Crossing borders on night trains
Since I'd never tried crossing borders by train before, we decided to travel within Eastern Europe exclusively by rail. And because these trips tend to be quite long, we thought we'd avoid wasting daylight hours in trains by taking them at night. So armed with terrifying stories of hapless passengers being gassed and robbed blind at night, we resolved to barricade our doors and sleep with our passports and money hidden on our persons.
All this paranoia was quickly eviscerated shortly after we boarded our first night train in Budapest when the conductor proved to be fluent in English and very kind while our sole cabin-mate, a 20-year-old Austrian student, told us he'd taken night trains in Eastern Europe many times and they were totally safe. Even when we were roused from our slumber in the middle of the night (twice) by the passport officers, I found no cause for concern.
In fact, the scariest part of that train ride happened before we actually began moving. I wanted to eat some canned fish and Eliza insisted I do it outside the cabin lest it smell of fish all night. So I sat on the steps leading up to the car while we waited at the station and began opening the can. Suddenly I was startled by the sound of sliding metal and the door snapped shut a fraction of a second after I whisked my legs out of its path!
The train trip from Romania to Bulgaria was less pleasant because we tried to sleep in seats instead of getting a couchette. While Eliza managed to pull this off, I ended up staying awake the entire time. It didn't help that the conductor kept asking me for my ticket at every station. The toilets on that train dispensed with plumbing in favour of holes in the bottom of the toilet through which we could see the tracks below. Beats having it get clogged, I suppose. When the Romanian passport office collected everybody's passports for inspection, he had trouble finding mine in the stack and so handed them all to me so I could locate mine. I greatly regret not being more thorough in my perusal of that stack.
When we got to the Turkish border, everybody had to disembark and buy visas. Of course, they only took cash, in Euros, despite Turkey not being in the EU! Eliza had previously told me that visas cost 10 British Pounds but when we got to the counter the slimeball behind it refused to accept the 10 GBP note she handed him, instead writing "15" on a piece of paper and flashing it at her. He also gestured at the piece of paper tacked to the window and upon glancing at that we noticed that the prices were all listed in only USD and Euros. She tried explaining that 10 GBP was equivalent to 15 Euros but he would have none of it. In desperation she handed him an additional 5 Euros (the last of her cash), which he finally accepted in return for a visa.
Having watched Eliza get swindled, I handed him 15 GBP right away, only to be rebuffed and directed toward the price list again. Apparently Turkey charges Canadians 45 Euros for a visa! Shocked by this, I asked him where the ATM was but he said there wasn't one. At that point I started to worry because I was stuck at the Turkish border in the middle of the night with insufficient cash to buy a visa and no ATMs around. My deus ex machina came in the unlikely form of a loan from a German traveller whose t-shirt had a University of Waterloo logo emblazoned across it. It turned out that he had spent a year there as an exchange student!
