That answer was to the following question, asked by Luke, to the Greek Rail lady when we bought our train tickets to get from Athens to Budapest;
"Do you think we'll need a visa to get through any of the countries on the way?"
It was more of a spur-of-the-moment question, we hadn't really thought about it, so the lady was by no means responsible for the following event, but if our trip had been a movie, that simple question and answer would have been accompanied by forboding music... we were, unwittingly, in for a rough ride.
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Since you last heard from us, we've had a great time in Munich, Freiburg, Geneva, Poitiers (thanks so much to Liz and all the ICSers in her ramshackle apartment for letting Luke and I stay with them, and being so much fun, and for taking us berry picking!), Nice, Florence and Rome (so many tourists... I can relate with Alex and Rhiannon, when they say they got up early to see David... we got up incredibly early to go to the Vatican city, and still waited an hour and a half in the queue to get in).
We got an overnight ship from Ancona (Italy) to Patras (Greece), then from there to Athens, which, I reckon, is a fantastic city. It was, however, on the train journey from there to Budapest where our luck turned for the worse...
First of all, the trains in Greece are incredibly old... I'm talking 1950s or '60s; vynal seats, faux wood panelling and no air conditioning, a bad combination when the weather is around 34 degrees. We changed trains at Thessaloniki, into another incredibly old train, but we were in a sleeper compartment, very cosy, with lovely red velour curtains. We slept that night in relative comfort, and spent the next morning looking at the lovely scenery of Bulgaria; densely wooded hills, and picturesque lakes, and we thought, wow, this place is lovely, maybe we should come back sometime.
We'd had our passports checked several times on the trip, so when the Romanian border police got on the train at the last stop in Bulgaria, we thought nothing of it, until the policeman asked, "where are your visas?"
"What visas?"
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If we've learnt anything from this trip, it's to CHECK VISA REQUIREMENTS before going to a country. It sounds so basic, and we feel like such idiots (and we probably are), but we just thought that if we were going through a country and not stopping, we wouldn't need a visa. It would have saved us a lot of trouble though, just to, you know, check it out .
***
For some reason the Romanian police didn't let us off the train in Bulgaria, instead taking our passports and making us stay on until the first stop in Romania. Our neighbour on the train, a man with an adolf hitler moustache and a little broken German, told us the Romanian and Bulgarian police were bad and corrupt and that we should try to bribe them. However we didn't like the idea of ending up in a Romanian jail, so just did whatever they told us to do.
We may laugh about it now, but at the time, we were shitting ourselves. We were in a small town, in the Balkans, at the mercy of a supposedly corrupt and terrible policeforce. Maybe I've watched too much TV, but what was to stop them doing something terrible to us? I have never trusted the police less, or been more scared, than on that day. Finally we were taken to a police van, which drove us to Romanian customs, where, after waiting in a dingy questioning room, we were given our passports back. After that, we were driven to the Bulgarian border, and left to find our way to wherever we wanted to go.
We got a taxi to the nearest town (coincidentally, the town where we first met the Romainan police almost 5 hours ago). The taxi driver told us we weren't the only Australians he'd given a lift back from the border; apparently he gets about one a month. At least we're not the only idiots... From the town, we got the midnight train to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, and the nearest international airport. While on the train, we had to bribe the train controller, a big lady who babbled at us in Bulgarian and one word of German, "strafe" (penalty/fine), so that we could sleep with our feet on the seats.
Once in Sofia, we made it to the airport and booked the next flight to Helsinki (you don't want to know how expensive
that was), and spent from 7am to 5pm waiting at the airport for our flight to get us out of the god forsaken place.
Just a note, the Balkans look picturesque when travelling through them in the comfort of a sleeper carriage (which is what we intended to do), but when you're tired, scared, and mentally unprepared for the place, it's a huge shock. I just wasn't prepared for the depressingness of it all... Living in a town like Ruse would be an absolute nightmare for me; those concrete communists apartment buildings probably looked drab in the 60s and 70s when they were built, but now as they crumble to ruins, they look depressingly hideous. And people live their whole lives there, and don't know anything else. Luke and I realised just how lucky we are to have the ability to say, "fuck it, I'll pay whatever it takes to get me the hell out of here." We in the western world complain about such trifling things; recently I heard that Simple Plan song "welcome to my life", or whatever it's called, and I felt like throwing my chair at the TV screen, because they really have nothing to complain about ("waah, my lawyer parents don't give me enough attention, life in this mansion is just so boring").
Anyway, enough of the drivel. We got the flight to Helsinki, via Vienna (yay! got to speak German again), and spent the next 3 days revelling in western capitalism's glories, by practically living in the biggest department store in Europe, Stockmann's. We did go to Tallinn, in Estonia for a day, which was interesting, in a touristy kind of way. Then on to Stockholm, from whence Luke posted the last blog, and now we're in beautiful Oslo, staying with our lovely friend Martin and his family.
So here is where the Luke and Mel saga ends for now, but stay tuned for more adventures...
The end.
