Travelog from Central Europe · 2004-08-19
I don’t like planes. Planes mean airports, and airports mean hours of sitting around waiting. Planes are also dangerous, dirty, noisy and selfish, guzzling fuel by the tanker-load and depositing the fumes right where they cause maximum global warming.
So it is at least partly out of a do-gooding environmental conscience that I find myself at Paris’s Gare de Lyon on the morning of Wednesday 4 August, boarding the 08.04 to Milan. It’s also because I just like trains. I have a long way to go on them: I have set myself the target of getting to Romania and back, in 15 days. Why Romania? Well because it’s there, of course.
As everyone knows, trains are what the French do best. There’s no legislating for passengers, though. The first half of my 7-hour TGV journey passes peacefully, soporifically in fact. Speeding towards Switzerland at 300 km/h I and my fellow passengers are lulled by the sound-insulation and frigid air-conditioning into a state of semi-voluntary restfulness, like hibernating bears. At Chambéry, however, I am joined at my little table by three middle-aged ladies with a determination to get to know each other – and possibly me. Conversation flows like water for the next three hours, while I feign pensiveness and even sleep in order to avoid being drawn in. There would be little I could contribute: the discussion seems to revolve around family tragedies, recently deceased celebrities, and – following moments of silence – the weather outside.
I have three hours to kill in Milan – enough time, I figure, to see the Duomo and to decide whether Italians in the street live up to their own stylish self-image. The cathedral is indeed impressive, but my second quest is inconclusive. There are certainly lots of trendily dressed guys on the streets of Milan, but perhaps they are simply gay – and that wouldn’t count, would it? Then again, is it possible to be both gay and Italian? My mission complicated, I attempt to find out by hunting down an Italian equivalent of “Attitude” magazine. In the bookshop of the opulent Galleria Vittorio Emanuele my eyes alight on a glossy featuring a male cover model who, I calculate, is baring a little too much shaved and oiled skin to appeal to red-blooded straight Italians. Incongruously, the magazine is called “Pig”. Thoroughly confused, I give up and head back to the station for my train to Vicenza.
Vicenza is hailed by the Rough Guide as being perhaps the richest town in Italy, and looking at it properly in the morning, I can’t disagree. The main street is lined with monumental renaissance buildings and filled with the kind of people who look like they might just live in them. At the well-appointed hostel I meet a friendly Chinese guy called Tim and we head over to the Teatro Olimpico together. It’s a 400-year old theatre which is so well preserved that it could have been built yesterday. There is a party of Japanese looking suitably awe-struck and suffering periodic reprimands from the doorman for taking flash photos. It must cause the paint to peel or something.
With Tim gone, I get hold of a tourist map and spend the rest of the morning doing figures of eight around the town’s main architectural showpieces. The highlight is by all accounts La Rotonda, a classical villa just outside the town centre. After enduring a baking-hot bus ride I arrive at the villa and dutifully pay the entrance fee to the grounds, only to discover that the building itself is closed for six-and-a-half days per week and that I have just parted with 5 euro to look at a “garden” consisting of nothing more than a patch of parched lawn. Disgusted, I walk back to the town centre under a beating sun, grab my bag and head for Venice.
Well, what can I say? Venice is gorgeous, stunning. I have simply never seen so many blond Dutch tourists gathered in one place. There are a fair few Brits too, which to me represents the first symptom of a condition known as Tourist Hell. The square in front of the train station is in fact thronging with tourists of all possible origins, along with hawkers of every kind of tack they might require. A band of pan-pipers is doing an interpretation of the theme from the Blues Brothers. And yet through this haze of noise and movement and sheer tastelessness, a truly strange sight beckons. Instead of a road running past the station, there is a canal. In the late afternoon sun, the sight of boats, bridges and choppy water is strangely exciting and I am suddenly filled with an urge to explore. It is a disappointment, of course. Despite my careful efforts to get romantically lost in a forgotten corner of the city, it is impossible to shake off the crowds and the theme-park atmosphere. I have a vacant look at St Marks square, barge through the scrum on the famous bridge and then follow the signs back to the station. Venice is just not an August place.
In Trieste I hit an accommodation snag – the first of many, it will turn out. Unable to find the bus to the much-praised hostel in my guidebook, I am forced to buy an expensive phone card in order to call them up and check it will be worth my taxi-fare turning up without a reservation. It won’t – they are full. Oh – and they only take women. I elect not to run down my now-redundant phone card by contesting this last point on sex-discrimination grounds, and go hotel-hunting instead. The first place mentioned in the Rough Guide has space, so I say yes – it is now getting on for 10pm, and I’ve never been the type of backpacker to sleep on park benches. The place is a dive: all brown carpet-tiles and peeling lino. In the hallway I bump into a couple of Australians who were on the train from Venice, and we exchange stories of accommodation woe before heading out for some dinner. Taking account of my Aussie alpha-male company – one is called Jared, the other’s name I don’t catch but it’s probably Brett – I switch into my best matey mode to allay any doubts over my masculinity and-or sexual orientation. After a while and a couple of beers, they seem to relax and I get treated to lots of stories of their travels in the Balkans. Albania is a saga of bomb craters and robbers, which apparently scared even these insouciant Antipodeans. I cross Albania from my to-do list.
I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it features so heavily in modern history textbooks. It is the frontier city at the intersection of the Latin, Germanic and Slavic worlds, mentioned by Churchill in his famous “Iron Curtain” coining. It was also a trophy town of both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Fascism. In the morning sunlight the evidence of this history is everywhere. Having long harboured a secret liking for pompous neo-classical architecture, I spend an hour or so wandering through the austere squares and boulevards and reflecting on how much nicer it could be with just a few more trees.
