82. Fingering Immigration; “Serviced” in Bulgaria:

(Zurich - Warsaw - Athens - Thessaloniki - Istanbul - Sofia - Ruse - Bucharest: 17th to 28th March, 2026)

Zurich Airport (after 23 hours of travel)… The glass fingerprint panel at Immigration would not accept that my fingerprints were my fingerprints (I have a new passport). It took 5 attempts before the officer seemed satisfied that what was at the end of my right arm was a match for the truly dreadful new passport photo.

Welcome to Switzerland and to the EU Schengen.

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Five days later at Thessaloniki Airport:

The Immigration officer stared for some time at my passport. He tapped on his keyboard and stared, stared and tapped…. This was ongoing for an agonising 12 minutes in dead silence as the departure queue was building up behind me… With no explanation, I was “stamped” and let through to the gracious and generously catered Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul (a full cold-collation breakfast with coffee on a mere 50 minute flight, following Eid Mubarak chocolate welcome treats as we had boarded).

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Istanbul Airport: if you’ve paid the entry fee or bought the sticker on arrival, you’re IN!

Istanbul’s new airport is massive: monumentalism defeats function from the time you become lost enroute to Immigration when signs direct you one way, uniformed flunkeys direct you another, then in the confusion the flunkeys complain that it’s your fault that you followed their instructions towards Transit oblivion and not the Immigration signs they had told you to ignore. This monster airport is 90+ minutes from town. Just catch a convenient public airport bus towards the Galati Bridge at Eminou Port and it’s a short walk past the old Orient Express terminus to your Sirkeci hotel (says the often reliable “Rome to Rio” website). I had their clear and helpful map in my hand.

We’ll see….

Following further terminal wandering, bouncing between various conflicting signs to the transport hall, we emerged into a monster bus cellar where, stretched vastly into the distance in both directions, were little numbered kiosks with bored pairs of uniformed attendants. By waving our map around we were eventually directed to “12”… “TWELVE!!!” … “Pay with CARD on BUS!!!… and were bundled into the back seats of a coach which roared out onto a rain-soaked freeway.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, the traffic was grinding into a sodden inner-city crawl. Well short of our destination, large groups of riot police and water cannon trucks were appearing under bridges and blocking roads and creating tram-jams in the streets below. Our driver took a sudden right turn from the freeway into a crowded square, stopped the bus and offloaded luggage, making it clear in several languages that he was going nofurther. We were jettisoned well short of the Sirkeci area in the midst of log-jam traffic, persistent street traders and huge first-Sunday-after-Eid crowds.

Which way to turn while being buffeted by passing happy families and glared at by police behind riot shields? Surrounding streets were a crowded maze: no sign of anything like taxi. My travel companion wisely retreated to the sidelines: nose in book.

Aksaray Metro station, 500 metres across the mob in the square looked like an escape route. Dragging bags and optimism through the crowd we approached a line of anonymous blue ticket machines and a somewhat scarred and graffitied system map. It seemed that two short metro rides would take us from here to Sirkeci. BUT first: the blue queue of sullen transit ticket machines beckoned through the milling mob, in a foreign country, with no Turkish currency, for a mystery system, at least with an English translation, but requiring such a strange non-intuitive series of instructions for steps to purchase that even the locals were struggling to purchase a pass.

The growing crowd, seeking escape from the square, was pressuring. Travel Companion, nose determinedly in book, was being harassed by plain-clothes police: “Why do you stand here? What is it you are doing here?” He pointed, distressed, at me floundering on my third ticket machine, which had at least recognised Mastercard payments. Two tickets spat out. Police guy grabbed both of us by the shoulders and pushed us with baggage through a gate to the stairs (free ride!!). We staggered with the good-natured crowd downstairs to a platform without quite knowing which line we were on or where it might take us, or even if our tickets were valid.

The underground platform was packed and in Eid Mubarak good humour. We found a poster map; worked out in collective heads where to transfer; took wild guess at train direction; boarded with bags, helped by a wiry bloke at the train door. Transfer was at the next stop: Yenkapi. Pushed out of train by scurrying crowd; escalator to barrier; three possible metro lines to use; where are they? Two were sign posted: one was in sight. A cry of “Sirkeci?” got us a welcome to the barrier; tickets tapped and WORKED!!!! Down escalator. One stop. On and off stiflingly crowded train. Up escalator. Out into laneways to the “Gran Essen Hotel”: shoebox room (found out later: bug infested and reached for Prednisone)… our Istanbul home to explore the riches of Topkapi, post Ramadan Hagia Sophia, Taksim Square and wandering around on a a circuitous spice market food tour…

Welcome to Türkiye!

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Kapitan Andreevo, Bulgaria, 25/3/26, 3am:

The 3 carriage Istanbul to Sofia sleeper express has two consecutive border stops in the wee small hours. Travelling west, the change in time zones means both transactions occur at 3.30am. It was sleeting as the 30 or so doubly-awoken passengers straggled and queued at the second of the barbed-wire-enclosed fibro sheds with tiny access windows. “Departure” on the Turkish side was by quick, no-fuss stamps.

After a 30 minute slow trundle through freight yards, past the final floodlit Turkish mosque and a vision of a distant welcoming lurid-neon-truck-stop-casino…entering Bulgaria? Not so smooth…

Two queues: we were in the one with the officious officer probing detailed documentation of every westbound Turk for illegal employment, lack of funds, family relations in Berlin etc… etc… Our gently efficient Turkish train conductor suggested we go around the shed to the other queue.

