After boarding the train to Mongolia in Irkutsk, we bumped into a tour group; some of whom were Irish guys who were on a tour crossing Russia, Mongolia and China. We were all in the same train carriage along with some other people from the hostel we had just stayed in. We ended up sharing our cabin with a Russian woman who had no English and an American guy called Stephen. He was en-route to China for job interviews and was going via Russia and Mongolia for some distraction. Needless to say the atmosphere on this train was very different from [View Full Entry]

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Getting on the Trans-Siberian rail network was amazing. We got onboard and settled in for a 70 hour plus journey. Luckily we only had three in the cabin and not four. Space is always a premium especially on a longer journey like this. We had visions of drunken Russian soldiers swigging vodka and roaming the train, but this did not come to pass. Apart from two Germans in another cabin, we seemed to be the only English speaking people in the carriage; everyone else was silent! We were sharing our cabin with an old Russian lady; we called her ‘Biddy’ as [View Full Entry]

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We got the train to St. Petersburg from Vilnius in Lithuania on Monday night at 6:30pm. It’s always anxious times when arriving in the station to try and figure out the platform, train number, carriage number and cabin number, especially when everything is in a different language. However this time around we were more prepared and I used my secret weapon Google translator to assist me. We boarded the train for a 15 hour journey to St. Petersburg over night. Not many people speaking English around here but luckily onboard I got talking to a French guy who was a teacher [View Full Entry]

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Buying tickets in Warsaw central train station for Russia is not the easiest thing you’ll ever do; be prepared for your blood pressure to rise significantly! You have no idea what the people selling the tickets are saying, and they pretty much just nod at whatever you say. After some intensive discussions / sign language though, we managed to book a ticket on the Moscow train which is over 20hrs! - You couldn’t make this stuff up…. While sitting in a café a while later, I began thinking about something the ticket lady had being saying… Belarus, Belarus!! - Now we [View Full Entry]

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From the moment we arrived at the station in Budapest to head to Krakow, the problems started. For some reason we didn’t have a night car reservation (meaning a cabin); don’t ask why; we thought we did, but somehow the whole thing got lost in translation. The Hungarian train attendants were not impressed and we got dumped into ordinary run-of-the-mill 3rd class. This is a carriage with no beds - just seats. There were six of us in this small shoebox, and it was a tight fit. We were supposed to leave at 8pm, however the train didn’t leave until nearly [View Full Entry]

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After getting another train....this time to Hungary from Croatia, we arrived in Budapest. The hotel was 200m from the train station which was handy and we were checked in, in no time. Budapest is impressive. The city is actually divided in two by the Danube River - on one side is the Buda district and the other is Pest. The local currency is the "Hungarian Forint". One EURO = 240 Forint and rising. I don’t know how the kids manage in school with this; the maths must get pretty heavy when trying to work out the price of a car or [View Full Entry]

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After leaving Sarajevo we headed up to Zagreb for a few days. We’re trying to make it a bit closer towards the top of Eastern Europe (i.e. Hungary & Poland), before our InterRail tickets run out, which sadly means we'll have to give the Croatian coast a miss this time. The train was an older train. Air-con came in the form of opening the window in the carriage and then opening the window in the carriage hallway, and trying to create a wind tunnel though the train!! I learned that trick on the previous train by watching this old guy! However, [View Full Entry]

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For a change we took the day train out of Serbia....mainly because it was the only train available to get out of Belgrade to Sarajevo. We had to detour though Croatia for a few hours, so we were expecting plenty of entertainment with our friends in passport control. While waiting for our connecting train in Croatia we bumped into a fellow InterRailer and world traveller extraordinaire!! He was 62! ...and travelling Eastern Europe for a few weeks. He had travelled all over the world and had many entertaining stories and words of wisdom to pass on to us... On the train [View Full Entry]

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We took the overnight night train to Serbia. Realising that we had no money on the train we panicked as we thought we needed a visa to enter Serbia. 'Take credit card?’ doesn’t really cut it at the border at 4am. Visions of being dumped off the train and having to wait over night at some forgotten station in no-mans-land began running though my mind…Doah!! Luckily when the police arrived in the cabin, the EU membership thingy seemed to hold a lot of weight especially for ‘wanna be members’ - No visa requirement at all for existing EU members. Nice one! [View Full Entry]

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Travelling up from Sofia to Bucharest in Romania was quite an enjoyable journey. There was some beautiful scenery along the way to admire and it also gave me some ‘me time’ to catch up with reading after a busy time in Sofia pottering about. We travelled first class and before you conjure up images of fabulous décor with champagne and wine on demand; take a nostalgic moment to wander through the corridors of your mind and picture what CIE trains looked like in the 1970’s & 1980’s in Ireland and you’ve got the idea of what first class was like. If [View Full Entry]

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