I get on a bus for the one unmissable sight in Trieste: the castle at Miramare. Perched on a rock overlooking the Adriatic this personal fantasy of Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian is a temple to exuberant decadence, with rooms decorated as if simply to maximise the expense. I catch the bus back into town in a republican frame of mind, and it occurs to me what good value public transport is in Italy. Free, in fact, because the driver is locked away behind an airtight screen and there is no one else to pay.
I catch a bus to Slovenia, this time paying the fare. At the border – which is up on the hill just beyond Trieste’s edge – a Slovenian immigration official boards the bus. Everyone has their passports ready, but the official clearly finds this a most tedious ritual and instead simply scans our faces to check for any dark skin. Welcome to the Eastern Bloc.
A few hours later I arrive by train at the Alpine village of Bohinjska Bistrica, which is almost as beautiful as its name is difficult to pronounce. The station, however, is in the wrong place for tourists, who without exception want to go to the lake a few kilometres further along the valley. I spot a couple of middle-aged American guys chatting with a nun. She is apparently a local and has a plan. A minute later several of us are trudging off down the road, trailing the eccentric-looking nun and her two new American friends, who are addressing her unselfconsciously as “Sister”. At the village post office there is a bus stop. Just as confusion is setting in over the timetable a bus draws up and we are on our way. The valley is almost impossibly attractive. Lush rolling meadows dotted with cows and Swiss-style cottages are set against a backdrop of pine forest and 3000-metre snowy peaks. The lake itself, when we arrive, is indigo-coloured with white sandy beaches, just as in the tourist photos.
It feels too good to be true, and it is: at the tourist information a harried official is turning people away – there is no accommodation left. Not having a car to jump into, I am left with the only option going: to follow the Americans to their rather classy hotel and, posing as their friend, to charm a spare room out of the staff. It works. A hole is blown in my wallet, but as a consolation I get a room with a spectacular lake view.
I decide to extract maximum value from my stay at Lake Bohinjska, and get up at daybreak to have a dip in the lake. The air is misty and the water surprisingly cold, but like many uncomfortable experiences it’s worth it for the extra satisfaction you get in the shower afterwards. Dan and Jim, the Americans, are at breakfast and we continue last night’s discussion, which centres on politics, linguistics, and the shame of being seen in public with a Lonely Planet guidebook. Jim is annoyed with himself for not having thought like me to print the Rough Guide from the web, and gets reception to photocopy my printouts.
A little later I wave goodbye to the American duo, who are off to climb some mountains, and head on to Bled. Bled is the area’s main resort, and the sudden abundance of tourists puts me immediately off the idea of visiting the town’s picturesque castle. Instead I exile myself to a little lakeside cafe to await my bus to Ljubljana, and speculate on tomorrow’s travel options while trying to ignore the café‘s tinny radio playing “Simply the Best” and what sounds like a Slovenian cover version of “Sex Bomb”.
Finding the hostel in Ljubljana goes off smoothly: it is a student residence just near the station. I am just about to hit the town when for no good reason the temperature drops by ten degrees and the skies open. The rain is relentless and so I stay in the dorm and try to sleep. Before long I have company in the form of a wiry 21-year old Irish guy called Ronan, who has been travelling for so long that the strap of his battered backpack has just broken off. He seems to have done the entire Balkans for free, by hitching and shamelessly accepting all offers of hospitality. In Albania he was put up in his own apartment by an ex-World Champion acrobat. One thing Ronan is incapable of doing, however, is spending a night without alcohol. With the local bottle shops closed and nothing going at the hostel but apple juice, he goes to bed, unconvincingly claiming tiredness.
Hanging around in the courtyard are the usual assortment of backpackers. I join a table of French guys. There are also a couple of Americans and a Flemish-Belgian girl called Inge, but together they can’t quite enforce English as the lingua franca. I note with satisfaction that my French is better than Inge’s. The hours roll by and sometime past midnight the rain finally eases off a little, and a group of us make a dash for a likely-looking club a few blocks away. The place is on the top floor of a plush department store, with access by a glass lift. Inside I do a double-take: it is glamour central. Attractive, young, sun-tanned, rich-looking people are lounging at tables drinking cocktails. This isn’t what eastern Europe is supposed to be like! There’s a group of three guys propping up the bar near us. Their ring-leader is tall, blond, impossibly well-dressed and coiffed, and perhaps even wearing make-up. He looks at me and I can’t resist leaning over and asking, impertinently, if they are gay. It’s a stupid question: of course they are. “Oh no, no!”, he replies, finding this exceedingly amusing, and then he tells the others what I asked and they all have a chuckle. Clearly I still have a lot to learn about this country.
You may never get under the skin of a country in 48 hours but you can at least see some nice churches and castles, and in the morning I head into town with this aim in mind. But I am feeling vaguely frustrated, and find it difficult to appreciate the sights of this clean, leafy and undoubtedly attractive city. I had intended to make Zagreb my next destination but at the hostel it became clear that about 97.4% of the other backpackers had the same intention. Hanging around with other travellers can be a pleasure when done in moderation, but today for some reason my tolerance threshold has been reached after barely twelve hours.
