A few memories that didn’t make it into this post: Arriving in at the youth hostel in Dubrovnik to find that I was their first customer in months, and that they had basically opened the place just for me. Having to beg for 5 euros from the station guard in Bar to get on the train to Budapest. The bus driver not letting me pee at any point on the journey from Dubrovnik to Bar, so me going in a plastic bottle in the (out-of-use) toilet.
Good times.
Probably the most amount of leg-work I’ve managed to squeeze into a seven-day period so far. So, let’s see, I sent the last email from Zagreb, and since then have ben to Split and Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast, Bar and Belgrade in Serbia, and now Bucarest in Romania, a city I’ve had a mild desire to visit for most of my life, seeing as I lived on a road that carried it’s name for seven or eight years.
So let’s start with New Years. I actually had a pretty good time, which is unusual, as New Years is usually something of a let-down. New Years in Zagreb takes the form of some 4,000 Croats in the main square, jumping up and down to some age’d-rocker band (think Bon Jovi fronted by George Galloway in a ponytail), and letting off fireworks with an absolute disregard for safety procedure. The fireworks were pretty incredible, though – the Croatians sure know how to put on good pyrotechnics, and the lack of police presence meant that they could be… creative about how they were letting them off and allowing them to go. So that was exciting. New Years Day was a proper vegetatian day; the Croats actually know how to do January 1st TV, meaning that I spent the day watching (in no particular order) The Great Escape, Beverly Hills Cop 1-3, Eraser and the last James Bond travesty. I had a good time in Zagreb. It’s an odd little city, somewhat lacking in charm, but it did know how to party.
The train down to Split was actually new, which was a novelty – I had kinda gotten used to trains being covered in cigarette ash and non-functional light fittings. Split itself is a fun little city. It is quite definately orientated towards the tourist, since it’s main raison d’etre (trade routesand sinking Venitian ships) dried up a couple of hundred years ago. It is dominated by a fort-cum-castle that is like the inspiration for every fantasy movie ever – masses of tiny winding passages flanked by tall, tightly-packed yellow-washed houses, interspersed with broken courtyards, gaping chasms and tall towers. It’s incredibly dramatic; wandering around it makes me feel a bit like a child, as I tend to let my imagination run away with me in such situations. I think that the main attraction of Split, however, is that it appears not to even have a McDonalds, which I think is probably a first. For a while it also seemed like it didn’t have a youth hostel, either; I was wondering aimlessly through a back alley looking for one which allegedly existed but could not be found through conventional means, when a man saw that I had a backpack on and came and asked me if I was looking for someplace to stay. Normally I would be wary, but I was tired and it was dark, so I just said yes. To cut a long story short, I ended up with a vacant apartment – double bed, kitchen, the works – for just under £10 per night, right in the middle of the citadel, and thus right on top of all the action. Outside the window this morning there was a vast market, selling fruits, dried meat and honey. Yeah, I fell like I did pretty well. I know it could have ended up much worse but for now I’m not complaining.
Split, however, is the end of the train line as far as Croatia goes. A bus journey to Dubrovnik wasn’t too traumatic, but it did act as a precursor for what was to come. Dubrovnik is an amazing city. Sheathed in white marble, perched on an outcrop over the Mediterranian, and ringed by mountains and forests, it is a city that demands awe. Like Split, it’s military function is ancient history now, which is why the shelling of the city (and its entirely civilian population) by Serbian battleships in 1991 caused such consternation. Happily, the damage has been pretty well repaired, although the odd gutted building still lurks around. Actually, that’s pretty much a feature of the Dalmatian coast. The train and bus rides down wielded some stunning views, but the countryside is still scarred by the odd derelict with its roof shelled off.
(Incidentally, the winter is the wrong time to visit Dalmatia. Wrong wrong wrong. Dubrovnik was gorgious but it would ahve been unreal in the sun.)
So, that was the fun part of the week. Unfortunately the rest brought varying degrees of discomfort and stress. The plan was to head from Dubrovnik to Belgrade; at first, I was set on backtracking to Zagreb and taking the train from there. However, the train lines in Serbia terminate in Bar, which is a small town on the south end of that country’s coastline, near to the border with Albania. Realising that it was but a hop, skip and a jump from Dubrovnik, I resolved to take the bus to Bar and catch the train to Belgrade from there. Bad idea. For a start, the bus journey was actually in the region of eight hours long, and then to add chaos to misery the train from Bar didn’t leave for Belgrade until about seven hours after I arrived there. Let me assure you that there is nothing to do in Bar. I used those seven hours to read Lolita, with annotations and seventy-odd pages of waffly analysis, and shivered in the unmitigated cold.
The train, when it finally left, was not a sleeper, despite the fact that it was leaving at 11pm for a city ten hours away. Also, the doors didn’t lock. Being as I was certifiably the only English speaker on the train, there was no-one to buddy up with. So I stayed awake all night, and judging by the incidence rate of people poking their heads through my door that was probably sensible. I did get to see soem of the Serbian landscape, though, which was nice, although as the train line plotted a course that contrived to approach both the Bosnian and the Kosovan border, the view mainly consisted of craters from landmines.
Belgrade is ugly. Don’t ever go there. I left after only six hours, and it’s the only city in which I didn’t take a single photo.
(It does have an amazing bookshop though. At some pioint I’m going to have to tote up the amount of books I’ve read over this trip. I’m pretty sure it’s around 25 now. Ouch, that’s a lot of money on books.)
And would you believe it? The train to Bucarest is also not a sleeper. The night train community in Romania is actually surprisingly zesty; no-one appeared to be sleeping, let’s put it that way, and if they weren’t then I sure as hell wasn’t. The train alternated between overzealously heated and ludicrously cold, the conductor kept on laughing at me which I found undescribably creepy, and to top it all off I made myself sick again – dehydration, over-exertion and exhaustion combined to produce an interestingly insistent fever and a scorcher of a headache. I’m coming to realise that I’m not a teenager any more and a diet of Coca-Cola and metabolism cannot be made to support power-walking up hills with large rucksacks. When I think about the three times I’ve been laid low on this trip, they’ve all been exhaustion-related. Perhaps I need to work on my diet.
Anyway, it wasn’t all bad. The train did wend its way through Transylvania, and I had an Awesome Travelling Moment – looking out of a window at an opportune moment, I happened to see a castle perched on a hill, surrounded by trees and illuminated by the full moon. Then the train took a corner with a screech of brakes and the whoel scene was obliterated by darkness. The fact that the train was roughly circa 1898 added to the whole Bram Stoker feel.
(Can you tell that I’m getting sick of travelling? No so much the seeing new and exciting things business, that never gets old. It’s the periodic 12-hour breaks in between, sat on dirty trains and cramped coaches, that are starting to chaffe.)
Anyway. I arrived in Bucarest (back above the snow line, le sigh) at roughly 5am this morning, found a youth hostel and have ben sleeping until now. Next is to take a poke around the city, although the main focus of the next few days is to get ready for my train jounrey to Sofia, which no doubt will be equally pleasant. My next email will reach you from Istanbul – and, my friends, will probably be my last, as my return flighty to Blighty is booked for Saturday the 21st of January. Keep an eye out for it, same Bat-time, etc etc.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to hearing all the New Years stories, which I’m sure some of you must have. I hope you all had a good one, anyway. Let me know!
