19 Countries - Border Crossing - Train Tickets

Thursday, 23.8.2018

Route: Danube Cycle Path 5 (Negotin-Vidin)

Kilometers traveled: 83

Highlight of the day: hmmm ...

somehow the day was average; maybe the food, or that we got the tickets.

We started in Negotin, where we didn't start riding until later, because we had a leisurely breakfast and also got our freshly washed laundry. We saw the Swiss during breakfast, they started as well as the French before us. We stopped at the market square to buy water and then we left Negotin. We didn't ride on the main road because there would have been many inclines, but on a bad main road instead. There were still a few smaller inclines. Once we passed a cemetery with huge graves, partially real mausoleums, and family graves, which in Germany would correspond to a whole property and with photos of the deceased engraved in the tombstones. Accordingly, the cemetery was sooo long. That was still on the Serbian side, but we were getting closer to the border with Bulgaria. There we came across some of the Czech police officers.

We slowly rode towards the border with our bikes. It was quite in the middle of nowhere. The barrier was open. Apart from us, no one was waiting. There was a policewoman standing there. But she didn't say anything. Then we rode very slowly past the barrier. Suddenly 2 small dogs came running towards us, real ankle biters, and barked at us. The policewoman whistled them back. We continued riding slowly. And then suddenly another police officer came out and yelled at us in English: "Border!!" Okay, so we rode back behind the still open barrier. Then it took another 3 minutes until the guy came to us and took our IDs. It took him another 7 minutes or so to look at them, so he took all the time in the world. I got a little upset, they could have at least closed the barrier. Julius said that the barrier is probably already too rusty and broken to close it.

Then we could finally continue riding and we arrived at the Bulgarian border crossing, where there were no problems at all and we were even addressed in broken German. The place behind the border, Bregovo, was again completely different from Serbia. At almost half of the houses, the roofs had collapsed and the houses were really tiny. There was a donkey tied to a lamppost, which was so thin that one could assume he hadn't eaten anything for a long time. We didn't find a sign and so we wandered around the place a bit. We followed the map description. In the city, we saw the French from a distance again. We went through real small towns. While in Serbia there was a shop and a village square in every small village, there was nothing here. And everywhere there were only very old people sitting in front of the houses on the small benches. Between the villages there were occasionally tree avenues, otherwise only huge, wide fields. We also saw a few very large bulldogs, a free-running herd of cows, and a man who fetched water from a very old well. Then we took a break, with the Swiss overtaking us again. This happened a few times. At some point, we faced the decision between the main route or the shortcut on the side route. We decided on the main route and rode the first section on an unpaved road, where we had to go through mud, mud and grass, but it worked. Finally, we arrived in Vidin.

There we quickly found the obligatory pedestrian zone. This was ... well-intentioned. The floor was tiled with a colorful pattern. Unfortunately, the floor was already quite damaged. At the end of a large square was a gate that I had read about before. There were many shops, it was quite nice. At some point, we found the hotel we had booked. It was funny, there was a glass elevator and from the 3rd floor, where our room was, you could see all the way down to the reception. If there weren't such a water shortage, a waterfall would have fallen all the way down from the top! First, we went to our 2-story room and settled in.

Then we decided to buy a train ticket because we wanted to go to Ruse the next day. So we walked the 200 meters to the train station and found an occupied counter. There was a woman sitting there who couldn't speak English. Because I had already suspected that, I had already written everything down in my notebook. But it still took quite a while until we understood each other. When everything was clarified, except for the credit card part, the woman behind the counter called her daughter, who speaks German. So we told everything again to the daughter on the phone, who translated everything to her mother. In principle, we would have understood each other already. However, she told us that we couldn't pay with euros or cards, so I stayed at the station and Julius went to look for an ATM. It was quite quick, even though in Bulgaria everything is noted in Cyrillic script, which Julius can't read. But he did great! So we could pay and got the tickets. Unfortunately, we couldn't read what was written on them. So we didn't even know a platform. The woman at the reception could help us a bit, but not with the platform number. In the room, we then looked at the tickets more closely because I can read Cyrillic and in the end, all the important information was on the ticket. Then we took a shower and I called home. Since we hadn't eaten lunch, we were already pretty hungry and went to the hotel's restaurant. After a shared chef salad, there was chicken curry with fries, which was very tasty, and for Julius ribs with barbecue sauce and then ice cream with fruits for dessert. After that, we went to bed tired.