Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, and the Hardest Travel Day

Michael flew home at the beginning of October, and to be honest, I was surprised at how much it affected me. I wrote in a previous post about how I initially had some reservations about Michael joining me. I’d never traveled with a partner (romantic or not) before on an extended trip, and Michael is far from a travel enthusiast. I worried at first that he’d burn out quickly and not have a great time and that I’d have to toss him from a cliff in Greece for wanting to go home. As it turned out, the month and a half Michael and I traveled together was wonderful, full of unexpected joys, incredible memories, and some of my favorite places that I’m grateful we got to experience together. But at the same time, a lot of my predictions were right. By the end of his trip, Michael WAS burnt out. Rather than talking about his excitement for the next stop on the journey, he talked more and more about his excitement to go home. He was tired and eager to get back to his regular life and routine. I couldn’t relate at all. It was clear that we’d timed his departure well when we booked his ticket—he hadn’t stopped having a good time, but he was very ready to be done. And I was very much NOT ready to be done. Though my desire to carry on solo as I’d planned was as strong as ever, I hadn’t known that I’d be so sad when Michael left.

After returning from the Greek islands, the two of us spent another couple of nights in Athens squeezing in a few more feasts and sights and repacking our bags so that Michael could bring home my summer clothes and some souvenirs I’d collected while I made room for the winter clothes he’d brought me. And then before the sun rose the next morning, we told each other goodbye on the sidewalk in front of the hostel as he headed to the airport and I headed to the train. And for the first time on my trip, I felt very lonely.

On top of being lonely, for the first time on my trip I also felt very, very anxious—an anxiety that I couldn’t always stop from dipping into fear. Specifically, I was anxious about going to Romania. Just a couple of weeks before this, Vladimir Putin had made his most direct threats yet about using nuclear weapons. Experts around the world agreed that it wasn’t super likely that he would go through with the threats and use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but more and more of them were admitting that it was a possibility to take very seriously. Tensions were at their absolute highest right before Michael left and I was supposed to head north to Romania. And while I wasn’t afraid that any bombing or fighting would occur in Romania, I was very afraid of what the aftermath of such a catastrophe would mean for the countries bordering Ukraine. How quickly would chaos and panic ensue in the region? Would I be trapped and unable to get out amid the panic of everyone else trying to leave? Can radiation travel that far? (I’m telling you all, I went down some deep anxiety-induced rabbit holes.) I desperately wanted to go to Romania. It was one of the countries I’d been most excited about. And I couldn’t tell if my determination to get there meant that I was ignoring common sense and precaution OR if my anxiety was unwarranted. I am used to travel being the best cure for my anxiety, not the cause of it.

So I decided to go. Or I decided to carry on and not NOT go, which is almost-but-not-quite the same thing. Or I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I decided to carry on and keep getting closer to Romania unless I decided to bail. Which ended up being far more difficult than I assumed it would be.

Something Michael and I talked about before he left is the weird feeling of guilt you experience when you’re traveling and not 100% joyful. I remember experiencing this for the first time in college and then again when I spent a summer working in Europe for the first time—logically you recognize that you’re in an extraordinary place and you feel that your emotion should be consistently and perpetually THRILLED, otherwise you’re squandering this opportunity you’ve been given. Of course, this isn’t realistic. Because we are human, we can have a moment of awe when we see the Coliseum from our window BUT still have a headache and want to nap. We can be temporarily lonely at the same time that we’re excited to travel solo, and we can be temporarily sad at the same time that we feel gratitude. I reminded myself after Michael left that on a trip this long, there would be sad days and anxious days, and that that was fine. It didn’t have to detract from my overall gratefulness and excitement.

As Michael began his journey across Europe and the Atlantic, I spent a long day on a train and then a bus only to arrive in Sofia, Bulgaria, that night and discover that the hostel where I’d reserved a room weeks prior had lost my reservation. They had no more availability, so I found the only other private hostel room available in town that night and took a taxi there. The staff had left for the night and sent me instructions for how to get in on my own via WhatsApp. The building looked like a prison, and the heat in the building hadn’t been turned on yet. I’d left Greece that morning in the lingering moments of summer, but the cold weather had very much arrived in Bulgaria. “It’s not cold,” the staff woman replied when I asked if I had a way to turn on any heat, plus the government determines when heat in the city comes on. (Is this true? I asked about this in the next hostel I stayed in in Bulgaria, and they were bewildered.) My towel had mysterious yellow stains on it and smelled bad, and I didn’t see another soul in the building during my stay except an older man who was leaving as I darted past to get in. It was, without question, the worst hostel I stayed in on my entire trip. I slept in 2 pairs of pants, wool socks, and 4 layers of shirts that night, lonely, miserable, and hoping I hadn’t made a mistake in choosing to stay.

