I walked back to the train station and tried out some rudimentary Bulgarian to buy a train ticket back to Plovdiv. Obviously for this to work it required that the woman selling the tickets would understand what I said and not need any further information, but she said a whole lot of things, and then the word ‘putnichki‘ a couple of times. She wouldn’t sell me a ticket for the train I wanted, only for the next train after that. At first I was a bit annoyed but later I realised that ‘putnichki’ is Bulgarian for “deathly slow”, and she’d sold me a ticket for an express. It was leaving an hour later but it would arrive in Sofia an hour earlier.

So I headed back to Sofia. The train journey was amazing, winding through a dramatic river valley. The villages we passed looked very ramshackle, with crumbling houses and horses and carts being common sights. We got back to Sofia at 9pm, and I needed some food. I just wanted some quick dirty snack, and I was a vegetarian in a meat-eating land, so this wasn’t straightforward. I came terrifyingly close to going to a McDonalds on Vitosha, but fortunately I saw sense and found a fast food van selling veggie burgers.

The next morning I got up at 5am, grabbed a taxi and headed to the airport. This had been a fantastic trip. The eclipse had been stunning, I’d loved Turkey and Bulgaria, and it was great to be on the road again only a few weeks after I’d got back from South America. But after seven months of travelling and dossing, my bank balance was dwindling. I headed home with no idea when or where my next trip might be, and pondering the unpleasant prospect of a return to the world of employment.