…and down another. Over and over again. I’m going to spare you actually how long, but leisurely taking photos out the window added up to a few hundred over the course of the entire trip.
Actually, I’ll tell you: other than for 25 minutes yesterday afternoon – from 6:45pm to 7:10pm, we spent the entire day on trains.
We left Thessaloniki at midnight:30 and woke up somewhere during the 9am hour… to this…
Yeah, not exactly the worst thing to wake up to! But it was rather extraordinary at times. We were near Sofiya, Bulgaria, shortly after sun-up, riding north towards the Romanian border.
Travel days are good. After such long days of walking Athens and the Acropolis and the narrow streets there.
Still, the voyage through Bulgaria into Romania was… epic, I guess you could say. I really do love trains, but 16.5 hours is a long time.
It lends itself to philosophy.
“I don’t really understand the mindset of these people,” says Hailey.
We had passed town after town of dilapidated buildings and entire factory complexes left abandoned, like modern ghost towns.
It is as if the land and the people and the buildings were left pre-World War 2. Many villages only having a few cars and more donkeys and carts than anything.
And the heavy machinery that IS used looks archaic and pieced together. You sometimes even ask, “What could that possibly be used for?”
The people are either much younger or much older than my sister and I, almost as if all of the people our age have disappeared from the villages and towns – at least as far as the train window allowed us to see.
Still, much of Bulgaria is extraordinarily beautiful…
…and Romania is beautiful in a completely different way.
After our quick stop in Bucharest, the sun began to set as we rode slowly into the Transylvanian countryside. Sadly, the failing light did not allow for any usable photographs of these places, but this part of Romania yielded a completely new and different bizarre question: the massive houses in the middle of nowhere! There are MASSIVE buildings in the middle of compounds – some deserted, some only one or two lights on – near no perceivable roads and only the train to keep them company.
Also, there are even more massive buildings – far larger than in Bulgaria – completely dark and abandoned, giving the Transylvanian landscape an extremely eerie feel. After all, it is TRANSYLVANIA!
As best as we can tell, these are left-over factories from communist Russia. Truly they are such an odd sight to behold.
Anyways, there we are, the 2nd night train in a row. Only 25 minutes on land since Thessaly.
Stay tuned,
-Noah D.
