Balkans (I)

How Not to Cross a Border

You can find it on Google Maps, the gas station I sat behind while the ink dried on my passport. It’s here, if you’re curious: 42°59’35.7 N , 22°50’46.6 E. There I found one thing: that it’s good to be on the right side of a border.

I arrived in Bulgaria circuitously. In normal times, it’s a 240 km straight shot from the Macedonian capital to the Bulgarian. In pandemic times, it’s a three-country, 360 km logistical trainwreck. I say trainwreck because the trains are literally wrecked. 

It goes like this: from Skopje, take the bus to Nis, then it’s a second bus to Pirot, then a third village bus to Caribrod (this bus does not exist on Google Maps, or elsewhere on the internet—you've got to ask around). Next, you need to hitchhike or find a taxi to the Serbian side of the border. But there are no taxis in Caribrod, so good luck. Eventually someone will offer you a lift.

Once you’re at the border checkpoint, you’re really on your own. If they let you through, you've got to hitchhike the rest of the way to Sofia. Or hitch to Dragoman and take the train if it’s not too late in the day. Your best bet is to wait and regroup at the gas station down the road. To get there it’s a ten minute walk down the highway, during which you’ll be stopped and questioned repeatedly by immigration police. Once there, it’ll be a short wait until someone pulls up and asks where you’re going. Then you get in. 

About that first bus, to Nis. You’ll have to cross the Serbian-Macedonian border. When you’re queuing up at the window, don’t take a photo of anything. It’ll get you pulled into an office where they take your phone and search everything on it, including your camera roll, browser history, and chat logs. When they ask you what you do, tell them you write. Although this is where the questions should start, this is where they end. 

Good news, you’re free to go. Bad news, your bus left without you. You’ll be stranded there a few hours till the next one rolls through, and since your ticket’s no longer valid, it’s a bribe-the-driver situation. Bid high. A couple days of transiting later and, ta-da, you’re at the Serbian-Bulgarian border. 

Don’t take this photo. 

For me, the world had closed up again, and I had run out of alternatives. Kosovo’s foreign ministry said they might take me, but I was looking at another few days of bus hopping to get there. By that point, my PCR test would have expired. Besides, I’ve always had a thing for the name Sofia. So when I found out it was the only major city left on earth that would allow me in, the decision was made a little easier. It was Bulgaria or bust. If they didn’t let me through, the journey, in which I was six months deep, would be over and I’d be flying back to Canada. 

Before the border crossing, I met an Argentinian traveller headed the opposite way after having been denied entry. “Forget it,” he told me. “They’re not letting anybody in.” At this news, I shed whatever morale I had left. I panic-Googled flights back home, and my wrecked heart wrenched at their prices.

But there was little to lose. I figured I might as well take a run at it. So I lined up on foot and waited my turn behind the trucks. Up ahead were hills that rippled in their fumes, adding a layer of irreality to a world that already felt impossibly far away and less than real. While queuing, I looked up how to say “Hello” in Bulgarian. When it was my turn at the window, I butchered the pronunciation. 

Dobar den. 

It’s Dobar den, they said. 

Dobar den. 

No, Dobar den. 

Dobar den. 

I could’ve played this game all day. 

They took my passport out of view. Eventually, I heard the stamp come down. These are the things you don’t forget: first the thud, like a gavel; then the loading of a spring, like a pistol cocking back. These are freedoms, crystallized as sounds. 

Best seat in the house on the Caribrod marshrutka.

It’s funny, the second time I entered Bulgaria a similar thing happened. The guy in my car on the night train was American, coming in from Istanbul. But American travellers had been barred from the E.U. since the previous March. I had to be the guy to break the news that he wouldn’t be let in. I tried to counsel him, suggesting he tell the border police he was only transiting through to Macedonia without stopping. But he insisted that if I, as a Canadian, could be allowed through, then he, as an American, could also. Minutes later, at passport check, they held his hands behind his back and walked him away, leaving him stranded at the Turkish border in the middle of the night, and that was the last I saw him. 

In Serbia, I briefly lived with a couple of North Africans who, like me, were in the country visa-free. They were intent on finding a way into the E.U. and, eventually, the Schengen zone. They had devised a plan to cross the Danube river into Romania once the ice was thick enough. On the coldest night in January, they showed up at the river to find it iceless, so they swam. But one of their wetsuits was too buoyant and carried them down the river with the current. When the police found them, they brought them back in handcuffs. I thought about visiting Romania myself, so I emailed the consulate in Bucharest. They told me I could book my flight for May, once the restrictions expire.  

I benefited enormously from an unjustified freedom of mobility in pandemic Europe. Because we had a handle on the virus early on, Canada was exempted from most E.U. member states’ travel bans, whereas the United States, and nearly all other countries, remained included in each. These rules stuck, even after the Canadian per capita case rate went on to surpass the American’s. So I found myself in a unique situation in which there weren’t any American tourists in most places I travelled, causing my accent to raise eyebrows, then suspicion. It’s not hard to spot the injustice. I posed no greater risk than any of the other travellers I met who were turned away by virtue of their nationality. We all came from the same places, after having generally done the same things. 

I had well-meaning Canadians tell me that I could only travel in Turkey due to my privilege as a man, or live in Serbia because I’m white, and while these made my life easier, I met countless travellers who served as counterexamples in both cases. What I didn’t find were cases where people from developing countries moved freely wherever they wanted. Their nationality was their principal or singular barrier, in all cases. I found that I carried no greater privilege than my Canadian passport—a privilege as in-born as race or sex. As circuitous as my journey was, I eventually made it to wherever I was going, which, I’ve found, is a universally held yet often hopelessly unattainable dream.