I’ve written many articles, essays, reviews over the years, I haven’t counted how many.
Some of them have been published on websites which have since foundered and disappeared, like the brilliant Balkan Travellers website, and the current affairs magazine Scottish Review; or in small print magazines with a small circulation. I’m in the process of updating the ‘Work on the Web’ page, to delete broken links.
So I’ve set up a substack page to make some of the longer travel articles, from the past 2 decades available again.
I've posted below the first part of Bourgas to Sofia, which hasn’t been published before. You can read the rest via the link to my substack page here. I envisage the substack page as being a place for longer articles. Thank you to everyone who has read, commented or enjoyed what I’ve written here on rivertrain over the years, and I hope you will also enjoy the substack page, which hasn’t yet got a name. I will still be posting here, probably shorter pieces, current travels, carnets de voyage, notebook entries, and thank you again for your company along the Way.
Bourgas to Sofia
At Karnobat the train stops and we wait – and wait. Three flags flap in the wind, three poplar trees bend and rustle. A cart piled with grass and pulled by a donkey moves slowly along the street. There are weed-covered areas by the yellow railway buildings where awnings slap in the wind.
Two tracks away stands a motionless rust-red goods wagon. Narrow worn dirt paths cross the tracks. Trains come and go while we are stuck here, then shunted off to a siding by a large building with broken windows and the shell of a khaki truck that blends in with the foliage.
So I discover that Petar was right when he said there can be long delays on the trains. I hear the word Varna spoken a lot and my guess is that we are waiting for the Varna train, to hook up with it and go on as one train to Sofia. But why the Varna train is so delayed, I do not know. When it finally arrives and we move off again, two hours have passed.
In the fields, mechanical harvesters are reaping crops and little clouds of yellow follow in their wake. To the north, the sky has turned a livid metallic bluish grey colour.
A huge building stands beside a platform, which the train passes without stopping. The building is a shell, its gaping window frames empty of glass. Just outside it, on the empty platform, stands a solitary purple plastic chair.
The grey sky has turned into the fringed edge of a curtain which trails along the horizon like a tented covering, sagging slightly inwards.
It's late evening, twilight, by the time we reach Sofia. I walk in the darkening streets from the train station to the hostel on Pop Bogomil, feeling as if I’m coming home. When I reach the hostel, it’s the young man, whose name I still do not know, who is on duty, not Nadia. I tell him I want to stay until the first of July and he looks very doubtful which makes me feel alarmed. Could it be possible that there is not room for me after all? But Nadia had said...
It turns out there is room, only not the pale blue one I was in before. A different one, for two people he says, but they won’t charge me any more. This other room is decidedly more spacious, but it takes me a while to get used to it. It has a slatted light-shade and the effect is of stripes of light and shadow. I grope around in this dim light, taking notebook and toiletries out of my rucksack, placing them on the small table. There’s something a little off-putting about this room. Unlike the unreserved welcome I felt from the blue room with the van Gogh paintings on the wall, this one has a feeling of reservation, as if it needs to make up its mind about me. Rather like the young man’s manner which contrasts with Nadia’s warmth and friendliness. And this rankles somewhat in my mind.
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