1

Buses leave Sofia for Skopje fairly frequently, and leave from the private international area of the bus station, should take about 5 hours.

Skopje Bus station is easy to navigate and from there you can catch a bus to Tirana, although I'm not sure how often these run. Alternatively you can take one of the frequent buses to Struga near Ohrid, it takes 3 hours, and buses depart Struga for Tirana about 3-5 times a day and take approx 5 hours.

2

Best way is by overnight train (departs Bucharest ~11.20PM, arrives Sofia ~9.30AM, beds from about €40)
Second best is by bus (leaves Bucharest at 4PM, gets to Sofia around 11PM, ticket is €25).
There's also a day train (departs 1PM, arrives ~10.30PM, seats from €28)

Flights are relatively expensive (about €140) considering the distance.

Edited by: ktack

3

All good information above. I don't know of any cheap flights between Bucharest and Sofia, so train and bus is really your only option.

The Central Sofia Bus Station lists four daily departures for Skopje:
http://www.centralnaavtogara.bg/index.php
(One is "overnight" but leaving at midnight and arriving at 5 am probably won't leave you very well rested.)

4

I'm not advocating it, but if you did want to fly, TAROM flies twice daily and Qatar flies 4x/week. Ktack has the price right.

5

I took the night train Bucharest - Sofia last week. Bought my ticket from an agency called Wasteels inside the main station. They spoke English, took credit card & charged no commission. €32 for a seat. They aiso have an office at Sofia station - I didn't use that but they might be able to help. The bus station is about 200m to the left from the train station & iI would think you could get a bus to Skoje from there.

6

From Bucharest to Sofia buses depart from Autogara Filaret, and no longer from the Double T office in Calea Victoriei. Apparently tickets are sold directly from the driver. Departure every day at 4 pm.

7

Hi,
I spent ages looking at how to travel from Bucharest to Sofia before we left for our hol but there was no information available. So we had to wait until we arrived in Bucharest to try and figure it out and this is how we did it (accurate in August 2012):

Got a taxi in the morning to Autogaret Filaret, which is one of the bus stations in Bucharest, you will see it on a larger map South of the city centre. The taxi cost about 10 lei (£2) from the centre but we found no one there at the ticket desk..weird. After a while someone turned up and told us to come back at 3pm to get out tickets. So we returned with our bags at 3pm and hung around for half an hour to find out you pay the driver 110 lei (cash only) each for the ticket to Sofia. Easy! The bus left exactly at 4pm and we arrived in Sofia about 10:30pm after a couple of stops.

Edited by: Studor80

8

Sofia to Skopje bus:
Go to the Traffik Market bus station, which is next to the central bus station and train station in Sofia. You need cash for your tickets and it took a long time to be served, which was annoying. In August there was a 7am bus, which we missed due to queues at the Matpu bus kiosk, and so we bought our ticket and returned for the 9:30 am bus to Skopje. You can ask about other available times at the ticket desk....
We then bought our return tickets to Sofia when we arrived in Skopje- which was easy to do and a lot of available times. Journey took about 3hrs with one stop.