In the pink in Sofia
Me’n’C were booked into the bus to Sofia early the next morning, thanks to the assistance of A, who kindly organised our tickets for us. We hopped into a taxi and arrived at the bus station nice and early, and tried to decipher our Cyrillic tickets.
Our Skopje – Sofia bus
Once on the bus, we wound our way through the streets of Skopje and through the north of Northern Macedonia to the Bulgarian border. Like our previous border crossings, this was pretty straightforward and we rumbled on for another couple of hours before reaching Sofia.
Fabulous Brutalist sculpture outside the main train station at Sofia
On applying to the International Ticket Window at the train station (one cannot book tickets on the Sofia Istanbul Express online, by phone or anything else apart from turning up at the train station) we found out that the double sleepers we’d hoped to book were all sold out, so our only option was to take spots in a 6-berth second class couchette compartment. We shrugged and headed out to explore Sofia.
Sofia main street
Not knowing anything at all about Sofia, we wandered our way to what looked like the centre of the city and had some lunch, then explored a bit more and finally found the pedestrian mall, full of locals and tourists enjoying their Sunday. After a cocktail and a quick stop at the supermarket for supplies, we headed back to the train station to await the train.
Much fun was ahead of us. We found our compartment, realising that “second class” meant the old, previously German Rail once upon a time Bulgarian carriage rather than the comfortable airconditioned Turkish ones we’d read about. We met our compartment mates, a Welsh lady and her son, who seemed perturbed that they would be sharing the compartment with us and our luggage. We shrugged, opened the window, ate our supper snacks and settled in.
The story spread from the other passengers that apparently the conductors had been spruiking the possibility of upgrading to the many empty “ice room” aircon first-class carriages for the low fee of 50 euros (the ticket price difference was about 5 euro). Confused as we were, since we’d tried to book one only to be told that they were all sold out, we expressed some disbelief, but apparently the conductor had tried to sell these to others in our carriage. Not sure what was going on there.
Leaving Bulgaria
We knew we’d have to wake up for the early hours border crossing, so decided to make an early night of it, especially once we found out we only had four in our compartment instead of 6. The kicker of the evening was when we arrived at the Turkish border at around 2.45am. Leaving Bulgaria was straightforward: officials came onto the train, took our passports and processed them before returning them. It was the Turkish entry side that was “interesting”.
First we queued up in the station as we had expected, but then after having our passports processed and heading back to the train, we were told we needed to have our luggage scanned. We had to go back to the train, collect all of our bags, bring them back to the other side of the station and wait to have them all scanned. There was only one official working, and the scanner kept breaking, so we queued for hours and didn’t leave Kapikule until after 6am. At least we all got a few hours sleep after that, and the rest of the ride was uneventful.
Two Weeks Away 