So on a whim I decide to do something a little reckless. At the station I buy a ticket for the 13.45 train to Zalaegerszeg. Zalaegerszeg, which sounds like a drunkenly slurred insult even when pronounced correctly, is a medium-sized town in western Hungary. But it is not mentioned in either of my guidebooks, and I will be arriving there at 7pm on a Sunday evening with no map, accommodation or even the most basic command of Hungarian. This strikes me as potentially great fun, and I head for my train in high spirits.
On the platform I am confronted with a final reminder of the Slovenian paradox. A bronzed, decidedly cute young guy is waiting for the same train. But what’s this? His mobile phone must be worth 600 euro! I am suddenly filled with petty resentment. These people are gorgeous and well-dressed, they live in a warm country with mountains and beaches, and even their children carry the latest mobile phones – and we are supposed to indulge them because they were victims of communism! The train arrives and, to make matters worse, the cute guy follows me into my little compartment and takes a seat directly opposite me. What did I do to deserve this?
My Hungarian gamble nearly pays off. I step off the train in Zalaegerszeg in a purposeful frame of mind and quickly find a cash machine and the bus station. Communicating with the guy at the counter by means of scribbled notes, I establish that by by sheer chance there is a bus about to leave for the touristy Lake Balaton. After a pleasant, windy ride across an expanse of rolling countryside, I alight at nightfall in the lakeside town of Keszthely. By this point I am getting fidgety: something must be about to go wrong. Sure enough, it does. Having found my way using the guidebook’s inferior town plan to the local student-residence hostel, I discover that it isn’t open this year.
Putting Plan B into effect I head back across the town centre to an area of B&Bs near the lake. I select a “Zimmer Frei” sign on the basis of the attractiveness of its porch flower arrangements, ring the bell and wait hopefully. Nothing happens. Clearly German tourists and their hosts go to bed before 10pm, even on holiday. There is a kindly-looking woman standing in the garden across the road, so I trudge over and ask, “Haben Sie Zimmer?” She seems to take immediate pity on me, as though I have been washed up in a shipwreck, and from that moment I know that I have found shelter.
The new German ambience of my trip is confirmed in the morning, when at the appointed hour I emerge from my B&B room for breakfast. The breakfast table is on the patio, surrounded by carefully arranged plants, and awaiting me is a cornucopia of breads, cold meat and – the Hungarian touch – paprika. After a discreet interval the owner appears. He looks to be old enough to remember the war, which makes me marginally less embarrassed at my incompetent attempt to praise his delicious frühstuck in German.
Lake Balaton, the largest lake in Europe, is of course a major holiday destination for Germans – though I hear later that there is currently a crisis because they are staying away. Leaving Keszthely by boat, I am struck by how unremarkable the lake is, with no dramatic landscapes on either side. The resort at Fonyòd, where I get off, is positively tacky, and so it is with no great regret that I catch a bus at lunchtime in the direction of Pécs. Half an hour into the journey we unexpectedly pull up in an anonymous grassy siding – where, a little bizarrely, a train is waiting. Everyone gets off and climbs onto the train and I follow, pretending I’ve done this a hundred times. We continue on our way, but progress is slow. The train has broken seats and doors that hang open, and seems to stop every 200 metres to allow more important trains to pass. And I would swear that the driver is hooting before going round corners.
My relief at arriving in Pécs is short-lived. As a backpacker, finding an place to stay in a town of 200,000 people in a country with a strong hostelling tradition should not be a insurmountable challenge. In Pécs it very nearly is. The first student residence listed in my book no longer exists, as in Keszthely. The second is not on the map, requires much asking of directions to find, and then turns out to be full. I am sent on to a third place, and by the time I arrive night is falling. I am hot and tired. At the door, the janitor says something to me in Hungarian which I take to mean “not possible”. I refuse to go and a standoff ensues while the janitor attempts to explain the situation using the phrases section of my guidebook and scribbled hieroglyphics on a scrap of paper. Eventually he gives up and gets on the phone. A minute later a friendly young man appears and explains in very passable English that the hostel is accepting no guests tonight because a folk-singing convention is taking place tomorrow. I give him a look of despair and, on cue, he decides to make an exception for me.
Dumping my stuff I head back into town for some much-deserved dinner. The handsome main square is buzzing with summer strollers, and for once I have the pleasant feeling of not being surrounded by other tourists. In Ljubljana I set myself the challenge of going three days without hearing another native English-speaker. This is tricky anywhere nowadays, but I calculated that in rural Hungary I would have as much chance as anywhere – and so far I have indeed heard none. But listening to the passers-by in Pécs I begin to wonder: does Hungarian sound like English? I pass three guys on a street corner; did one of them just say “gotta” or is that Magyar for pork goulash? At another point the language of Shakespeare appears to waft over from a chatting couple – and the woman is carrying a book terrifyingly reminiscent of the one I get my inaccurate hostel listings from. Could they be…? I don’t hang around to find out. Sitting down at a restaurant, it transpires that southern Hungary is indeed not as far from the Thames estuary as it might seem: the beefy local guy and his girlfriend at the next table turn out to be from Burnley. I do the calculations. My escape from the Anglophone diaspora lasted 32 hours. It was pleasant while it lasted.
Back at the student residence I settle in for the night. I have an entire 1960s communist cornflakes-box monstrosity to myself – give or take a small advance party of delegates to tomorrow’s folk-singing convention, who appear to be installed and warming up somewhere within a radius of about 50 metres. Vanishingly long corridors, bare light bulbs, plywood fittings as standard, hot water which takes a full five minutes to arrive (but then presumably never runs out), bare concrete and right angles everywhere – this is the original machine for living in. I go to bed wondering uncomfortably whether anyone ever removed the asbestos.
