DEFCON 2

Ulysses on his way home suffered the wrath of Poseidon at sea. We suffered it on land.

Right from the beginning, rain had been always a constant threat. In London it respected us. In Paris and until Prague it looked too grey. In Wien it threw all it had over us, wetting us in a matter of seconds –and giving me a cold. In Budapest it confined us to our rooms. And in the Balkans… Intermittentshowers had been a constant in Sarajevo but we surely weren’t prepared for what was about to come in the rest of the country, much poorly prepared and with a worse infrastructure to withstand the attack of Mother Nature. The disaster was on way to collision with us.

We boarded a train supposed to last for eight hours, from Sarajevo to Belgrade. The plan was to arrive just on time to have a quick view of the city and then catch another train to Sofia. And everything was working fine. The train went out of Sarajevo on time, without problems, good speed and it looked like rain was forgiving us for a while.

Well, not so fast. After three-four hours, we arrived to Doboj –town to add to the axis of evil of Alençon and Hollendretch. Suddenly the train stops. After the first few moments of not knowing what’s going on, I asked the ticket inspector. “No English”; great. Fortunately, there was a Canadian-Serbian girl around that translated it to me: the railway is flooded and the train cannot continue; we must get off the train and wait for a bus that will connect us to another train to bring us to Belgrade. Knowing what was going on, the ticket inspector used me as a speaker to communicate the news to the rest of foreigners aboard the train, so I went compartment by compartment telling the news.

Resigned to wait –and hungry- we got off the train and waited in the station. It’s strange how these experiences unite you with your fellow travelers. Up until then, David and I almost never had exchange words with other travelers –apart from Prague and mostly because David wasn’t too eager to that. But there in Doboj we befriended am English couple, two French girls, two Canadian-Serbian girls and several Bosnian and Serbian old fellas that didn’t have a clue of English.

Five hours later the bus appeared. We thought the wait was over, but it had just started. The cause of our delay –the floods- had flooded the road and the bus spent more than two and a half hours trying to cross what looked more like a river than a road, even though it was just about two kilometers long. Once we crossed it everything went quicker, including border formalities.

Still, it took us five hours to get to the train waiting for us. It was like a palace in an oasis in the middle of the desert, even though it was just an old train in a station in the middle of nowhere. But they had food onboard and we were moving. Three hours with little sleep but good food and funny waiters made the trip to Belgrade easy and a pleasure compared to what we had just had.

We finally arrived to Belgrade in the middle of the night. Our night train to Sofia, although a night train, had gone several hours ago and the next one wasn’t running until 7 in the morning. It was too late to find a hostel and too early to board the train, so we had to sleep in the train station in Belgrade, just the one that our guide discouraged to sleep in. David could get some sleep, I didn’t.

With too much sleep to recover and too little food eaten, we boarded the train to Sofia. Eight hours, this time without major problems. And just like that, after 32 hours of travelling, we arrived in Sofia. And what’s our prize for all that travelling? A dull city, a grey city, a boring city; probably the worst city we’ve visited so far. Fine, Bulgarian women are awesome and our couchsurfer Mila was a great host, but seriously, Sofia is a city worth to skip.

No wonder we took the first train out of the city to Athens.