Inability to secure a bunk in a sleeping car on Bulgarian State Railways, BDZ, is just one of those things that you have to take lying down, as it were.
I had hoped that going to the booking office on Saturday would be time enough to buy a Sofia-Varna return ticket, and book a bunk each way, for the following Thursday and Sunday. I was wrong. Not in mid-July. The woman behind the counter at the booking office (near the National Palace of Culture, arguably more convenient than going to the central railway station) was polite enough, but firm. I was able to book a spalen vagon (sleeping car) on the Thursday night 10pm train, but either a spalen vagon or a couchette for the return journey was out of the question. She told me to try again when I arrived in Varna, because each city has a quota of tickets it can sell. The computer chattered out my three-sheet ticket certifying that I was entitled to a return trip anything up to three weeks from the date of my outward journey. Lesser technology, in the form of a ballpoint pen and a coarse-paper ledger book folded back on its spine, was used to record my name. For the return ticket, with the sleeping car bunk on the outward trip, I paid 35.10 leva. Two enduring minor mysteries, that I have pondered each time that I have made a railway journey in Bulgaria in the past five years. First, why does BDZ not upgrade to a national computer ticket booking system that could operate more effectively? (Probable answer, given BDZ’s spectacular loss-making: money.) The second mystery: why does the Bulgarian language employ German for its name for a sleeping car, yet French supplies the language with “couchette”?
When it comes to BDZ, anything to do with technology is indeed like the curate’s egg: good in parts. Its website (bdz.bg) functions adequately in Bulgarian and English, after some months in which an upgrade led to the English not working at all - no inconvenience for me, because I can read Bulgarian, but not much help for those who cannot. Visitors are able to use the search engine to get timetables by day and hour for the departure and arrival stations they want. A click will show ticket fares. Another will show each station at which the train stops en route. But click on “route map”, in this case Sofia to Varna, and nothing more shows than an outline map of Bulgaria with a squiggly line joining Sofia and Varna. Not really a train buff’s dream. Nor, for that matter, a website that is much use for the creditcarditsa class who want to book online.
Crowded hours at the keyboard and a business phone call on Thursday night saw me make it to the station with little time to spare. Fortunately, because I have travelled by train in this country many times, and because I can read Bulgarian - the electronic signboards at Sofia station are exclusively in Cyrillic script - I had no difficulty in getting to the correct platform. On the train, I handed my ticket to the coach conductor, who, as is the practice here, took it for overnight safekeeping and ticked my name off in another little coarse-paper notebook. Perhaps because I was tired and rushed, I must have shown a moment’s hesitation as he explained to me where to find my coupe and my bunk. Swiftly, he repeated himself in flawless German. Although I understand that language, I retorted, perhaps a little unjustifiably crossly, “Az ne sim Nemetz” (I am not a German). A few minutes later, I retired to my coupe and, reaching randomly into my bag, swopped my work shirt for a t-shirt. When the conductor strolled by, he glanced at me with suspicion, at which point I realised that my t-shirt read “Koeln” with an outline of that city’s iconic cathedral, a souvenir of one of my trips to Germany.
The coupe was everything I had come to expect from similar such trips, clean, with sheets and blankets laid out in a pattern of precision. In Bulgaria, a first-class coupe has three bunks. One remained unused throughout the journey, in spite of a friend of mine, who had wanted to travel with me, having been told earlier that day that there were no vacancies. That booking system again. I settled into the middle bunk that I had booked (a preference I developed in childhood; lying on the middle bunk at night, facing the window, affords one an enchanting view of the lights of the train weaving in the night, and the moonlit passing scenery) and soon was asleep. Normally, I am not able to go to sleep before 1am. Train travel lulls me like nothing has for more than four decades. Even the raucous Americans quaffing mineral water and sharing ancient Chuck Norris jokes in the compartment next door did not keep me awake.
A beautiful Varna summer Friday morning, and I dive into the scrum at the booking office. No, there are definitely no spalen vagoni or couchettes for the Sunday night return trip. I buy one of the six seats in a first-class compartment for the return trip. This costs 50 stotinki. In my life, all my overnight train journeys, even on troop trains, have been made on bunks. Sitting up has been for aircraft and buses. If nothing else, the return journey would have novelty value.
With a slightly enhanced tan, more photographs in my camera, and some shells clinking in my overnight bag, I was back at Varna station on Sunday night with half an hour to spare before departure time. My wife, due to return to Sofia two days later by car, and I went from spalen vagon to spalen vagon, asking after any vacancies. There were none. Dropped off at the station in turn by his wife, my friend joined me in wagon A, I in seat 56, next to the window and facing backwards, he with less good fortune in between myself and a well-prepared foreign tourist, who unpacked guide book, inflatable neck pillow and sleeper mask. I unpacked three jerseys. One to serve as a lap blanket, one as an armrest atop my small backpack which I jammed between myself and the wall to forestall any thefts while I slept, the third to serve, rolled-up, as a neck pillow.
Every train on which I have travelled in Bulgaria has left on time, and so did this one, to the second. We chatted in desultory fashion, as the train sped into the night, about the Libya case, about the newly-elected leader of the Union of Democratic Forces (briefly, because we could not remember his name), about BDZ’s difficulties in supplying summertime demand for sleeping cars. My friend said that it had been years, perhaps three decades, since BDZ leased any new ones, and while an outfit in Bulgaria did maintenance on the existing stock, there was an undersupply.
By democratic consensus, the six of us agreed that it was time for lights-out. Some while later, the bright overhead light was snapped on. A conductor wanted to do a second check of our tickets - unlike in a spalen vagon, in an ordinary compartment, your ticket is kept on your person. With varying degrees of grogginess, we fished them out, she clicked them as her predecessor had done some time before, and flounced off down the corridor. Leaving the light on. I readjusted my legs, careful not to intertwine them with those of the karate expert’s trainer directly across from me, readjusted my jersey-pillow, and settled back. The slightly out-of-place metal bar in the well-worn seat did not prevent my sleep. Nor did the absence of curtains on the windows.
Early morning in Sofia. “You slept like an angel,” my friend says, startling me because my self-image is anything but angelic. The waiting taxis outside the station refused me, either because my Bulgarian is clearly too fluent for me to be fooled about the route and the fare home, or because I would not pay what they demanded. But I happen to know that catching a taxi from the nearby central bus station is a much better option, with a reputable company in charge. Three leva lighter, in 15 minutes I was unlocking the door at home.
