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