Night Train

A Sofia - Belgrade ticket costs me 30 euros, 45 minutes trying to find the EuroRail booth, and a whole day to kill in the Bulgarian capital. I spend it walking around the city, reading on park benches, eating Bulgarian ice cream (like Italian gelato, with more cream), and shopping for books near the Aleksander Nevski church, where old men have set up tables on the sidewalk and piled them high with used paperbacks. I buy a Hemingway with an introduction in Bulgarian, in the Cyrillic alphabet I find so confounding, especially for street and city names. I'm not sure if they used Cyrillic in Serbia. I'll have to check that in my guide.

I arrive at the station too early, of course, so I order a Zagorka and drop my backpack on the floor in front of me. I get as comfortable as I can, trying to relax before an unpromising ride. As I watch people pass by -- employees, other backpackers, strange mustachioed men -- I try to remember where I am and where I am going. It's hard, at times, to have a sense of now and here.

A week ago I was hiking with a Russian Jew near Lake Matka, Macedonia.

Two Days ago I was having drinks with three French girls in Veligo Tarnovo, Bulgaria.

Tomorrow morning I'll wake up in Belgrade, Serbia.

In two days I'll be listening to Franz Ferdinand on my iPod in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In four days I'll be jumping off a rock into the Adriatic near Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Maybe I could've planned this backpacking trip more logically.

The enormous clock in the station has neared my departure time more reasonably. I finish my beer and haul my enormous backpack as carelessly as I can despite the weight and asymmetrical shape (mainly due to the excessive amount of books I've stuffed in it) and walk towards the platform.

Outside, the train is there, under the harsh glare of exterior halogens. A group of travelers are sitting down on the floor of the platform against their backpacks. I notice a couple of Canadians by the red and white flags sewn to their packs. Only Canadians do that. I don't feel like going to talk to them.

The man on the platform informs me with the usual Bulgarian impoliteness where my compartment is and I climb aboard the train. I find my compartment easily, and I am confronted with the reality of couchettes: four narrow bench like platforms, two on top of each other on each side, covered in faded red suede. One of them, which I take to be mine, has a small sheet and pillow waiting for me. I can only hope to be alone. The absence of sheets and pillows on the other beds is promising.

I make my bed, which consists in tucking the sheet over the bench, and sit down to check my guidebooks, trying to plan the next leg of my trip. More people board the train. I hear laughing and talking in French and English and other languages I can't quite put my ear on. Travelers stride past my compartment, looking for theirs.

Eventually I put my Lonely Planet down and get out of my compartment. I open the train window and breath in some cool night air. A guy comes out of the neighboring compartment and stands beside me. I turn around to look back at him as he greets me.

"Hey! Are you alone in your compartment as well?"

"Yeah! You too?"

"Yeah. Guess night trains aren't that popular around here."

"Most people travel by bus, I guess..."

He looks around him, smiling.

"Wonder why."

"Yeah..."

"If you tried the washroom you wouldn't."

"I don't even want to look at them."

"It's, like, just a hole, really."

"You mean, it opens right onto the tracks?"

"Sure it does. They recommend not to use them when the train's stopped."

"Wonder why..."

"I did anyways!"

We laugh. He seems nice enough. I'm bad at accents, but he's probably Australian.

"You're from Australia, right?"

"Nope. New Zealand!" Damn. They get me every time. "You?"

"Canada."

"Yeah, I thought as much, but you don't have a flag on your bag so I wasn't sure."

He points back at my compartment. We laugh again. I wonder when he had time to notice I didn't have anything sewn on to my bag.

"So anyway, you heading for Belgrade too?"

"Yeah, I am... do you know when we'll get there?"

"Around five in the morning I think."

"Oh, God..."

"It's not so bad, at least we're already near the border, so we won't get woken up in the middle of the night."

"Yeah, I guess..."

The train jolts into movement under our feat with a creaking metallic sound that resonates around us. The platform starts gliding past the windows slowly. We both move towards our respective compartments.

