5 Comments

7 Comments

10 Comments

I imagine my childhood self had found the similarity of “Hungary” and “hungry” hilarious on more than one occasion. Whatever negative karma that had generated at the time, I was paying my debt in full as we crossed the border into the country.

Our credentials were checked by a pair of non-uniformed border guards who looked and acted like something from an Eastern European Miami Vice. They asked us if we had any cocaine. From the way they asked, it was tough to tell whether they would have been upset if we had said yes. They may have wanted to share some of it, or even sell us some of their own.

As we handed over our passports, Brodos and I were clearly having the same thought: these people could be anybody. I tensed a little, ready to leap after them if they ran off. It didn’t prove necessary. Which was lucky, because I think they were armed.

By the time we reached Budapest, I had eaten five pastilles. The train pulled into the station and I quickly climbed off, flagged down a passing guard and asked her how long we had before it would leave the station again. She didn’t speak English. Or bad German.

I gazed down the platform and saw something that could have been a shop. Salvation, just one medium-distance run away. Oh god. There were no more trains to Belgrade that day, so if we lost ours we were scuppered. I couldn’t take the risk.

I climbed back on board and sat down, mournfully popping a licorice pastille into my mouth.

Did I mention, by the way, just how unpleasant they were? I should have. They were very unpleasant.

The hours stretched on. DS gaming began to wear thin, as did reading our books and staring out the window. Our timetable claimed there would be further stops of more than 15 minutes - long enough, perhaps, for a dash to a station cafe and back again.

We arrived at the first of these stations, stopping a short walk from the platform. Passengers began leaving the train and walking across the tracks. I asked a guard in broken German how long I might have to grab some food, and he told me it would be around 10 minutes. It was too tight to risk.

After a couple more hours we were at the next stop. Again I asked the guard how long we had. This time, he told me, we had half an hour. That would have been perfect, apart from two large hitches. Firstly, there was not much of a station to speak of and certainly no station shop. He indicated that if we left the train, headed away from the platform and down a nearby street, we might find somewhere. This was so far from a comfortable manoeuvre that we could barely contemplate it.

Perhaps more importantly, this was the Hungarian border with Serbia. We were newcomers to border etiquette, but common sense suggested the sight of a couple of men diving off the train and legging it into town may have attracted the interest of the police. So we stayed put, stomachs rumbling and throats dry as we handed our passports to the border control.

Half an hour later we were handing the same documents to the Serbian border patrol. Entering and leaving Hungary, we had felt a faint sense of menace and power emanating from the authorities, but the Serbians could not have been more of a contrast. Smiling, fascinated by what two Englishmen were doing on a train between the two countries, our passport checker began practising his English and answering our questions about the Serbian language. What initially seemed like probing questions about our business in the country turned out to be genuine, friendly interest, and when his female colleague popped into the cabin with a basket of sweets, we practically bit her arm off. The sweets weren’t just for us, sadly, but she let us have two each on request. Had she known how close we were to death, she may have offered more. But we didn’t want to look stupid, so we kept quiet about our dietary miscalculation.

In retrospect, it was a good thing they hadn’t pried too closely into our business. We couldn’t have told them who we were visiting. All we had were mobile numbers and online nicknames. There was an outside chance that the border guards would have played World of Warcraft on the Ahn’ Qiraj server - “Oh, you’re going to visit Peyota!” - but it seemed unlikely.

We set off again. I was down to just a handful of pastilles, but they were doing so little to take the edge off the grumbling in my stomach that it didn’t really matter.

Exhausted after almost 36 hours of relentless travel, we stared, we mumbled, we lay on our seats and tried to catch up on the sleep we had lost between Berlin and Vienna. And we looked at our phones to see how many minutes had passed. Over and over, we looked. Until finally, with minds numb and bodies sore and spirits all but eroded, we came within half an hour of Belgrade.

