"sleeper" train

After Istanbul next stop Budapest.

On nearly every form of transport. 

First, to get to Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport from our hostel we caught the light rail and then a ferry followed by a hour bus ride. From the airport by plane off to Belgrade. We had a couple of hours in Belgrade before our 8 hour night train to Budapest. Leah had done lots of research on this night train and the majority of reviews were negative with stories of theft, scams, several passport checks, taken passports, no sleep etc. 

Belgrade train station.

we were a bit concerned when we got onto the train and all the lights were off.
(they turned them on with the train)

Besides little sleep (I had about 1 and a half and Leah about 4 hours) our trip was pretty much just what we expected. We booked the cheapest seats rather than a sleeper seeing we wouldn't be getting much sleep anyway. 

Passport checks: The one exiting Serbia went smoothly. Going into Hungry our passport check was a little more thorough, with the guard flicking through and really inspecting our Estonian passports (they are both different, Leah’s being more recent). 

And then there was the Russian guy. 

This guy had one day left on his visa. So Serbia were happy for him to leave but the Hungarian boarder control were not welcoming. After 15 minutes of discussing on the train he was taken off for a further half an hour of “discussing”. Well something was sorted out and he was finally back on board and we were off again. Because of the delay we must have missed our window of time to travel on a certain track because a short time later we stopped again this time for an hour. All up our trip was from 9:30pm to 7am. We capped off  our 24 hours in transit with a metro ride from the station to our hostel in Budapest.

Defiantly an experience but not nearly as scary as people say!

the sun rising just around 5:30. Two germans sleeping opposite us.

finally in Budapest at the train station bright and early.

- Arvi