Bulgaria had been an unexpected trip back to Cyrillic and outward opening doors. The doors were almost as hard to get used to again as the letters. I got about two thirds of the alphabet again before it was time to leave. I was excited about heading home. Catching the bus from Plovdiv to Istanbul …
The Scenic Route
My slow (ish) journey from Australia to Scotland by bus, train and boat with as little flying as possible.
A dog town and a cat town
The strange thing about the train from Bucharest to Sofia was that it grew. I’m sure I was in the front carriage when I got on. Following the route on the GPS, we zigzagged from town to town, through massive open fields with not a house in sight. This had to be industrial scale farming. Another huge …
Where the Houses have Eyes
The last thing I did before leaving Budapest was to book my flight home from Istanbul. There have been points where I would have been ready to head home earlier, but the timing feels right now with only a little over a week to go. The train station was a few stops on the metro from the hostel. I …
How Strong are Your Castle Walls?
I haven’t got much of an idea of what the scenery was like between Sibiu and Brasov. Instead I basically got a wide ranging lecture from a Romanian woman. She had some interesting things to say, but it was pretty much one way traffic for a couple of hours. I did manage to spy a farm of solar panels …
Horrors and Beauty
Someone had the temperature in the train compartment turned up really high when I got on. It might have been the two young women travelling together and getting around in their underwear. The one I could see from my bunk had big flashy earrings and butterfly tattoos. She showed me showed me two …
Back on track
I took the scenic train to make my way out of Switzerland. The Glacier Express boasts that it’s the slowest fast train in the world, but I just liked the angled windows in the roof. Instead of going all the way to the end of the line and having to backtrack, I only booked it as far as Chur to give …