6 Comments

Tuesday April 29

11 hours on a single train is an interesting prospect. It’s crucial to pace yourself, and so, like marathon runners preparing our bodies and minds before a race, we analysed our resources and apportioned them accordingly. The most entertaining options for passing the time - in our case, videogames - were to be rationed, while activities we might have shunned on a short journey - like staring out of the window - became viable. In fact, I began gazing out of the window as soon as we set off, and watched Vienna pass by until there was no Vienna left. I then immediately cracked and switched on my DS.

We had hit the jackpot with our cabin. A six seater to ourselves with two plug sockets, it gave us room to stretch our legs, mutter appalling jokes without fear of offending bystanders and keep everything we wanted charged, charged. Our command centre held two DSes, two phones, a digital camera and an iPod. This is how geeks travel when given an electricity supply.

Time marched on. As we called into various train stations, we defended our cabin from intrusion by closing the door and doing out best impression of Faceache for anyone who peered in. It worked every time.

Pacing yourself on a long journey applies to food as well as entertainment. Our relatively early start meant a decent wait until lunchtime, and the temptation to break the tedium with a snack was compelling. But we held out valiantly. An hour or so after noon, the moment came to seek out a well deserved meal.

My European rail timetable book had informed me that this train came equipped with a buffet car. Meanwhile, a knife-and-fork symbol pointed in both directions on the wall directly outside our cabin. Good signs. I stood up and headed out into the corridor.

I decided to try going left first. I plodded past a range of six-seater cabins and a toilet, repeated the process once more and then hit a dead end. I had expected as much. It seemed unlikely that both sides of the train would boast a buffet car.

I turned around and headed back down the train, pausing briefly outside our cabin to fail in my attempt to communicate “there is no buffet car at that end so I’m off the other way” to Brodos with a hand gesture. Fortunately he was too busy playing Sonic the Hedgehog to care.

I marched on, discovering that this side of the train contained standard carriages filled with seats, as opposed to our old fashioned cabins. I ploughed through one, and another, and finally a third. Then I hit a dead end.

It emerged that there was no buffet car. Indeed, there was no food on the train at all. We had been promised a wonderful array of produce by no less than three separate sources - my book and both of the little arrows under the knife-and-fork sign - and had instead been presented unceremoniously with nothing more than a door at either end of the vehicle. If you’re really hungry, feel free to throw yourself off the train - that was the message.

We had already gone three hours without food and we had another eight hours to go. After the banquet that was our morning’s Selection of Traditional Austrian Cheeses, my stomach was already rumbling. This was bad. This was horrible.

I headed back to Brodos to deliver the good news and we began sizing up our provisions. We had:

* Half a bottle of water each
* Eight small bottles of Schnapps
* A large pack of Swedish chocolate wafer biscuits
* Some dried reindeer meat
* A small tin of licorice pastilles

This was beyond horrible. This was a disaster. We had everything we needed to help us forget our troubles, in the form of chocolate and Schnapps, but they did not technically belong to us. We were mere custodians of these gifts, a cultural exchange between Sweden and Serbia, and though we knew both parties would forgive us, there was a principle to uphold.

In terms of fluids, that left us with our depleted bottles of water - which were helpful to have, what with water being essential to maintain human life - but that was scant consolation for our yawning bellies. And so we turned to our lump of dried reindeer meat - an oddity from Northern Sweden which Maddok regularly received in the post from his mother - and the little pack of licorice, which I had only kept out of a morbid desire to remember something of the horrors of Scandinavian sweets.

Brodos and I pondered our situation. He hates licorice and I don’t eat meat, so that was that. Rations assigned. He took out his delicacy and grimaced as he sawed off a small chunk with his teeth. He looked like he was eating wood. Meanwhile, I opened my tin and appraised the 20 or so tiny pastilles within.

Eight hours. Eight hours. Shit.

14 Comments

The train pulled up. Our tickets bore cabin and carriage details, but as we crossed from one carriage to the next from inside the train, a disgruntled guard ushered us back from where she stood on the platform. We obliged and climbed inside the cabin which corresponded to our ticket number.