"Anyway, I've downloaded a bunch of movies on my computer if you want to come, later."

"Yeah, sure..."

"I've got Watchmen and a bunch of other films."

"Okay, I'll see you later."

"See you."

Back in my compartment, I close the heavy door and try to read Dostoyevski. It's long enough to last for days, engaging enough to provide an escape in cramped buses and loud hostels, but not too gripping, so I don't feel like reading all the time and actually see things.

After a while I drop the book, close the light, and put on my earphones. I play Chopin's nocturnes on repeat and lie down on my couchette, trying to get some rest. Soon the train comes to a complete stop and the light go on in the corridor. I take of my earphones. I hear compartment doors opening and some shouting. Border control.

I receive a total of six people in my compartment in the next half hour. First, one of the men on the train who checks my ticket, tells me he will come get me tomorrow when we've arrived in Belgrade, and warns me the border control people are coming. Next, a mustachioed man comes in, wipes a flashlight across my eyes and my compartment, checks my passport, and stuffs his arm in my backpack. Then a woman comes and stamps my passport. I've just exited Bulgaria. Next a Serbian agent comes in and asks for my passport. He opens a flashlight and checks under the benches. He leaves. A woman comes in, asking to check my bags. She opens my backpack and starts taking out my things and piling them in my arms. She gets to a pile of books halfway through my bag.

"What this?"

"Books."

She keeps searching through my things, comes to a bulging pocket with something hard in it. She can't get to it, it opens from the inside.

"This?"

"A book."

"Books, books, books."

Clearly discouraged, she drops my backpack and stares at me for a moment. She looks down at the Dostoyevski on my couchette.

"This?"

"A book. Dostoyevski?"

"Dostoyevski?"

"Yes."

She sighs, signals to stuff my things back in my bag and leaves. Finally another man comes in and stamps my passport. I'm in Serbia.

After the border control I close my compartment door and lock it. Then I sneak into my sheets fully dressed and try to sleep. It's impossible. The train is loud and awkward. There's the rusty grinding of metal against metal, the sudden jolts as we stop at stations in the middle of nowhere, the orange glare of lamps outside, the clunk clunk clunk clunk of the wheels on the rails.

When I do sleep, I dream of trains. It's as noisy and uncomfortable in my slumber as it is outside of it. I'm not quite sure I sleep at all. Flashing lights come and go. Stations come and go. Silent conductors suck on hot cigarettes in the night, I glimpse a city or a building. Clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk.

Then someone tries to open the door of my compartment. I spring up from my bed and open it myself, fumbling for a few seconds on the cold metal. The employee from last night stands there seriously and warns me we'll be in Belgrade in 10 minutes.

One minute later I've packed everything and I'm ready. It's early, I've barely slept, and it's intensely cold. Outside the window, in the pale morning light, communist era concrete apartment blocks glide past despondently. Novi Beograde. This country does not look promising.

The Kiwi I met last night emerges from his own compartment, as red-eyed and disheveled as I certainly am.

"Morning..."

"Hey. Sleep well?"

"Nope."

The train slows down and comes to a stop. The heavy door opens and I step down onto the platform.

N.B. This piece is a little too auto-biographical for my liking, but sometimes reality might as well be fiction... The only thing that doesn't stick to my personal experience is the arrival in Belgrade. Trains coming in from Sofia arrive in Belgrade from the East, which means they don't pass trough Novi Beograde at all. I did, however, pass trough Novi Beograde by train at the end of another night train (from Sarajevo) two weeks after the events described here. I put in the description of the apartment buildings because I think it's the best way to enter Belgrade. There just so damn ugly and grey and cold it feels like you've just landed in Communist Yugoslavia. This picture at the top was taken in Sofia. It was the best picture I had for the piece because it's from one of the two cities and it was tram cables on it, which is sort of related to trains. The truth is, I have no pictures of trains. I'm positively certain I actually took one in the Sofia-Belgrade train but I must have deleted it during the trip.