Hungary is not famous for many things, but one thing most people would mention is its thermal baths. Talk about these to Hungarians and – from what I understand – you might well hear the name Harkàny, a spa town an hour south of Pécs claiming the most sulphurous outdoor baths in the country. With this in mind, I offload my bag at the left luggage counter of Pécs bus station and get the first bus south to investigate. Feeling vaguely voyeuristic, I buy a ticket to the bath complex and stroll in. There I am treated to the spectacle of hundreds of mostly shapeless and sunburnt bodies wallowing in the famous, malodorous “hot spring baths”, which although apparently fed by some underground source, look disappointingly like ordinary blue swimming pools. I do a couple of tours to check I’m not missing anything more exciting or romantic and then leave, 3 euro poorer.
Back in Pécs I plan to kill a couple of hours with some culture, although for some reason this proves difficult. The enormous basilica is demanding 400 forint for entry, which seems more forbidding than the 1.40 euro it represents. Meanwhile, the famous hybrid mosque-church on the main square is interesting but takes only about seven minutes to view satisfactorily. Is there something I’m not doing right? Pécs seems an otherwise agreeable if not-very-special place, with the usual slightly jarring juxtapositions of historical and communist architecture, Renaults and Trabants, fashionably- and functionally-dressed citizens.
Will Szeged be different?, I wonder as my bus rolls into town in the late afternoon. But as usual, first things first – accommodation. Things start badly and within 45 minutes I have already visited two ghost hostels and experienced a tense moment with a monoglot janitor. I am saved by a passing English-speaking researcher, who does some interpretation and points me in the direction of a place in the official hostel handbook. He even wants to walk me there in order to get in some free English practice, and we cross the town together talking about his most fascinating work on the extraction of plant molecules. The place in my guide has the word “hotel” in its name and it turns out to be one, despite carrying the official hostel logo. The receptionist pretends at first to find nothing wrong with swiping 20 euro for what is certain to be, after all, a Soviet-style, nylon-and-brown-carpet, bare-bones hotel room in provincial Hungary. Some hurt looks and a little insistant finger-pointing at that official logo on my hostel card do the trick and she finds a special dormitory rate for 10 euro. We both know there will be no-one else in my “dorm” – but is that the point?
A little while later I am in town hunting for some evening sustenance. The main square is jammed full of people watching a loud tribute concert for Buddy Holly or something. The restaurants are all closed but there are ice-cream and cake shops open everywhere. Hungarians, I have now discerned, are constitutionally incapable of eating savoury aliments – indeed anything other than cakes and ice cream – after 7pm. I buy a bag full of sickly sweet cakes and eat them one by one.
I resolve to see more of Szeged than I did of Pécs and head into town at the unusually early hour of 8am. I stop to have a look at the aptly named Great Synagogue and then continue to a building known as the Reök Palace, a celebrated example of an architecture known as the Hungarian Jugendstill. It is an unusual sight, lime-green and resembling a giant, partially-melted wedding cake. Nearby there is a leafy boulevard where trams are still parked for the night. In the morning sun Szeged is rather endearing.
Around the block is the tourist office. I take the opportunity to bitch politely to the girl inside about rip-off hostels, confusing road signs and other such inconveniences, before rewarding myself for all this stress with a sit-down breakfast at a café in the main square. Looking about I notice that people are already eating ice cream and cake, at 9.30am. I try to discern a Hungarian “look” but it seems more difficult than in other east European countries. A good few of them are fat from all those sugary calories, but otherwise they seem a fairly miscellaneous bunch. Like all east Europeans, however, they are uniformly white: so far I have seen three black people since leaving Italy.
I buy a tram ticket from a kiosk using a prepared script written for me by the tourist office girl. “Egy villamos jegyet bérek köszönöm”, I intone, but even this is ambitious, and the kiosk owner has to read it herself to find out what on earth it is that I want. On the tram I insert my ticket dutifully in the machine, but nothing clicks. I try again; nothing. People look, but no-one helps. Two stops later, as if by some conspiracy, a ticket inspector boards the tram and makes a bee-line for me, the one with the backpack. He shows me the magic lever I was meant to pull, unlabelled in Hungarian, English or Papuan Indonesian, and demands payment of a 2000 forint fine. I huff, and while he affects to call the police on his mobile I get off and walk the last 200 metres to the station. Honestly.
I catch a train into Romania. It has become clear that this will be the far point of my trip; I will simply not have time to go any further. My target is a town near the border called Oradea, talked up by the guidebook as a beautifully preserved relic of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. First impressions, however, are not good. Dogs and children roam the streets and I have barely been there twenty minutes before I am accosted by a beggar in stripey pyjamas looking for all the world like an escaped mental patient. The other locals don’t seem much less dodgy. Most of them have a swarthy look which it is tempting to mistake for dirtiness. Almost everyone is breathtakingly badly dressed. I notice a predilection among the men for twenty-year old starkly hued tracksuits that couldn’t possibly have been considered presentable even twenty years ago, at least certainly not west of the Danube. I head into town to find a cash machine. My usual discretion when using a guidebook map has turned to furtiveness and I find myself trying feats of memory in preference to delving in my bag for cartographical assistance. As it is, I’m not attracting much attention. Perhaps it’s because, after eight hours of traipsing about in the heat and the dirt, I am beginning to look a bit like a Romanian myself.
