My faith in train travel is somewhat restored.
Belgrade to Sofia
I started the day in style. After a stay in a hotel the night before I decided to just book a car through the hotel to avoid any funny business with taxi drivers. And so I rolled up to Topcider train station on the outskirts of town in chauffeur driven Mercedes, a lot fancier than I had imagined. I did draw some looks from some of the other travellers decamping from the tram nearby as my driver took my rucksack out of the boot and helped place it on my back.
The train was pretty much on time and was just made of two carriages. Nothing fancy.
The seats were basic but unlike my previous journey I ended up having a whole 4 seats to myself to make home for the next 11 hours or so.
This meant I was able kick back, take my shoes off and spread across the seats which was a luxury compared to the previous journey but still resulted in a sore bottom after so many hours.
The only downside was that there was no air conditioning and it did get pretty hot in the afternoon. The windows were all down but the issue was that the train went so slowly there wasn’t any breeze generated even if sticking one’s head out the window. Especially towards the tail end of the journey we can’t have been going more than about 10-15mph. It was so frustratingly slow. The total distance travelled is less than 200 miles but it takes pretty much half a day. At least I could get up and stretch my legs. Even with some Netflix, a bit of reading and writing some postcards it was pretty boring. Thankfully I’d brought a fairly wholesome picnic with me which kept me going throughout the day.
We eventually arrived at Sofia’s central train station just a while before ten, only an hour late.
Wandering Henry 