Today was supposed to be a boring day. I was going to spend most of it moving in a train between Debrecen and Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Nothing too special. No sites or particular activities to make it special. But I won't forget this day anytime soon. Easily the craziest and most intense day of the trip so far...

Well, at least the first half of the day went according to plan. I woke up in Debrecen, confirmed I was couchsurfing with a guy in Cluj-Napoca named Mihai, and checked out of the pension I was staying in. Went to the train station to buy a ticket (I would have taken a bus, but there were no feasible options on a Wednesday). In order to get to Cluj I would have to take a connecting train at a place called Valea Lui Mihai, right on the Romanian side of the Romania-Hungary border. I bought the ticket for the first part but I couldn't buy the connecting ticket since I had to do that in Romania. No problem, I would have enough time between connections to do that.

I had a few more Hungarian Forint than I needed, so I thought I would go exchange it for some Romanian Leu. At the exchange office I noticed the rate looked more like it was for the old Romanian Leu (they revamped the old currency a few years ago), rather than the New Leu. It didn't seem right. I went to a cafe, got some wifi and tried to figure out what the deal was. One of the things I read was that it is normally not possible to get Leu outside of Romania... There was some information disputing this, but overall it wasn't very clear so I decided to play it safe and hope that they would accept euros at the ticket office. A small dilemma, but not something I was worried about. As it turned out it would be the least of my worries....

In the meantime, I passed a couple of hours in Debrecen. There's not very much to see there but the main street is quite nice (I think most tourists come here to check out the nearby Hórtabagy National Park, one of Hungary's biggest). Eventually it came time to go to the train station, and begin the journey towards the border. Now things were going to get interesting....

After some time, the train pulled to a halt (actually, it seemed to do this every five minutes for some reason, but this time it was for a purpose). Sure enough, the Hungarian border control police got on and started checking people's passports, as we were leaving the Schengen Area. I had all my documents, so no problem right? Right?

Well not exactly. The police had a lot of trouble understanding the Spanish residency/identification card I had and another certificate which I had giving me the right to re-enter Spain (and therefore Schengen) was considered worthless by them because it was written in Spanish (and not English, Hungarian or Romanian). Therefore the only document they took any notice of was my Australian passport, with its expired temporary Spanish visa and a Schengen re-entry stamp from January when I returned from Morocco. Well, s***. They asked me a number of questions about where I had been/what I was doing and so on, and then proceeded to leave the train with my documents. They took ages, long enough that I was worried the train might start to take off before I got them back. Finally they came back, but it was not like their opinion had changed. They basically started telling me the same thing, that I had overstayed my time in Schengen, based on what should have been an irrelevant stamp on my passport. At this point I was realising that my trip was coming to an end, almost one month earlier than planned. I would have to get back to Spain as quickly as possible, lest they try and deport me all the way back to Australia. To say it was a bit exasperating would be an understatement.

Then suddenly a woman (Amy, as I would find out later) appeared out of another train cabin and joined the conversation. It went something like this...
"Hey, it's ok, I will be your translator. Where are you from?"
"Australia".
"Australia! Strewth mate, I'm an Aussie too! Well, I lived in Perth for six years and I married one anyway. What's the problem?" She even whipped out her Australian passport cover to show me.

Seriously, on this train? It wasn't exactly the Paris-London route. We were in a town that just seemed like a few farms with a train station, and not much more. Anyway, it turned out she was Romanian-born, ethnically Hungarian, and as mentioned, she had married an Aussie and lived in Australia. Wow. She had three different passports as well, and worked as a professor in the arts faculty of Oxford. You could have worse allies in this situation, I'd imagine!

Well after assisting the police and I with a slightly more coherent conversation - -- which involved them taking my documents off the train again - she started to campaign a little on my behalf (like all the people on the train carriage who had now waited almost an hour because of this situation, she was sick of the delay. I could see most of the others in the carriage were too, but to their credit, they seemed more annoyed with the police than with me). She was saying that they couldn't leave me in the middle of nowhere and stuff along those lines. The police weren't too interested at first, but at least she managed to convince them to call their superior about it. They left the train for a third time.

This gave us an opportunity to talk briefly, and even then a couple of others joined in to find out what was going on. They all were quite supportive and understanding though, which brought a slight sense of relief given the situation. Amy assured me that she would try everything to make my border crossing happen. Finally, they police came back on board for a third and she started talking to them immediately. I stood there, basically just hoping that something might come out of this....

