Taking the Train from Thessaloniki to Sofia
Background
My buddy Nick & I were planning a mini European trip. On completing his PhD thesis, he found himself with some time on his hands and decided to stay at my place in Berlin for a week. At the end of the week, I had to go to Belgrade for the weekend to attend a wedding. Nick was able to find cheap flights and a hotel in Thessaloniki so we planned to add that to our trip too with him flying there on Saturday and me joining a day later on Sunday afternoon. With this plan set, a couple of weeks later Nick noticed that Sofia was not too far away from Thessaloniki and was able to a book a really nice hotel for a pretty cheap price; so we decided to also add Sofia to out itinerary. The only thing left to decide was how to get from Thessaloniki to Sofia.
Thessaloniki
Having arrived the day before me, Nick decided to use the afternoon to research the best way of getting to Sofia. He had already found a single blog post that described this journey. It seemed legitimate enough, but we were both a little sceptical of a blog post from a website called “bbqboy” (After the trip however, we were actually a little happy to have read this blog post).
We had an interesting choice between a train and a bus. The train was going to be leaving at 4:30am and would reach Sofia at 2pm. The bus would leave at 10am and reach Sofia at 3:30pm. However, the train station was a 10 minute walk for us whereas the bus stop would take us 45 minutes to get to. The bus ticket was possible to buy online, whereas we had to go in person to buy the train ticket. We felt like we would be much more comfortable taking the train but we weren’t sure yet. What really decided it for us, was our odyssey from our Hotel in central Thessaloniki to Peraia beach (definitely recommended). We had to take the 2K bus (which we’ve since dubbed the worst bus in the history of the world) to get to Peraia. We woke up early to beat the crowds and were at the stop at about 8am 10 minutes early. In that time, we saw multiple busses come by at the same minute with a bunch of people constantly getting on and off. Finally the 2K arrives, its already full but people are just shoving us out of the way to get in. We decide we cannot get in and we just walk along the same route of the bus, past multiple stops hoping to catch the next one. We’ve already walked about 2.5 kilometeres at this point and end up at the stop outside the University of Macedonia. We decide to wait at that station and after 15 minutes of waiting we were starting to get a bit impatient. I found a website called Moovit which tracks the busses in Thessaloniki and it claims that the 2K comes approximately every half hour which was plainly wrong. The bus eventually does arrive and it’s full (if the bus comes once every 1578 minutes, of course it will be full) and again there are people getting on and off. After being packed in like sardines on our way to IKEA, where there is a major bus terminus and switching to Bus no. 72 to finally get to Perea beach (this bus being much better), we unanimously decided to take the train.
Buying the ticket
On his second morning there, Nick decided to walk to the train station to enquire about the train schedule. The cashier told him that there was just a single train for Wednesday leaving at 4:30am and gave him the aforementioned information about the option of the bus as well. Nick asked if he could come back later in the day to buy the ticket, but was told that there was no more paper left to write him a ticket. The evening after, we went back to buy the ticket. The person came across as a little lazy and uninterested in writing us a ticket. He was sitting behind the counter of International Departures, so you’d think he wouldn’t have that much to do in a day. He asked us a couple of questions about our passport and visa requirements, to which we both replied that we didn’t need a visa. He had a short conversation with his colleague and wrote us two tickets without pressing us further about visa requirements. He told us that we’ll have to take the train to Strymonas, a bus to get us across the border and another train to take us to Sofia. The ticket cost 16 euros each.
The Journey
We get to the train station 15 minutes early and upon entering, we notice that there is no sign pointing to departures. If you find yourself there, you can take either entrance on either side of the ticket counters. The security guard there helpfully told us that we had to get on the train at Platform 3, we found the train and we were off. Approximately 15 minutes into our train ride, a ticket conductor came by to check our tickets. We had read on the bbq boy blogpost that we would have to get off at Strymonas railway station. This was a little confusing during the journey though, as we were looking at the map we noticed Strymonas — the region was a little further down in the map ( I just tried to look this up on google maps again to take a screenshot, but it seems to be accurate now; we both could have sworn it was further down). We found the actual name of the station to be R.R, according to the road sign we found as we got off.
I managed to doze off for a bit, but Nick stayed up. I woke up to find some beautiful Macedonian & North Macedonian mountains. About 10 minutes before we were meant to get off a kind man had overheard us about where we needed to get off and told us that ours was the stop after his. The ticket conductor came by later and told us the same thing. We got off and found ourselves at a nice little transit stop which had a little chapel attached to it, but no cafe’ in sight (because, priorities…). Right when we got off, we noticed a small office and on the door, the time for the next bus across the border to Kulata. The officer inside on the other hand, didn’t speak any English and seemed annoyed that I even dared to come in ask him a question. So, we had an hour’s wait to go and we found ourselves with two Dutch travellers, a chinese girl and three Romas. They all seemed friendly enough, but Nick and I needed some coffee. So we walked down the road a little bit and decided against crossing the service road. About 45 minutes in, the minibus to take us across the border arrived and we all got in. It was about a 15 minute drive to the border checkpoint. When we stopped, I realised that my passport was in the back so I asked the driver to please open the trunk. Among all the bags, there was a dog in a bag that didn’t move, but silently looked up at me (I wish I had taken a picture). I fished my passport out and handed it to the officer. who collected all our passports. On getting all our passports returned, we started off again and about 5–10 minutes later we were at Kulata railway station.
Here, we found a cafe’ where we were able to food, water and coffee. At the station there was also a toilet (but no tolietpaper). Our train was already there, but we found that it would be another hour before it would start up again. We were happy to get some coffee in us and walked around and the train started on time as promised. The train also had a toilet, but it was locked for the whole trip. This leg of the journey was again very scenic and about 3 hours later, we were in Sofia.
Conclusion
I still think the train was a better choice over the bus and we did enjoy the journey and the scenery. I wish we had some of the details that I just posted here and I hope it helps other people hoping to make the same trip. We met some nice people along the way and we got a great story out of it.
