Day Thirteen Bucharest to Turkish Border

For the next 22 hours we will be sat in this fuggy, damp smelling compartment on the slowest train in the known world. It will stop at every station along the way, making a laborious process even more mundane. There is to be no getting off the train and no restaurant car.

We share our six bed sleeper compartment with an elderly Romanian couple (good thing too as the man has a bag of pears larger than the draw for the FA Cup 3rd round and I forgot to buy any fruit) and a lovely young Italian couple who keep themselves nobly to themselves.

We cross into Bulgaria through a nondiscript, industrialised abandoned town (a depressingly common sight on this trip) and stutter over the vast Danube on a rickety steel bridge.

Passing through Bulgaria the landscape changes from marshy delta plains to densely forested hills, via the now ubiquitous fields of dried up sunflowers.

We stop for a while at a namless station for the front half of the train to split on its way to the Agean Sea. I ask a rotund attendent if I have time to dash across the tracks to buy water and beer from a rundown kiosk. He looks nervously at his watch and says that the train leaves in three minutes and he will hold it if it starts to move prematurely.

Run for my life across several tracks only to find that, unsurpisingly, they don't take Romanian notes in Bulgarian paltform kiosks. Sprint back and dive in the door to detect a glint of mischief in the attendents watery eyes. The train's not leaving for another half hour, he chuckles to me.

We are forced to make friends with some terribly noisy Dutch students in the nearby carriage and we polish off the Hungarian wine Claire has been dutifully lugging along since Eger.

As the sky fades in a pale magenta sunset, the moon rises as a perfect crescent slither. Somehow fitting I think, as we head towards a 95% Islamic 'secular' country.

We have finally done it. We've got to Istanbul.