Two conferences, one Interrail pass, one bus and lots of holiday: to Sofia and back via Leipzig

ENMESH aims are: 1) To develop and maintain a network of active researchers in mental health service research in Europe; 2) To promote the development and dissemination of study designs, research instruments, mental health outcome indicators (including cost measurements), and relevant forms of statistical indicators; and 3) To function as a clearing house for mental health service evaluation information in Europe.

The Leipzig stigma conference was a meeting by invitation of stigma researchers, to discuss our research and to reposition our field in order to meet present challenges.

Before Iguana I travelled by train to conferences in Ulm, Lisbon, Nice, Güttingen, Versailles and Trento, but for the first three of these I flew back. Last year, because of global heating, I decided no more flying in Europe unless there’s e.g. a family emergency. I also like to see where I’m going, and may be trying to recapture my lost youth when I did a lot of European rail travel- before cheap flights. I slip my journey details into conversations at conferences, and most people tell me how much they like rail travel, so I hope it gets them thinking.

We made a family holiday of this trip. The only person who had been to Bulgaria before was me, for a few days in 1986; also my sister and her family live in Prague, creating a stopping point on the way, with Leipzig on the way back.

My starting point for international rail travel is always www.seat61.com. I’m not sure what I would do without Mark Smith aka Man in Seat 61. In November 2025 I bought four discounted Interrail passes for all the family- discounts are usually twice a year and passes are valid for a year. I made reservations as early as each rail company allows – six months for Eurostar and three for some of the other journeys. This is important for Eurostar as they don’t seem to save many seats for Interrail users.

After the Eurostar to Brussels we took the European Sleeper to Prague, a slight variation to the more direct route to Bulgaria via Vienna. The carriage was hot when we first got on because the A/C does not start until the train gets going; happily there is water supplied. You can also order snacks and other drinks. I find it remarkably easy to sleep in couchettes, I guess the movement lulls you to sleep. However, if you are over about 5’9” you can’t stretch out fully.

There was a great sunset as we travelled through the Dutch countryside and Amsterdam.

One son returned the same way from Prague while the next day the rest of us went to Budapest and then took a sleeper to Bucharest, which was full of football fans from Wales for a friendly that night.

We followed Man in Seat 61’s recommendation to stay at the hotel where the spies hung out in Ceausescu’s time. While there may be no more spies and the hotel has had a makeover, the sleeper carriages are straight from Ceausescu’s time according to one of our Romanian fellow travellers on the return journey- cramped and with a/c not up to summer temperatures. And there’s no food or drink for sale so you have to stock up before boarding. But still I slept well.

Had we been going straight to Sofia the next day we would have continued there on the train from Bucharest. Instead we got off at Ruse, just over the Danube which forms the border with Bulgaria. We then did a brilliant 10-day guided road trip around archaeological and historical sites in Bulgaria, ending in Sofia. I went to ENMESH which as always was an excellent meeting.

The challenge for this trip was how to get from Sofia on the 20th in time for a pre-conference dinner in Leipzig on the 21st. The few other people who went to both meetings flew. To avoid this I missed the last morning of ENMESH. Originally I booked the train from Sofia to Bucharest, sleeper to Budapest, Budapest to Munich then Munich to Leipzig, which would miss the dinner but just about get me there for the first day, albeit at 4am. Well into the trip I discovered after a prompt from my son that the Flix bus between Sofia and Bucharest is much quicker than the train. It’s cheap, as is the train reservation, so we switched to the bus, got an earlier sleeper to Budapest, and then the best train I have ever taken, from Budapest to Dresden. It was a Czech railways train with very good a/c, a play area for children, and a restaurant car with a waiter (in second class!), hot Czech dishes and cold Czech beer on tap. Also the view along the Elbe between Prague and Dresden (see photo of the Spa town Bad Schandau) is lovely.

While it’s possible to get between much of Germany and London in a day, Leipzig is too far east, so we broke the journey in Cologne for two nights. German trains, once the envy of Europe, have become quite unreliable following partial privatisation, with frequent cancellations and delays. The departure time of our train from Cologne to Brussels was brought forward by over an hour because of a change to the route and because of reserving through Interrail I did not get a notification- you have to check a day or two before for any changes. We were otherwise fairly lucky and got to Brussels 30 minutes late. Problems elsewhere however meant that the Eurostar left two hours late. As that was our last journey, it didn’t matter.

As you can imagine this trip took a lot of time to organise - several hours during several weekends. I made one mistake, which was to reserve a sleeper from Bucharest to Budapest on the Romanian Railways site (per Man in Seat 61) without the Interrail pass; this trip is not on the Rail Europe site at all and I think I forgot to go back to the Interrail app to do it there once booking opened. One tip about the Interrail app: if you put in departure and arrival cities that are far apart it often suggests routes with interchanges that are too short to allow for delays. Instead my advice is to use Man in Seat 61 to find out each step of the route, then break the journey into these steps on the Interrail app, leaving a couple of hours to change trains.

Further information on IGUANA can be found here: King’s College London Decarbonising European Conference Travel Initiative (IGUANA) | King's College London or email iguana@kcl.ac.uk