I got up the next morning, exhausted and aching after shivering all night and very little sleep. I showered as fast as I could in the shared wet-bath, which required me to basically stand over the toilet in order for the water to hit me. Then I took the metro to the bus station just in time to get on a bus headed toward Veliko Tarnovo.

I’d only planned this segment of my trip a few days in advance, so Veliko Tarnova was a bit of an afterthought—a way to linger for an extra breath before heading to Romania. On the 3-hour drive, I watched out the window as we headed into the hills, the leaves glowing with more and more hints of fall. It was a beautiful day. The emotions I’d felt the day before felt duller, muffled by a thin layer of calm. Veliko Tarnovo is a small town in northern Bulgaria, nestled into a hillside. During tourist season, people flock to it, but in October it’s very quiet. The taxi driver dropped me off at Rooster Hostel, and I immediately fell in love with it. It’s an old house converted into a hostel that looks like it once belonged to an eclectic grandmother. My private room cost $26 USD and had a large bed, a day bed, and a private balcony overlooking the main downtown street. The room was full of books, art, color, and light. It felt like a cocoon of safety and warmth, a lifeline to pull me back out of my melancholy and return me to anticipation and wonder.

    

I met two older men, one Canadian and one American, who had met each other solo-traveling a few weeks prior and decided to travel together for a while. They had both spent their lives doing trips like this, long before the internet made it easy and popular. I met a guy who was on a bicycle journey from London all the way to Istanbul. He’d ridden through the hardest part of the mountains already, and he seemed full of joy to be there. It made me think of how insignificant my anxieties were when other people were doing such wildly brave and inspiring things.

It was early when I arrived, so I headed to the train station to get my ticket to Romania for the following day. No one spoke English at the station, but after a long while of Google translating, I learned that such a train did not exist, despite what the internet said. I headed back to the bus station where I’d arrived earlier that day. After even more Google translating, they explained to me that no such bus existed, either, no matter what the internet said. It seemed as though prior to Covid, there used to be direct trains and buses to Bucharest, but not anymore. The only other option I could find online was to go all the way back to Sofia and take an overnight bus from there—a journey that would cost me two extra days. That felt like giving up, and I refused to do it. I don’t know what magic existed in that little town that allowed me to simply… not care. I shrugged and decided, oh well, maybe I’ll figure it out tomorrow, or worst case, I’m stuck in this gorgeous place for another day. Then I wandered the town and ate a delicious meal and felt curious and calm and generally unbothered.

   

The next morning, I left the hostel with my bags and told the manager that I may or may not be back depending on how my luck went. I tried to call a taxi with the numbers she gave me, but none of the drivers spoke English. I found an off-duty taxi on the street and accosted the kind driver as he was coming out of a grocery store. He agreed to take me to the other bus station—a smaller station on the outskirts of town several miles away. There was no one else at the station except one woman selling tickets. The next bus was heading to Ruse, a small city on the border of Bulgaria and Romania. Surely there would be a way to get to Bucharest from there, I hoped. I bought a ticket and found myself on a mini-bus that felt like it would fall apart at any moment as we bumped along little back roads. Two hours later, we arrived in Ruse, and I walked to the train station to ask if a train was heading to Romania. None were posted on the departures list, and the ticket window was closed. I headed back to the bus station. No one spoke English, and it took several Google translate attempts for me to find someone who could tell me that there were no more buses to Bucharest that day—I’d have to wait until the next morning. (Bulgaria is BY FAR the country where I had the most difficulty communicating on my entire trip.) I was ready to give up, feeling oddly content to spend a night in this city I’d never heard of, but I headed back to the train station once more. A woman was at the ticket window this time, and when I asked, she pointed me to a different window where international tickets were sold. It took 30 minutes for someone to show up at the window. “Any tickets to Bucharest?” I asked him. He looked at me blankly. I typed it into a Google translate. He nodded. A train was leaving for Bucharest in an hour.

It should have been stressful, and it WAS objectively stressful, but mostly I found it funny. There’s an element of anxiety that’s about control, and when you realize that there is no information available with which to plan or strategize or control anything, it’s freeing to shrug and submit to being fine with wherever your swept. The train to Bucharest was only one train car. One. Singular. We rolled across the Danube River into Romania on the highest bridge I think I’ve ever been on in my life, rocking around like a wooden roller coaster. And I felt glad to be there.