At the cash machine I withdraw 5 million Romanian Whatsits, which seems about right for my 24 hour stay. But my tram ticket costs only 14,000! Either tram tickets cost 2 cents in Romania or I have just taken out enough money buy a century’s supply of plum brandy and embroidered blouses. I take the tram to my carefully selected inn and – clearly someone has it in for me, it’s now official – the place is full. I play the sympathy card, and – lo and behold – they have a “service room”. Apparently it’s because I am “young”. Just wait till they see my passport.
Predictably, Oradea doesn’t look quite so bad in the morning. I dump my bag at the station and set off on a potted tour of the town’s hyped architectural highlights. It is barely nine o’clock and my tram is packed with commuters. But where do they work? And how do they afford those expensive mobile phones? Romania is clearly a much poorer country than even Hungary, but once again all is not quite as it seems. The streets are full of rebadged 1970s Renaults, yet pedestrian-crossing signals sport indicators giving a countdown in seconds – and not even Switzerland has that.
The famous historical buildings are in fact rather special, when I finally find them. Dominating the Regele Ferdinand square is the grand State Theatre, looking like a pint-sized Reichstag and painted a fetching pastel green. Across the road there is an anonymous art nouveau building in shocking pink, housing, most inappropriately, a travel agency. On the far side of the wide, dirty river is the main square, overlooked by a chateau-like town hall and a clutch of banks.
I go into one to atone for last night’s folly at the cash machine. The teller, a fifty-something English-speaking lady, is openly disappointed that I don’t want to spend my excess four million leis on her country’s fine products – shoes, for instance. I am so emollient that she takes a liking to me and starts suggesting itineraries for the rest of my brief stay. Two minutes later she is out from behind her counter and leading me, all but by the hand, to the nearby Biserica cu Lună church – which by all evidence is unmissable. “I wait here while you look”, she says helpfully, and I duly pay my respects to the Eastern Orthodox faith. We stroll back to the bank – was she allowed to do this? – and I thank her for her hospitality. I am about to make a joke about the number of zeros on Romanian banknotes but think better of it and instead remark flatteringly on her town’s aesthetic qualities, overusing those universally-understood words “beautiful” and “nice” for good measure. I decide that I quite like the Romanians after all.
Arriving in Hungary later in the day is nonetheless a small relief. I am back in the EU – the land of Volkswagens, blue eyes and functioning drainage. Still, it is definitely an unusual corner of the EU, as I am reminded at the first train station: the Hungarians persist in speaking their peculiar dialect of Martian. I have decided to head for the northern town of Eger, which necessitates a long bus trip. On the bus I amuse myself by listening to a neighbour on his mobile phone and trying to guess which of his invariably short, staccato utterances in Hungarian will turn out to mean “goodbye” – this I can then add to my growing list of useful Magyar vocab, which at present begins with “köszönöm” (“thank you”) and ends with “egin” (“yes”). Or perhaps that’s “igen”.
Eger is known for its baroque architecture and for being the furthest point north of the Turkish advance in Europe. Before I can explore it, however, I must endure a now customary accommodation ordeal. Eighty minutes elapse before I finally find myself in a little hostel twenty minutes’ unpleasant walk from the town centre. Hitting the town to recover, I am immediately subjected to a new, less physical, trauma – east European customer service. The waiter at my cafe on the town’s main drag first ignores me and then pretends no menu exists and that he has forgotten what drinks they sell. As soon as I am served he acts as though I don’t exist – which suits me fine so I give him a tip of 50 forint. Unable to move due to the heat and the deadweight of all the nuts and biscuits I have eaten since that peach in Püspökladány, I remain plugged to my seat at the cafe until nightfall. I think about plans of action for the next few days. Budapest is a nagging concern, what with the accommodation shortage and the legions of tiresome Brits and Aussies on their east European piss-up tours.
I make an early start in order to get a decent impression of Eger before moving on. First up is the town’s Lyceum, which houses a gorgeously ornate library containing some 400-year old maps. Nearby is a peculiar relic of the Turkish period, a minaret detached from any mosque. Seeing my opportunity for some mind-opening appreciation of Islamic culture, I pay the small fee and climb to the top. To round off my tour I stop by at the colossal, gold-coloured Minorite church – the best baroque building in the world, according to the guide. I am always a sucker for such superlatives; whether they are true or not is secondary.
Pleased that I have done at least passable justice to Eger’s beauties, I catch the lunchtime train to Budapest. Approaching the capital, my unease at the challenges ahead turns to dread. It seems all but certain that I am going to spend the entire afternoon, and possibly the entire night, slogging around this metropolis in hot, sweaty circles searching for somewhere to put my head down. But on arrival something odd happens at the station tourist office. The surly official slaps a map on the table, circles four or five Hostelling International signs on it, all apparently in the centre of town, and informs me in a matter-of-fact tone that I need simply select one and a minibus will be along immediately to collect me. Now this is what I call efficiency. I double check that this is indeed Budapest station and that I haven’t by some terrible error disembarked in Munich, then point at a triangle and mutter some words of gratitude to my saviour. His air of surliness undented, the official is already on his mobile ordering my minibus, as if arranging some shady deal. The contrast with my experiences in the provinces is surreal.
At the hostel, a big student residence, I quickly bump into several fellow backpackers – the first since Ljubljana, a week ago. I am sharing a two-bed room with Javier, a Spanish architecture student who talks in rapid-fire lower-intermediate English – mostly about girls it seems. Next-door are two Italian guys, Fabio and Nicola, and in another room are a couple of English girls from Hampshire, Hannah and Georgie. The evening arrives and we all head out to investigate the town and perhaps each other. Hannah and Georgie seem to have identical personalities as well as accents and ask lots of perfunctory questions, invariably responding to the answers with “Oh really?” and “Oh right…” in the English equivalent of a Texan drawl. I find myself grading my language to exclude difficult adjectives in order not to overwhelm them as we go through the usual topics – travels so far, plans, life histories etc. We all get bored of the girls quickly, and evidently they of us: at 11pm they head off, suddenly both “tired” and needing to “get some sleep”.
