Getting To Far Away Istanbul: Transport And Sofia

I leave Srebrenica after four days, feeling recovered and up for a very new country. Once more I enjoy the bus ride along the Drina, through the sunflower, corn and melon fields, and across the Sava in Belgrade. When I buy the ticket for the night train to Sofia I am delighted to find the charming old man at the counter for international tickets to be fluent in both English and German (sounding very Austrian - I later hear he speaks French, too!). He also reassures me about security issues: 'This train is about as safe as a night train from, say, Berlin to Munich. Maybe a bit less.' I spend some hours at the internet café, get some food for the rest of the day and the next morning and return to the station well in time. The train is already there so I get in and find my compartment where I'm soon joined by a young German couple and a Scottish pharmacist. This by chance grouping turns out to work really well, we continue to Istanbul together and meet there several times, too. 

While the beds are nice enough, border control before five in the morning prevents us from feeling really awake when we reach Sofia at eight. On the sober and empty platform of Sofia's otherwise gigantic socialist main station a smoking guy in worn-out flip-flops tries to persuade us to directly book a bus ticket to Istanbul with his company. Not too keen on this marketing strategy we try to ignore him for a while, but maybe this is the way it works here, the price turns out to be reasonable and we can leave our luggage at the station. So we set off to find the starting point of the free walking tour, one of my travel buddies heard about. We walk down the main street with a quite impressive mix of architecture. When we finally reach the Palace of Justice, we still have time till the start of the tour, so we have breakfast, sharing our bread with a Gypsy lady.  

The tour takes about two hours and the guide, a law student is really good. It is a suitable way to learn some basic facts and see the key sights in a city where you spend only a minimum amount of time. It gives me the feeling of actually having been in Bulgaria. We get an idea both of the old history and the socialist time and of the issues of modern Bulgaria. Walking through many green parks in combination with eating a lot of really good ice cream (fig! plum!) I even manage to stay more or less awake.

Start of the tour at the Palace of Justice. Note one of the ubiquitous lions - this one however proves the sculptor's lack of biological knowledge...

A capital in layers: Very old small church, Stalin era style government building (which used to be crowned by a huge red star)

Quite impressive lady - there was a Lenin statue at this place till 1990

Last functioning mosque in the city - built of brick! - in the background on the left a synagogue

The church bell of the church of the Holy Spirit 

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

After the tour we sit in one of the parks for a while and then walk around for quite a long time until we find a café where we just sit for most of the day, have a drink and watch the rain come and go. Finally we get up to buy some food, walk back to the bus station and take about an hour to rearrange our backpack households, sitting between the tiny bungalows holding bus company offices. At 8 we get on the Turkish bus. It's packed and unfortunately some of the elderly passengers are quite noisy, listening to music from earphones not on their ears or snoring. We cross the border two hours after midnight, this time we need to get off the bus and even put our luggage through the x-ray. We are not all that awake when we reach the absolutely gigantic Istanbul central bus station. Luckily there is a really nice waiting area where some people just continue snoring, we have some breakfast and watch the dawn growing lighter until we catch the shuttle downtown.

First morning in Istanbul, International bus station

More Paths Walked Till The End - If Only Caspar David Friedrich Had Known!

After the having spent an afternoon at the springs I want to find out where some other roads and paths out of the city lead. First I walk straight South. This is where I find the small Catholic chapel opposite the path leading to the town walls open this time. I pay it a short visit and try to figure out (not really successfully) the Serbian explanations about the stones in its yard. Then I just walk on, past short front gardens overflowing with pink and lilac flowers, it's getting hotter after a quite chilly morning, there aren't many people in the street that eventually starts to twist and turn, looking different after every corner. I walk past a small hotel, some guests waiting for their lunch at its restaurant, and some construction workers renewing part of the asphalt under some apple trees. Then buildings get scarce as I approach the edge of the town. There is a weather station and a sharp twist of the road leading out of the town there is a big dog living under an abandoned trailer with her puppies. I leave the main road as it doesn't look too approapriate for walking from here on and find myself in a quite idyllic sandy street with big houses generously placed between green hills, some of the gardens are entered by means of small bridges. A dog starts to bark fiercely, I'm glad to see he is on a chain. The street gradually turns into a forest path with a steep hill covered in shrubs rising to the side opposite of the houses. Sunlight and heat linger on the dried grass, it smells of warm needle trees. I see an old woman with a colorful headscarf and a kind wrinkly face. She leads her goat to grase on the steep hill, smokes and smiles. And looks at me curiously. There are probably not all that many tourists right here and I look very touristy I guess. I am happy to find my Serbian sufficient by now to have a small chat with her, tell her I am from Germany, not the Netherlands and thank her for her compliments. She asks me if I am married, as I tell her I am not she wishes me luck to find a husband and have a child. In Germany I might have felt offended by someone just taking it as a given that everyone wishes to have a family, but here I take it as a genuine good wish that puts a smile on my  face, even more so as I understood it in a language I didn't actually ever learn.

When I ask Miloš if it is possible to get close to the old city walls I realize that I actually stopped half way to the top last time because it was getting dark and I thought the road was leading somewhere else. So I go back there and continue up the side of the valley, dark green all around, some bushes heavy with big black elderberries, occasional apple trees on the up hill side of the road, quite some apples fallen on the road. The valley is filled with the sound of the Guber, invisible beneath all the trees and bushes and I catch a glimpse on the construction site of the new spa building. After a while I find another set of houses, I am not out of town here. They are surrounded by huge gardens and situated between two hills, one crowned by the old walls, the other holding a Muslim graveyard, white stones gleaming in the sun. There is a big steel cross on the edge of the wall and I sit next to it for a long while enjoying the view and the wind and the blazing sun. A good place for writing and feeling free. After a while the sky gets more overcast and I hear a rumbling sound in the distance. This is not the place to be in a thunderstorm so I hurry down and reach the hostel already drenched by the heavy four o'clock rain.

 



 

 

 

As quickly as it came the rain is over again and before darkness falls I hurry off again to visit the other Peak, the one with the graveyard. The quickly changing evening light and the damp air after the heavy rain make me take a lot of pictures - and some views of multiple layers of mountains and clouds actually remind me a lot of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, especially when there are gravestones in the Picture, too! If you don't know this German painter who was actually born in the town where I study take a look here. Maybe he wouldn't have limited his trips to Germany, Danmark and Czechia if he had known about this place...