Varna

Getting to Varna from Brasov took most of the day. I took a train to Bucharest, which I had considered visiting but decided not to do to lack of time. At the Bucharest train station, I was unsure what to do and had initially planned on taking a bus from there down to Ruse, just on the other side of the Bulgaria-Romania border. That might have been a good option, but I ended up taking the train...a very slow train that took nearly 4 hours to complete the journey of some 45 miles. But since I would have had to take a cab to the bus station and then find a bus from there, it seemed worth it to hop on the next train to Ruse, which it was I did.

Seeing that a train was headed down to Sofia (with a stop in Ruse) but leaving in just a few minutes I decided to enter the train without a ticket and buy one on board. However, the train ticket collector emphatically would not let me on the train without a ticket. So...I waited until he turned his back and got on anyway, a couple of cars down. When he came to collect my ticket later, he gave me a wry smile but was otherwise cool about it. Normally, when I've bought on board they write me up a receipt, but in his case he just charged me a slightly high rate and seemingly pocketed the money without giving me anything.

We crossed the Danube into Bulgaria after awhile. The pics for this entry are from the crossing. Nice nuke plant complex in the background behind the Bulgarian flag. At Ruse, everyone had to remain on board the train until passports had been stamped. Once they took care of mine, off I went to the bus station just next door, having had enough of trains by that point. Ruse, from what I little I saw in the 100 meter expanse between the bus and train stations was a bit of a dump. In the bathroom of a shop in the bus station, I was greeted by a squat toilet, as I saw in Ukraine but never in Romania. Not that I actually used it in that way, but there it was. The bus ride to Varna took about 3 hours from Ruse and went through some nice looking countryside. Plenty of agriculture and nice rolling hills. From the Varna train station it's a 20 minute walk downtown, but a nice one. Varna, at first impression, was a much nicer town that Ruse, and held up to that first impression during my single day there.

Varna is essentially a Black Sea resort town and has plenty of nightlife. The beach and water were pretty good, if a little cool, but overall very refreshing. I took a quick visit to the old Roman Baths not far from the south end of the beach, which is worth the $2 entry just to poke around for a half hour. Costs in Varna were about average for this trip, which is to say, pretty low. I wish I had had more time to visit other towns or stay longer in Varna, but when you're traveling alone, you tend not to linger and I had no time to linger in any case. Much of this trip was like that - acknowledge and move on - type of mindset.

From Varna it was an overnight bus to Istanbul, which was fairly costly as I recall, maybe $40 for the 9-hour trip with a middle of the night crossing of the Turkish border, which cost me $20 as an American. I arrived early in the morning in Istanbul, linked up with a connector bus (offered from the same company for no charge) and was shortly in Taksim Square in the center of Istanbul, with a full day of sightseeing ahead of me.