I awake surprisingly refreshed. The total sensory deprivation of an eyemask-earplug combo worked a dream, quite literally. Before long last night’s companions have resurfaced and we are all leaving in the inevitable pack to see the town. After some stray Italians have pushed numbers to beyond critical mass, Javier and I peel off to go and see the castle hill in Buda. This, it becomes clear, is where Budapest’s famed hordes of tourists are. I note that the price of the funicular – a two-minute ride up the hillside – could buy a 50km train ride. The Hungarians clearly know how best to milk their new cash cow without hitting their own countrymen.
With this reflection I remember my transport card, bought yesterday for 11 euro and so far not used once. Alone once again, I get a bus back to the town centre to take a spin on the metro’s line 1 – famed across the globe (among metrophiles) for being the world’s very first metro line. It feels like the first, too: more like a funfair train with mini platforms than a heavy-duty people shifter. At the park at the end of the line I stumble on an outdoor art exhibition. It consists of ad hoardings with the messages wittily or poignantly subverted. The messages generally being in Hungarian, most of the wit and poignancy are lost on me, but I make the effort to nod and beam in satisfaction along with everyone else.
At the nearby train station I take the opportunity to buy a sleeper ticket for later in the week. The ticket office woman is comically unpleasant. Noting the ordeals of previous customers in the long queue for international tickets, I prepare carefully and when my turn comes I pass her a scrap of paper with the date, time, departure point and destination of my required train clearly printed in block capitals and ask pleasantly: “Can you book this for me?”. She takes a long, disdainful look at the note – as if I have handed her a piece of litter to dispose of – and then spits back: “And what do you want me to do with this?” “Book it!”, I snap, patience already gone. For a moment I think I can hear a round of applause erupting from the people in the queue behind me. My forthrightness seems to put her in her place and I am gratified when she then proceeds to get dates wrong, thereby requiring helpful and polite correction. On leaving I allow myself to reflect that this episode may just have represented a small triumph of British propriety.
Budapest is of course a city of conjoined twins, Buda and Pest, and I know I won’t be able to cross it off my list until I have properly seen both. To this end I decide to devote my second full day in the city to Pest.
It is a Sunday and the town is deserted. The weather is warm and still, creating a strangely eerie atmosphere. Wandering in the vague direction of the parliament I come across a leafy square fronted by grand old banks, and collapse onto a bench. There is a little cafe amid the trees. A couple of old ladies are walking their dogs together, and the silence is broken only by the occasional rustle of a summer breeze. It’s bliss; I am won over by Pest already.
The parliament is a big Gothic pile supposedly modelled on its British counterpart. Unlike in Britain, the police standing around the entrance are sporting jump suits with sew-on national flags, along with an array of outsized guns and clubs to frighten off terrorists. In Italy, say, or perhaps Romania, this kind of sight is comically unconvincing. But these Hungarians seem to me to mean business. Nearby there is a memorial to the victims of the 1956 uprising against the Russians; the famous red star was only taken down from the spire of the parliament building in 1990. The impression given is of a country which takes its democracy seriously, having known the alternatives. How long before they forget?
I decide to go to the zoo. Two of my guidebooks, including an intellectually-slanted French one, make much of the zoo’s elephant house and practically order readers to see it. The Lonely Planet doesn’t even mention the place, which seems an even better reason to go. The elephant house is indeed special: it resembles a kind of Turkish mosque. I wander around happily until closing time and then fill the remaining hour of daylight with a stroll around Marget island in the Danube. There are joggers everywhere and an enormous fountain is disgorging jets of water in a display cleverly synchronised to classical music piped through megaphones. I buy an insipid microwave hotdog and try to think how many days it’s been since I last ate a vegetable.
Wandering home I come across the plush Vörösmarty Square. Unable to resist the temptation, I install myself at a table of Gerbeaud, a 140-year old purveyor of overpriced cakes and coffee to tourists. A party of Japanese are seated at the next table, admiring the view. A waitress promptly appears, dressed in some kind of period costume. I immediately wonder whether I can really afford this, but then remember that I am in Hungary not Austria. For a jot over 5 euro you receive a meanly-sized slice of cake, a glass of mineral water, use of a toilet with hand-dryer AND paper towels, and rental of a table on Budapest’s most picturesque square. Good but not great value. Happily the waitresses are obligingly brusque, so at least there is no tip to pay.
I start the day in a bad mood. I intended to time my arrival at the station to give time for a relaxed breakfast before departing for my next destination, the northern town of Györ. But I find no suitable cafe en route, and then at the station I am greeted by a snaking queue for the ticket office which leaves precisely three minutes to find my train and my seat on it, still breakfastless. Just as the train is pulling out, two fat women pitch up and plonk themselves down on the seats opposite, under which I had stretched my legs.
