Romania and the train journey from hell

Wed 2nd August 2006
I depart for Bucharest in an overnight train from Burgas - an experience of a lifetime. A journey of about 400km takes 11 hours. We wait at the border crossing for 2 hours!!! It's an old Russian train, something you see in the old Cold war films from the 50ties, with russian writing on the windows, no air conditioning (so during the day to melt and in the evening you freeze) and with a hole in the toilet (i nearly droped my MP3 player on the track). And this is an international train going all the way to Moscow with 5 passengers onboard - 1 Slovakian and 4 Romanian.