THERE has always been something very romantic about train trips and I have always enjoyed travelling by train.
It may be slower than a plane, bus or car, but for long-distance trips it has its good sides - a toilet, a dining car and a sleeping car.
So when it came to deciding how to get to Poland for the U2 concert with our limited budget, plane out of the question and bus companies not offering direct lines to Katowice, we decided to go by train.
It seemed like a perfect idea - sleeping car, a long stay in Budapest giving us enough time to go for a walk and have a look at the city, a comfortable connection directly to Katowice and a group discount ticket.
Things looked great until the moment a friend of mine who took the same train to Budapest several days earlier called me from Budapest on the night before our departure to tell me to pack lots of food and be prepared to sleep in Belgrade as the train from Istanbul through Sofia to Budapest, which was supposed to be direct, actually is not.
So, in accordance with her experience, the train arrived in Sofia with a great delay, accumulated even more delay in Serbia and missed the connection with the train leaving from Belgrade to Budapest at 10.20 pm.
The good news was that there was another train from Budapest to Katowice at 6pm so we could still be there on time for the concert.
All this freaked me out totally but there was nothing to be done but pray for the train to be on time.
To cut a long story short, it was not at all on time. It arrived in Sofia with a 140-minute delay and sat at the Bulgarian side of the border with Serbia for around another two hours. The reason, according to the conductor was because the customs officers have to drive up to the train, which stops in a forest quite far from the border checkpoint, check the passports, drive back to their office with the little pieces of paper with our names and passport numbers and check whether we can leave the country and then come back and let the train go through.
Passing through the border was annoying enough but travelling through Serbia was even more so as the rails were in such a bad condition that the train was going very slowly and stopping frequently.
Instead of arriving at 8.30pm in Belgrade as scheduled, we arrived at 1am and the train to Budapest was long since gone.
The conductor told us to lock the cabins and not let anyone inside unless he told us to because thieves pretending to be police quite often preyed on the sleeping cars parked in the sidetracks.
On the following morning we were woken up by the shouting match between our conductor and the Serbian railwaymen who were telling him that we should get off the sleeping car and move to the train which was leaving in 20 minutes for Budapest.
So much for the direct train from Sofia to Budapest. Half asleep and very confused we packed our stuff and ran for the train.
This seemed like the easiest part of our journey. Apparently the rails after Belgrade were in better condition and the train was on time.
Crossing the border with Hungary, which is an external EU border, was so easy that I was totally astonished.
The Hungarian customs officers had portable devices which looked like calculators into which they punched the passport numbers and then stamped the passports.
Passing the border took around half an hour.
My friend Yana and her boyfriend Niki were waiting for us at the train station as, due to the circumstances, we were now on the same train.
So far so good, but we actually had tickets for the morning train for Katowice and needed them replaced.
Myself and one of my companions, Plamen, went to the international ticket counter and queued up for 15 minutes.
I tried to explain to the lady behind the counter that we had missed the morning train and needed reserved seats for the one at 6pm.
She did not speak English so we tried Russian. Somehow we managed to communicate our problem to her and she told us that we needed to pay an additional six euro. Then she started doing some calculations and suddenly the six euro turned into 24 euro. To my question as to why and how the six euro had multiplied, she rattled off something in Hungarian and slammed the window in our faces.
I went ballistic. My companion suggested that we queue up in front of another counter and after 10 minutes of waiting we were told, this time English, that the 6 o'clock train was an express and that's why the seats were more expensive. Ok, fair enough. We gave her a 50 euro bill but she pushed it back at us and said they only took forints.
So we went looking for a change bureau or a bank. After more queuing up we finally got the new tickets and relaxed a little, but by that time there was about an hour left to the departure.
The train departed on time and was quite empty.
We met a young Hungarian by the name of Gabor who was also going to the U2 concert and we chatted for quite some time.
Then Plamen and myself went looking for Yana and Niki who were in the sleeping car. We got as far as the entrance where we were stopped by a Hungarian conductor with an avuncular smile.
"We are looking for our friends who are here," I said in the manner reserved for the slightly deaf and those who do not understand the language very well.
He smiled back and mumbled something in Hungarian.
I repeated my statement but it was obvious that he did not speak a word of English.
"German," he asked.
"No," we said.
"French," he inquired again.
I pushed Plamen forward as he speaks some French.
So he repeated the previous statement slowly in French.
The conductor's eyes lit up and he started nodding. Then he took out some papers from somewhere and said "bezahlen".
We despaired. We may not know German but we know that this means "to pay".
"No bezahlen," we said and left.
We came back a few minutes later with Gabor and asked him to tell the conductor that we were only looking for friends and didn't want beds in his carriage. Then we figured that perhaps the idea of a bed was not so bad and asked how much it would cost anyway.
Then I found Niki and Yana in their cramped hot cabin with four other people and figured that 10 euro for a narrow bed with five other people was too much and decided to go back to our nice air conditioned carriage.
Six of the group, however, fancied the idea and went off to sleep.
Niki and Yana decided that they liked it better in our carriage and moved to our compartment.
The train rumbled through the border and past Bratislava with its beautiful bridges and a castle on a hill.
Things looked perfect and we kept on telling ourselves that when we arrived at 4 am in Katowice we would still have time to sleep and rest before the concert.
But how wrong we were!
At 2am we were awoken by the Polish customs officers who took the train almost by storm and quite scared us in their camouflage combat uniforms, their menacing looks and the demand to show them the concert tickets.
They stamped our passports but the train was still not moving.
Wide awake and bored I decided to go and see how Niki and Yana were doing at the other end of the carriage. Halfway through, however, I saw the Polish border officers in one of the compartments directing their flashlights in the eyes of a man sitting slumped on the seat.
"Go back to your compartment and don't go out," hissed a girl who was travelling with her mother to Krakow on the same train from Sofia.
I got scared and went back. I told Plamen that there was some trouble because the customs officers were interrogating a man a few compartments further down.
After 10 minutes a Polish conductor came to our compartment and after exchanging greetings he told us in Polish that the train was arrested and we should get off and catch the commuter train leaving in half an hour.
We thought we did not understand correctly so I called the mother of the girl who was Polish to translate.
She engaged the conductor in Polish and we heard the words "police" and "prosecutor", which turned out to be the same in Polish as in Bulgarian.
So it turned out that we understood correctly and I went to the sleeping car to wake the rest of the group and tell them to catch the other train..
They thought I was joking as their Hungarian conductor did not say anything.
"Well, he might have said something, but in Hungarian," I said and they realised I was not joking at all.
So in the dead of the night we got off the train and got on the most strange and rickety train I have ever seen - it was a rusty and dirty double-decker with no toilet and hard wooden seats.
It was already full of people in different variations of U2 t-shirts in Hungarian and Slovak and I soon dubbed this funny means of transportation "The U2 Train".
The train left the station amid creaking and shaking.
We kept on asking ourselves what had happened on the train we left behind.
"There was a dead guy on the train," said the Polish lady. "Didn't you know that?"
There was a shocked silence on our part.
I thought that this was a bit too much after all the misadventures so far and started wondering what would be next.
Thank god, nothing much. At 6.30am, after almost 48 hours on the road we finally got to our destination - definitely later than planned and after far more adventures than planned, but otherwise we would have been bored.
Our way back was far less adventurous but by that stage our definition of adventure had changed somewhat.
The only conclusion of this story is that you should not trust what the people at the Rila Travel Bureau tell you, and leave at least one day early if you want to get there on time.
Actually, try to avoid using the Balkan Express as much as possible because it is not express at all.