Last in the quickly progressing queue, I was confronted by another sulking fingerprint scanner. This time I could see the screen. Finger prints had to match the passport photo AND the entry photo taken in Zurich. My first three right hand fingers were fine. I was 100% that person. My “pinky” just would not scan. “Right hand on glass.” “Try AGAIN!” “RIGHT hand s-l-o-w-l-y on GLASS!”….After 8 attempts of changing pressure, altering the order of digits touching scanner, rolling fingers, pressuring hard, slowly, softly… the Immigration guy stomped out of his hutch, rubbed the scanner with a paper towel and ducked back inside for a last shot. Still not a lucky winner. Our Turkish train conductor was checking his watch and starting to look tetchy at this point. Officious officer from other room, having run out of westbound Turks to harass, appeared at his door and invited me in: one quick and successful scan! I am now welcome back into the EU Schengen states.

The train conductor urgently grabbed my elbow and pushed me up into the carriage. Door slammed. Train hooted and departed.

Welcome to Bulgaria!

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Plovdiv: 7am… Struggling awake after heavy sleep to stare at some of the industrial wreckage of post-Soviet Bulgaria: every town we pass through has at least one abandoned Communist-era industrial site. Buildings are crumbling: “enterprises” painted in fading chalky yellow are disintegrating, some with remnant hydro-electric schemes from local streams. A (very) few have been repurposed. What is striking is not only the desecration of the smattering of medium sized industries tied to particular towns by failed central planning, but the seeming lack of any effort to demolish or recycle or remake or remove. So much of the devastation looks like people just walked out in 1990, never to return. The crumbling physical remnants of factories and industries have been left to slowly implode.

From our smart and well-run Turkish sleeping car, the occasional passing Bulgarian trains present as short, decrepit, grubby, graffiti-laden: wandering semi-empty from town to town, providing service under sufferance. Large railway yards are packed with rusted rolling stock, vandalised passenger cars and abandoned locomotives left, like the old town enterprises, just to slowly rust away. The still-operating trains amble around the rural landscapes on old short-joint tracks at slow speeds: great if you crave reliving travel experiences from the 70’s and 80’s. No so good for the current century.

Sofia Central station seems largely empty of people who are not railway workers: vast echoing off-the-form concrete Brutalism at its most annoying. Here you may first encounter Bulgarian “service”, which also possibly reflects the clinging of old Soviet attitudes. To a short-stay visitor this inherent abrupt grumpiness is mildly, confrontingly, amusing. Longer term: not so much.

Each ticket service window in this country has a large adjacent sign outlining when it is open and when the breaks will be. “Open” means occupied. It is not an indication of “service”. There are many numbered windows on two levels in Sophia Central. Few attract queues. We approach one to seek a reservation on the International train to Bucharest. After standing for some minutes, we risked tapping the closed but “Open” window. A joyless face turned our way, put down her word puzzle and opened the slot. We passed through a translation of our reservation request. Gruff response: “Five. FIVE!” Pointing upwards, slot slammed shut, turning back to her word puzzle. Locating a working escalator (quite an achievement) we took bags and selves up to another line of gruff looking women-lurking-behind-window-slots and located “FIVE: International”. Similar response. We had handed over our phones with their online Eurail Passes.  A piece of paper and pen were thrust at us through the window hatch: “WRITE. Names. When. To.”

We did. She tapped languidly upon a keyboard, sighed deeply, and waited for some minutes. A green light appeared on a small printer into which she fed two ticket blanks. These tickets were perfunctorily handed through the window. Slot closed: back turned; she returned to her phone. We escaped through the pedestrian zone (elevator blocked by a temporary shed, “gardens” of weeds, stalled escalators, shuttered shop fronts and a beckoning underground “CASINO!”, all surrounded by rusting blue steel uprights doing nothing in particular) to the genuinely lovely Terminus Hotel, our base to enjoy exploring 12 centuries of history across Sofia.

This prevailing customer “service” was our experience at many Bulgarian counters from an abrupt Sofia pharmacy (service is finished when back is turned), the Sofia Museum shop (touch or move a postcard in the rack and be yelled at: “You WILL write” a list of numbers you want to buy in correct order for each card rack, into 2 columns, and those cards may be found), an inner city cafe where we were informed, loudly: “NO AFFOGATO. NO!” when we had pointed to it on the extensive menu… to the suitably vast, Stalinist, frontier railway station at Ruse where no information about the connecting train from Bulgaria to Bucharest was displayed on any screen or sign.

The “Information” window lady yelled: “Cassa. CASSA!” At us and slammed her window. She then turned to her colleagues who laughed at this performance before returning attention to their phones. Across the hall, we found “Cassa” who yelled: “Three. THREE!” at us before slamming her slot. Up on platform 3, our train crew from Sofia were having smoko. The fearsome, buxom, razor-cut-bottled-blonde-crimson-lipped-in-black-belted-waistcoat, black-tights-and-huge-patent-leather-boots train conductress assured us that “three” was the place to be for Bucharest, as a puttering little diesel arrived to be the “International Express”.

Bucharest Gara de Nord:

On arrival into Romania, you might imagine that it was with some trepidation that we approached the “International” booking window to arrange reservations for onward travel towards Budapest. 

Our seats from Brasov to Budapest for next week were quickly and politely arranged by the smartly uniformed officer. We were thanked with a smile and directed to an adjacent widow for some local tickets. Another beaming and well presented booking clerk greeted us and took our request, closing her window to read the translation and discuss it with a colleague. She negotiated options with us and while printing out seat tickets (with a broad smile) asked where we were from. “Australia! You have travelled so far to see us in Romania. I am SO pleased you are HERE!” We exchanged our tickets for cash, and a small kangaroo pin. She laughed. She beamed. She left her seat to show her co-workers and to add a wee Kangaroo to the large floral brooch on her lapel.

“You have no idea how much this means to me!! Thank you, thank YOU and ENJOY Romania!!!”

We do!.