At Györ I head straight to the tourist office to test my new formula for trouble-free procurement of accommodation. A pleasant English-speaking girl directs me without blinking to the place indicated in my guide and cheerfully agrees to phone to check availability. Fifteen minutes later, at the door of the István Széchenyi university residence, the inevitable frosty doorkeeping lady tells me in perfect Hungarian that yes, she has rooms, and they cost 3000 forint (12 euro). Here we go again. I indicate, monosyllabically in English and German, that I don’t need four walls and plumbing, I just need a bed. But I am only indulging her: it’s take-it-or-leave-it, as usual. I decide to make a last stand, just for the prinicipled hell of it, and trudge off back to the tourist office to inform them of what they don’t already seem to know: that it seems no longer possible to get a simple, cheap dorm bed in Hungary, and that I am personally most disappointed about this. “I’m sorry about that”, says the girl, before resuming her conversation with a colleague.
The student residence itself is rather pleasant. I have a nice view from the sixth floor window of my tiny room. The room is as ever stuffed with beds – three of them here. Do the students really live like this?, I wonder. There’s barely enough space for the two tiny desks, and the bathroom measures 1 metre square. Whatever they get up to in here, it’s not work.
Györ is Hungary’s third largest industrial centre, so it’s no surprise to feel like the only tourist in the place. On my walk into town I pass some outdoor thermal baths, quite crowded on this hot summer’s day. I inspect a couple of churches dutifully. One of them, the town cathedral, has an outrageously gaudy baroque interior, with statues, frescoes and lavishly gilded decorative reliefs from floor to ceiling. I can’t help thinking what a great venue it would make for a gay club night. The DJ could go on the altar and gold balloons could be released from the upper aisles. Finding a powerful enough sound system could be tricky though. And possibly a crowd of blasphemers big enough to fill the place, too.
Back at the station the departures timetable confirms what I already know from my trusty Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable – that if I want to leave Györ before lunchtime tomorrow (and with little more of interest to see, this seems likely) I will have to get up at the break of dawn because the only morning train to Bratislava leaves at 05.35. At the international ticket centre the matronly drone quotes me 1900 forint for the ticket, only to revise this to a figure in the vicinity of 2300 on sight of my passport. Not ready to let this shameless attempt at national preference go unquestioned, I make noises of protest and demand an explanation in as many non-Hungarian languages as I can muster. Only to be met with the inevitable shrug and undecipherable gesticulation, accompanied by a that’s-just-the-way-it-is look. I am on the point of taking down details in order to report her to the European Commission’s anti-discrimination unit when the reason for the higher fare suddenly becomes clear: she assumed, incorrectly alas, that I was under 26. Another reason never to carry official documents wherever possible.
With the clock now ticking down, I rush off to a nearby supermarket to offload my remaining 5000 forints. I buy as much liquid refreshment as I can face carrying and enough wet wipes to last until 2014 – by which time Hungary will with any luck be in the eurozone. Administrative tasks completed, I have a leisurely poke around the part of the old town I missed earlier. The guidebook seems more informative than usual, so I keep it out of its bag, consulting its map openly and obediently following its bespoke tour of the town’s pleasant renaissance and baroque streets. How much easier sightseeing is now that I have decided to come out of the closet and accept, in front of everyone, who I really am: a tourist.
Stress all but evaporated, I resolve to blow my remaining 1500 forint (6 euro) on dinner at an agreeable restaurant on the main square. Across the road is the house where Napoleon stayed on the night before the battle of Györ. I am surrounded by French and German tourists of a certain age – better, it occurs to me, than English tourists of any age. The French couple at the next table are talking animatedly and in hushed tones about international macroeconomics or some such subject; the restaurant, and indeed the town, is deserted by 10pm. It’s easy to see why there are no English tourists.
My train pulls into Bratislava station at the almost unseemly hour of 07.57, making me the first customer of the day at the station tourist office. Slovakia and Slovenia were famously confused by George W. Bush, and in at least one sense he was right: in both countries the tourist officials speak truly excellent English. Here the station announcements are in such good English that they even come with a free American accent. Perhaps I’m being sensitive but this doesn’t strike me as a gesture of friendship to Slovakia’s new Anglophone partners in the EU.
I find my lodgings quickly and go for a morning stroll along the bank of the Danube. This turns out to be less romantic than it sounds. The promenade is litter-strewn and cut off from the town by a dual carriageway. Behind the roaring traffic the river-front facade is unremarkable, enlivened only by the town’s modern art museum, a Soviet creation of astonishing inappropriateness. It looks like an airport terminal. There is nothing to see on the other side of the river except a desolate horizon filled with high-rise housing. The most interesting sight is the town’s monolithic bridge, which resembles something from a 1960s socialist vision of the future and was presumably built to impress the neighbouring Austrians, only a few kilometres away. Its tower is capped by a sort of flying-saucer shaped pod, which apparently contains a restaurant. I make a mental note to investigate.
Turning back into the old town another Bratislava emerges: a central European city centre of colourful, well-preserved historic buildings and tree-shaded cafes. Now this is more like it. I have a respectful look at a couple of civic buildings and a church and then wander over to the National Museum. As the national shrine to educational self-improvement of an unimportant former Eastern-Bloc state, there seems a distinct possibility of finding a real, old-fashioned museum – a survivor from the age when museums were not even meant to be interesting. Thrillingly, all my suspicions are confirmed. I wander, breathless, through halls filled with tacky reconstruction paintings of historical scenes and forlorn cabinets full of rocks and broken pottery. Appropriately, the place is lit by fluorescent tubes and uniformly lined with musty, kinked, vomit-yellow carpet. One room contains an enormous display of stuffed and blow-dried wild animals, all looking strangely unconvincing – except the wild boar, which is terrifyingly large and scary. If I ever meet a living specimen, it occurs to me, at least I will know its name in Slovakian (diviak lesný).