... It did. Finally they relented and decided to let me through. I couldn't believe it, but the stress was not over yet. They said that they would let me through, but I still had to pass the Romanian border check, and that whatever happened there was totally my responsibility. Amy told me to come to her train cabin to talk. The Hungarian police had been strict but nice enough (this was more or less true actually), but she said the Romanian border police are usually a "bunch of motherf***ers" and it's possible to expect all sorts of drama from them. We had to make up a story to help deal with them. So, we had met in Debrecen, and because of our Australian connection we had become friends and she had invited me to visit her hometown (Baia Mare) with her for a few days. I should say as little as possible and let her do the talking. It wasn't much, but it was something. She gave me her phone number as well, just in case I had to get off the train or had any other problems.

We arrived on the Romanian side, at Valea Lui Mihai. The police got on and the routine began again. They came straight for me because apparently their mates on the Hungarian side had made a phone call, so that made the story completely useless. She talked to the officer and I said almost nothing, as we planned. He took my passport and got off the train. There was a third person in the cabin, a friend of Amy's, and I found out because of all these delays he would miss a connection and not arrive home to his village until extremely late in the day. I felt bad about this so I gave him a little bottle of licor de hierbas (Galician herb liquor) which I had been carrying around. Fortunately this gesture went down rather well.

After about seven or eight minutes, the police came back with my passport. But instead of telling me to get off the train, he smiled and gave it back to me with a Romanian entry stamp. He wasn't a motherf***er at all.... and I'D MADE IT! Naturally, the relief I felt was considerable. Ok, I was f***ing stoked! I got up and gave Amy - this woman who had been a complete stranger to me only half an hour before - an enormous hug, thanking her relentlessly. This woman had come from nowhere and saved my trip! She seemed almost as happy as I was. I sat back down in my seat, laughing. You could not have possibly wiped the smile off my face at that point. I was so relieved that I forgot I actually had to get off at this point and wait for a connecting train! Luckily Amy came to the rescue on that one as well, just before it began to take off again. I quickly grabbed my stuff and ran off the train (is this becoming a habit?), but not before giving Amy one more hug and saying "catch ya later". The border police were still around and strangely enough they even had a little joke with me about the situation.

I'd missed my connecting train to Cluj-Napoca, but fortunately there was one more passing by this place in about an hour's time. I bought a ticket for the train. They didn't really accept euros, but I gave her a little bit extra and it solved the problem (after what happened on the train the currency problem I'd had in the morning seemed like a complete non-issue). I passed the time at the train station having a half-English-half-Romanian conversation with another lady who had been in my carriage, and then after with Ion (John), a jolly alcoholic who constantly talked to me from then on, of course only in Romanian.

I got on the next train when it arrived, and Ion sat down in the same cabin. He pulled out a bottle of water and two beers, and threw one my way. I was pretty sure you were not supposed to drink on the train, but by this point I didn't care much, a beer seemed completely appropriate. After a few minutes he invited me to come for a cigarette as well. This was definitely not allowed, but I could tell he was saying to me that it wouldn't be a problem and that he did this kind of thing often. We went to the end of the carriage to smoke, keeping a look out for the inspector. Sure enough, the b***** snuck up on us anyway. But no problem, this is Romania. Ion gave him 10 Lei (about 2.50 euros) and we now had a smoking pass on the train! For approximately the next two hours Ion and I had a big conversation (well, he was doing most of the talking, and of course he didn't speak any English). Fortunately Romanian is slightly similar to Spanish (and Italian even more so), so therefore I could actually understand a small part of what he was saying.

Eventually the train reached the town of Oradea and stopped for a short while. At this point Ion got off the train to buy a couple more beers and smoke what was probably about ten cigarettes. While he was gone the train filled up with people, including our cabin (actually, we weren't sitting in the correct seats, it didn't matter when we had got on. But now it did). It turned out most of the new people that sat down were actually medical interns from Egypt and Turkey, so now I could have a conversation in English. Meanwhile when Ion returned there was no space left and he had to go to find his real seat. The medical students were a nice group, and I spent the rest of my train trip talking to them and a couple of Romanian girls who were looking after them.

Finally, at about 11:30pm the train finally made it to Cluj-Napoca. I said goodbye to the students and saw Ion getting off again to buy more beers. Luckily for me, Mihai (my Couchsurfing host in Cluj) was waiting at the the platform for me with his girlfriend, Loredana. We came back to his apartment and finished off with a few drinks. So much for a boring day...