a mockery of the “for two” notice on the salad menu), a fantastic vegetarian lasagne, pancakes, coffee and orange juice. It was all delicious, and it worked out as about….7 quid. Unreal. Whilst i must admit i felt very guilty pigging out for peanuts while people down the road live in slums, I was also grateful not to be eating pizza. Does that make me a shit person? At the time i didn’t really care. Stuffed full, we headed back to the hostel for a big night’s sleep.