I have decided to take the hydrofoil onward to Vienna tomorrow, but as it is at 5.30pm this will mean killing another entire day in Bratislava. I go back to the student-residence hostel to begin the task by having a nap – which is starting to seem about the most exciting thing to do in this city. There is a big, oafish guy slumbering heavily on the bunk beneath mine. I try to sleep but the sun is pounding through the window and as usual there are no curtains. The oafish guy finally wakes and we begin the ritual introductions conversation. His name is, of all things, Genghis and he is from Arizona – but half-Eskimo. He is 26, a political science grad, and is thinking about teaching English in Europe. There the similarities end. The evening arrives and Genghis and I head out with the couple of British girls who are occupying the remaining two beds in the room. Joining our party at the last minute are a sleazy French chap and a rosy-cheeked young Norwegian girl. The evening is fairly short and yet very long. I try to avoid drinking but the British girls think suspiciously of this and Genghis takes it downright personally. The Norwegian girl, inevitably a teetotaller and vegetarian, is also a little out of her element and so eventually we join forces and abscond together.
In the morning I escape the British girls once again by going to have breakfast with the amiable Genghis. We have bagels and coffee in a place called, aptly enough, “Bagels and Coffee”. The food is excellent quality and absurdly good value, and the joint itself is trendily appointed, clean and professional. All it needs is a smile on the faces of the staff and perhaps a change of name and it will be taking over the world. Genghis agrees.
With my adventurously-named American acquaintance and the others departed for Budapest, I set about the mission of filling my six remaining hours in Bratislava. First up is a visit to the memorial to the 6000-odd Russian soldiers killed in the 1945 battle for Bratislava. It is high on a hill overlooking the town, and I only last a few minutes in the beating sun before fleeing for shade. To ward off heat exhaustion, I have an apple juice in a cafe on the town’s main thoroughfare. I head off refreshed and mildly excited about what looks increasingly likely to be the highlight of my sojourn in Slovakia: a lift ride to the space-pod on that big bridge. But even this is to prove a disappointment. Next to the vandalised lifts on a windswept concrete platform at the bottom of the bridge’s single tower is a scruffy notice: Closed. With nothing left to do, I repair to the nearby park and spend an hour watching some local boys playing football and idly wondering how on earth the strange bridge stands up.
In the popular imagination the river Danube is lined not with concrete high-rise and space-age bridges but with old-fashioned forests and castles. Speeding at last towards Austria in a cramped Russian-built hydrofoil, this romantic vision of the river is partially salvaged: for many kilometres we skim through a beautiful landscape of solid forest. Under the late afternoon sun we pass fisherman, canoers and even swimmers. Eventually civilisation reappears and an hour and three-quarters after leaving Bratislava I am savouring the novelty of getting off a boat in another country’s capital. I am almost at the end of my trip.
If the words ‘rich’ and ‘clean’ had geographical coordinates, these would surely fall squarely on Zürich, the unofficial capital of Switzerland. The place has been synonymous with privilege since – well, at the very least since people started employing clichés involving the phrase ‘synonymous with’. My reason for this flying visit is a little earnest: I have long wanted to see for myself the city with the highest living standard in the world (according to the United Nations itself). The experience might also serve as a kind of engineered culture shock, a means of putting into perspective my meanderings around the dirtier and poorer parts of eastern Europe and thereby lending them extra meaning. Or something like that.
Things get off to a good start at the Hauptbahnhof, where a cash machine refuses to give me any less than 50 swiss francs (33 euro). Entering into the spirit of things I offload my remaining Hungarian and Slovakian small change – into the nearest bin. It is barely seven in the morning – I arrived on the sleeper from Vienna – but I am eager to see the place so I take the tram 13 (FF2.50 flat fare) to its terminus, where the map indicates a pleasant-looking lakeside park. On the way I compare the view with all those popular prejudices – and find most of them to be accurate. The boutiques lining the Limmatquai seem to be dedicated exclusively to fine food, luxury watches and miscellaneous frivolities like “Schwimmpool Chemicalien”. Every car in the street is of the expensive German variety and my fellow tram passengers look like they have probably just left their own BMWs at home today. The town has natural beauty, too: snow-capped alpine peaks are visible from the town hall, while swans glide majestically about in the pristine river. Even the pigeons look strangely clean and well-nourished. On descending from the tram I inspect the pavement more closely and decide that yes, it would indeed be feasible to eat one’s dinner off it.
Wandering back into town along the lakeside I spot a branch of H & M. That must be where the homeless do their shopping. For some much deserved breakfast I retire to a pleasant cafe in the old town where a slice of cake costs a reassuring seven-euro-fifty.
So the people of Zürich are rich. But are they happy? They can certainly claim to have culture. The Kunsthaus art museum is by all accounts one of the most respected in Europe and the town is filled with perfectly preserved buildings from seemingly every age. I climb the tower of the Grossmünster church for a better view of it all. Seeing other tourists at the top is almost a relief: I was beginning to feel uncomfortably different, inadequate even – a foreign pauper in a city of carefree rich people.
The epicentre of all this money is the Bahnhofstrasse, occasionally vaunted as the most expensive street in the world. I buy an extortionately overpriced Bratwurst and saunter back towards the station through throngs of besuited and suntanned young bankers on their lunch hour. Some of these people have earned more this morning than I have spent in the last two weeks. But thinking about their jobs I suddenly feel sorry for them all. I have no money or reason to stay in Zürich, so I leave cheerfully for Paris on the 15.02 train. And when did any of them ever get to say that?
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