January 06, 2004
The Alpha, the Omega, and the Deltas In Between
I learned a lot on the trip. Learned about people, Greece, monuments, stray cats and dogs. But the most important lesson was the first taught and the last absorbed. The key to a great trip, the gravy on the biscuits, is to have a terrible, horrible, reprehensible time getting from place to place. It first hit me when we got back to Athens from Crete and began talking about our trip to that point with the 10,000 odd volunteers we ran into in that city.
You see, nobody expects you to come back with a recommendation about a way to travel. Unless you paid two dollars for a flight and had caviar and champagne served by glowing belly dancers, most people, most of the time, really aren’t interested in the way you got to where you went. But if you have a funny story about the ferry to Crete-with its stained floors and chairs and heavy smell of vomit-that just adds to the fun. Also, when you go back and look on the trip with the people you went with, the memories of the bus staff that wouldn’t let you sleep will always be there to go along with the more pleasant things that happened.
I don’t think there was one trip from city to city that we can’t look back on and laugh about. The fun began in Sofia on the snowy days before Christmas Eve. They were the kind of days where the things in your nose that can turn black from smog and freeze from cold do both. Sofia, as it turns out, is pretty ugly in winter. Reminded me of Dickens’ descriptions of Victorian London. It made it kind of Romantic in a way, but it also made us want to get the heck out of Dodge as soon as possible.
The day before the trip, we were forced to buy our bus tickets in pairs. Jeff and I needed to collect our money from the screw-up travel agency, and Kate and Ryan needed to get their tickets as soon as possible. Since the screw-up travel agency continued to screw up in getting our money back (they finally succeeded) Kate and Ryan left to go get their tickets before Jeff and I did.
Before Jeff and I could get in a cab, Kate called from the bus ticket agency and told us we needed to get down there, like, five minutes ago. We told our cab driver to get us there, wondered what Kate was getting herself into a fuss about this early in the trip, and arrived at the bus depot with Ryan having already left for his Bulgarian home.
Kate told us that the ticket lady had said something in Bulgarian about the possibility of there not being more than one or two tickets left on our bus to Athens. She had had a long conversation trying to get the lady to hold the remaining couple of seats for us, but the negotiations had not gone well, apparently.
We went into the office and the sight of Kate set off the worst in the woman we had to deal with. I’ve heard rude “Kazhete”s (formally “speak!”); I’ve heard polite “Kazhi”s (informally “speak!”); but I’ve never heard “Kazhi” with the wrath and seething anger this woman displayed toward the two American men standing before her plexiglass window, asking her to do the job she was ostensibly paid to do and give us some tickets in exchange for legitimate Bulgarian currency.
We wanted two tickets to Athens, could we have a couple? No, there were no places left, and we couldn’t sit next to our friends.
So, there weren’t any places left, or there weren’t seats next to our friends? No, there were no seats left, and they certainly weren’t next to our friends if they did exist.
On the entire bus…stay calm…there were no more places? There were no more places next to the two other Americans.
Out of curiosity and hunch, was there somebody that spoke English we could talk to? She was busy, and there were no more seats left next to your friends.
We didn’t need to sit next to our friends. We could sit anywhere on the bus she liked. If she wanted us to sit at the opposite end of the bus, we’d do that.
Fortunately, the woman who spoke English came around at this point and got a good yelling-at too before she opened the reservation book and wrote our names into two of about 10 empty slots on the bus. The rude woman sat in her chair seething. Maybe she just liked to prevent people from going on trips, maybe she was having a bad day, but she symbolized all the rude customer service we were leaving behind in Bulgaria. The rest of our travel difficulties came on the various modes of transportation.
The ferries to and from Crete weren’t so much difficult as they were odd. We slept on the floor of the third class room with the other backpackers, using our coats as blankets and bags as pillows. At some point in both ferry trips the coat eventually turned into the pillow. The food on the ferries was understandably bad and expensive and the night trips arrived in port at ungodly hours of the morning. On the second trip we were prepared for it all, but the smell of vomit kept some of us awake and the horrid, ghastly snoring and coughing of two elderly gypsies sleeping next to us did the rest of us in too. We got about three or four hours of sleep on both trips and lost about two years of life in our backs, but we traveled cheaply dagnabbit. And at least the ferries weren’t the buses. That was something in their favor.
The first bus trip has left at least two indelible memories. The now world-famous conversation occurred when we were stuck for five hours in Sofia waiting for a truck to be cleared from the road. Jeff and I were sitting in the back of the bus and had just finished a little of our liquid sleep-aid. In what we thought were quiet, inside voices, we went through the topics of competition, war, the prospects for peace and utopia, robots, etc. The whole thing went on for more than forty-five minutes and the opening twenty were listened to and recorded by Kate and Ryan, sitting several rows in front of us and apparently able to hear everything clearly. They say they were informed and entertained, but stopped when we got to the robots, as I must say any reasonable people would. Jeff and I nearly had a universal solution for all of the world’s problems worked out, but nature called, we realized that many of the bus’ passengers were using the cover of night and a park next to a restaurant that was once a church, and we hopped out of the bus to join them.
Towards the middle of that same night, while trying to sleep, I myself created the second lasting image. I'm sitting in the back of the bus with my feet crammed into the neighboring seat and my knees up near my chest. My head is leaning back against the window, my mouth is gaping open, and my scarf is tied around my head to cover my eyes against the fluorescent glare of the lights left on during our three hour stay at the border check. Apparently, I was also snoring to set a new record and the Bulgarian woman sitting in the seats next to me was debating whether to wake me or take her own life. I have no memory of this image, seeing as I was dead to the world and all, but I’ve already heard it described so many times and in such detail that I feel like I was there, watching me make an ass of myself too.
Trips always remind me about what a terrible sleeper I am. I snore when uncomfortable, drool a little once in a while, and now-apparently-mumble incoherently occasionally. Of course, there’s nothing I can do about any of this, especially not here in Bulgaria. I haven’t once seen or heard of a sleep clinic here, nor do I expect to in the immediate future. Sleeping better seems to be one of those luxury things Americans are accused of taking for granted. Nobody blames me for any of it, but it sure makes for good comedy, and the snoring tends to make sleeping on buses a bit harder, apparently.
Sleeping is also harder when, as on the trip to Sofia from Athens, the staff on the bus tries to do everything they can to keep their passengers from doing it. “Wake up!” was the only phrase in English one of the heathens seemed to know, and he delivered it in a way that suggested that it was his own private revenge for the all the torture English-speaking tourists had subjected him to in life. These boys took it personally that we were trying to sleep at two in the morning at their precious border check, and if we weren’t awake to hand over our passports then that was a viscous insult against them.
They kept us from taking off our shoes, they left the heat on until we were sweating with our sleeves rolled to up to our shoulders, and they sang along loudly to the terrible music they were playing. This after the horrors of the ferry trip the night before left us in a horrible state when we arrived in Sofia at about 6 in the morning, and I think it says a lot that the best and least remarkable trip was the train trip that morning back to Kate’s place in Pleven. Somehow, Bulgarians know how to do things just right. Sometimes.