It was a small chamber with four cramped looking blue beds, two up and two down in traditional bunk style. We made ourselves at home. Brodos stowed his luggage on the top bunk while I removed my shoes and hung out a wet towel, which had failed to dry at Aakarp’s place, on the little ladder. We settled down to eat some chocolate.

Five minutes later, four Jewish pensioners shuffled up to our cabin door and began peering in and clucking amongst themselves. They clearly wanted to get in. Mere minutes into beginning to unwind, we suddenly contemplated the possibility that we would be spending 11 hours packed like sardines into a tiny room with four extremely old people. Brodos muttered an exasperated “oh fuck off” just loud enough for them to hear.

The situation can’t have looked much better for them. Doubtless expecting a hassle free journey, they had reached their cabin to find two grubby Englishmen collapsed inside amidst an assortment of shoes, sweet wrappers and drying laundry.

Nobody had wanted this. But while they may have felt affronted, we felt pure, exhausted dread. And so we gathered our things together, gave a half hearted smile and headed off to find help.

We unearthed our actual cabin one car down. It turned out that the guard hadn’t been waving us back after all. God knows what she had been doing, because it had looked exactly like waving us back. Now on board the train, she unlocked our room. It seemed slightly smaller than the previous one, but was also a little more plush, complete with two beds and a sink. It had the distinct advantage of not having four elderly people in it.

We liked the guard. She was extremely grumpy but also strangely attractive. Between the pair of us, our buffoonish charms had earned cheerful smiles from the vast majority of travel operatives encountered on our journey. Notwithstanding the heroin faux pas at Stansted, we’d won over air hostesses, pierced ticked sellers and security personnel. This one, however, was not playing. We named her Faceache.

Faceache left us to gather our thoughts and come to terms with the size, or rather the lack of size, of our room. 30 minutes later she returned to collect our passport for the night time border patrol - we’d be heading through the Czech Republic and then on to Austria - and to convert our slimline accommodation into sleeping quarters, using an intricate series of winches, levers and pulleys.

She also got us to specify what we wanted for breakfast. This entailed handing over an A4 sheet containing a long list of items, of which we were allowed to tick six. I chose the “Selection of Traditional Austrian Cheeses” and five other things. Brodos ticked fewer than six, partly because he’s a picky eater, and partly because the small breakfast would give him something to complain about in the morning.

We played on our DSes for a long time before finally bedding down for the night.

I have no idea how much sleep I got, but it wasn’t much. It’s quite hard for your body to get used to the sensation of being conveyed sideways across the land at high speeds, and the starting and stopping and noises don’t help. I was probably conscious as we passed through Prague, in the early hours of the morning, but I’m still not sure if that means I’m allowed to say I’ve been there.

We were awoken at around 7am by a knock from Faceache, roughly an hour before we were due to arrive in Vienna. She carried food, which we gratefully accepted.

The meal was nowhere near as exciting as it had sounded on the sheet. Brodos’ breakfast amounted to a few scraps of meat and some rye bread, so he wasn’t happy. My meal was larger in volume, but surprisingly contained only one cheese. This was not the Selection of Traditional Austrian Cheeses that I had been promised. Evidently seemed Austria wasn’t big on variety. Or cheese, for that matter.

By the same logic, I had also been given a Selection of Traditional Austrian Breads, a Selection of Traditional Austrian Fruits and a Selection of Traditional Austrian Desserts. In English terminology, that meant a roll, an apple and a yoghurt. I ate them anyway.

As we neared Vienna, we scrambled, washed and dressed ourselves as best we could - aided by the discovery of a wash room down the carriage which I forgot to tell Brodos about - bade a semi-fond farewell to our sour faced friend and stepped onto Austrian soil. True to form, this was the first time for either of us.

There wasn’t much time to see the sights, so we snuck across the street for a couple of photos of Vienna, killed five minutes in a Selection of Traditional Austrian Shops - known elsewhere in the world as a newsagent - then reserved some seats on the train and headed to the platform.

11 hours lay between us and Belgrade. Unlike our previous journey, however, we would entirely conscious. We braced ourselves for boredom and climbed aboard.

4 Comments