Gün Üç – Coolest bus trip ever!

A couple of days ago I caught the bus from Istanbul, Turkey to Haskovo, Bulgaria. As I had flown from the other side of the world the day before, I wasn’t looking forward to the trip. But it turned out to be awesomeness to the max!

Firstly, I was the only English speaker on the whole bus. So that was the first time in my life I wouldn’t have been able to talk to anybody around! The driver could say a few words in English, as could the hostess. Yes, you heard me right — the bus had a hostess. Who regularly bought us refreshments of water, tea, coffee, crappy packaged cake, etc. Also, this 5.5 hour bus trip only cost me 35 lira ($26.15 AUD) — BARGAIN! Oh, and that was with a good quality company — there are some dodgy looking ones out there! I couldn’t even get from Launceston to Hobart on crappy Redline for that.

So why was the bus trip so awesome? Well the bus companies slogan describes it pretty well — “Crazy Holidays”! The scenery was really intriguing because this was the first opportunity that I had to see what regular Turkey & Bulgaria looked like. There wasn’t anything super super amazing about the Turkish scenery, but everything was slightly different enough to keep me wanting to look out the window. Here’s a picture of one of the many pictorial road signs. Many cool points to the first person who can explain what the sign means. Also, notice the nuclear cooling tower in the background.
You should also be able to infer what side of the road you drive on here.

Nuclear Reactor #1

Two or three hours after leaving Istanbul, we drove past an actual nuclear power plant. This is probably a non-event for the locals, but a first for me. Back in Australia I was recently wiki-reading about the Chernobyl & Three Mile Island incidents. If you don’t know much about them, I really suggesting looking them up! I was almost speechless after reading in detail about Chernobyl — how it melted down, and what they did to “fix it” is so crazy! I’m guessing this one is ok though?

The Border Crossing

I’ve often seen border crossings on TV, but I’ve never experienced one myself until this bus trip. Since I was on a respectable bus company, the crossing was almost uneventful. Although, my passport took the longest to process. Everybody on the bus in front of us, had to stand with their own bags outside of the bus. But not us. The Bulgarians opened the cargo doors, had a really quick look from the outside, closed them, and we were on our way.

Humphrey, the tobacco smuggler

The most bizarre aspect of the crossing would have to be, what I’m calling, “no-mans-land”. That’s the area between the Turkish & Bulgarian borders. All it is a big car park & a big duty free shop that sells cigarettes & spirits. I think the only reason we stopped there for 15 minutes was so that everybody could buy duty free cigarettes. Everybody smokes over here, but I’ll probably write more about that in another post.

I think there is a limit to how much goods (ie. cigarettes, spirits, coffee, etc) each person can bring into the country. I’m pretty sure that I was already well over the limit for how much coffee you can import, but whatev! Since I didn’t smoke, I had three different people ask me to take tax-free cigarettes into Bulgaria for them. I had no idea what the first lady who asked was saying, so I walked away from her.

Then the bus driver asked me. By now I had worked out what these people wanted me to do. The driver handed me 66 euros ($108AUD) and a big armful of cigarettes. There would have been about 25 packets of cigarettes in my arms — so they were pretty cheap! Later the hostess also asked me to do the same, but I managed to explain (by doing the arm actions of driving) that I already had done that for the driver. So, I’m pretty sure that we didn’t “technically” do anything wrong, but those cigarettes so weren’t for my use :-P

My passport took the longest to process, but it still only took a minute. I was the only one who passport got stamped, and got asked questions: “Where are you going”, and “How long for”? Except for what it says in Loney Planet, I have no idea what my entry conditions are. All I know is that there is a stamp in my passport with Cyrillic characters on it. But whatev, I’m here now :-)

Bulgaria

As soon as we crossed over the border, EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, looked different. The quality of the road was worse, there were falling down buildings everywhere, there were people in farms farming, all of the signs were in Cyrillic characters, and everything just looked older and less maintained. I instantly decided that Bulgaria was a much cooler (in a weird communist Chudleigh way) than Turkey :-P.

So that was the bus trip. It was awesome to see Elly & Stu standing at the bus stop waiting for me. Hooray! I could finally speak English again! Heaps more has happened since then, so I hope to write more soon :-)