Crouching Pigeon's Flight

From the Balkans and back to central Europe

After an overdue hiatus and as an afterthought, these last few countries have been rolled into one blog because we found ourselves breezing through the Balkans and central Europe, and as we were enjoying ourselves immensely, too much in fact to be flitting around in internet cafes with where-the-bloody-hell-are-you obligations. From sleeping underneath feather eiderdowns, searching for wild blueberries and mushrooms, drinking wine and eating all sorts of continental fare, we are in short, blissful of being in a laissez fare travel mode after a year on the road.

Having left Istanbul after we calculated a total of three weeks and Turkey as a whole of nearly three months of counted up visa entry and exit stamps, we decided to do a whirlwind tour of some Balkan capital cities. No better way than by rail, which enabled us to sleep, board and disembark at our leisure. Firstly, in what we hope to be our last long bus journey for a while, we bussed it from Istanbul to Sophia with a  three hours touring around the outskirts of sprawling Istanbul thrown in for god measure to pick up passengers before we were on our way. We hadn’t chosen this mode of transport rather it had chosen us as all international trains departing Turkey have been suspended due to flooded tunnels and washed away tracks from the past rainy weeks in central Europe. Personally for the pigeons well, a cheap airline can be just too darn fast and you miss everything in between. Like the last Ottoman hurrah, we picked the fanciest bus company and settled ourselves into being served countless sachets of coffee and tea as we left Istanbul at dusk. Several hours later and on full alert for gypsy-thrown babies, we arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria. Fortunately, Sofia did not live up to our low expectations and turned out to be a rather sophisticated, hip and quaint city with all the hallmarks of being liveable: museums, art galleries, bicycle lanes, vegetarian restaurants (two!), and of course the most beautiful women on earth and no offence to the Roma, but no babies were thrown in our direction. All of Sofia’s sights were enjoyed over a weekend with some great food that didn’t involve a vertical barbecue and some sublime mojitos enjoyed in street cafes.

We then embarked on our Balkan Express train journey- departing daily at 12 with no idea of expected arrival in Budapest. After pleasantries were exchanged with Ivan our carriage’s conductor, he informed us that we must lock our door after the Hungarian border crossing, as there could be bandits on board. This had to be re-translated to a Japanese couple in the neighbouring compartment and a young American who was chilling after already having travelled for days on a Greek train. Our journey, which ended up being ten hours later than scheduled, had a couple of highlights along the way. A drug mule was frogmarched off at the Serbian border from the American’s compartment. He said he was a nice guy. Temperatures may have been mid-thirties outside but we were a sauna on wheels and adorned in only undies we, along with our fellow passengers stuck our heads out of the fogged up windows, which were our only respite for air-conditioning. Our train finally limped into Zagreb, Serbia early evening after all the occupants’ water sources were bone dry and we were listlessly counting the circling vultures. Apparently our carriage needed to be unhitched to join up with the next morning’s train. Ivan forgot to tell us about this as the boys from the carriage left in search of a moneychanger and cold beer supplies at the station. Now without going into too many locomotive technical ins and outs it was decided that all the hitching and unhitching of carriages needed to be in the farthest rail yards about a kilometre down the track. Unbeknown to Matti, this resulted in coming back from the hunt arms laden full of liquid amber yet without a passport and a word of Serbian and no train on the tracks. Luckily, the Japanese fellow came to his and the American’s aid as the Japanese has spotted the train moving out of the corner of his eye. They were rescued from stumbling aimlessly across the train tracks in the dark.  One bit of wisdom we can impart with is do not chose to sleep in your carriage on platform one outside the Zagreb train station’s all-night drinking hole. We arrived in Budapest with a few odd currencies stuffed in our hand in less than a week of leaving Turkey- our passports accumulated a massive seven stamps! Ah the joys of slow travel. Note: Should you wish to experience this rail journey, a two-bed compartment on the Balkan Express is actually first and second-class rolled into one even though all of us had paid at the Bulgarian ticket counter extra for first class.

Budapest was a dream, apartment accommodation in the middle of the city with footpaths and bike lanes we were mistaken for seeing everything through rose-coloured glasses, but hey it has been a long time since we’ve seen any sort of subculture and heard decent music playing in the cafes. It was also a perfect city for getting cultured up, which included watching the Swiss win against Spain in the early games.

Arriving in Hartberg, Austria to meet Kat’s parents and Mat’s sister, Kathrin, would inevitably lead to an overindulgence of merriment after our travels. Not all can be said of what we got up to in those ten heady days; long lunches and a lot of wine consumed was the norm. However, a few highlights included eating chook off the spit cooked by our gracious hosts Willi, driving to Hungary for haircuts in a day because you can in the EU, witnessing the World Machine www.weltmaschine.at and of course,  just spending quality time with our families in delightful Steiermark.

Afterwards Mat and his sister were yodelling all the way back to the Swiss Alps and Kat packed her bag for Berlin to spend a week’s frivolity with great friends Kari, Max and their latest edition Eli. For those in the know, since the wall came down in Germany’s famous far-east city, Berlin has become a mega-cool mecca. After bracing myself on the ins and outs of the U-bahn verses S-bahn connections, watching the locals play beach volleyball, celebrating an almost near inclusion into the finals of the World Cup, and drinking litre-full glasses of beer in 37 degrees heat, I was happy to be a Berliner. Of course, after such a long travel on the road I felt that my clothes were becoming a little worse for wear, yet anything goes in this city. After all, there were smatterings of St Kilda as the young and beautiful males were either decked out in PVC lederhosen shouting “Schatzi, komm heir mein

Liebling” to their Pomeranians, or other Berliners sunbathing on the nature strip. Anything goes in Berlin.

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