Budapest to Belgrade

Ah the wonders of long distance train travel!

For some ridiculously small amount of forints I ride a comfortable train across the Hungarian plain. It is brown and pretty boring landscape, really, but the company is good. Maddy is a student from New York who has been spending several months in the region digging through archives and getting fed up with life in Bucharest and Novi Sad. She studies the growth of nationalism in the Balkans ad Romania evidenced in the 60's student press.

'It's great' she says 'hardly anyone studies this stuff, so there's still a lot of interesting things to say'.*

Jonas is a teenager from Baden Wittenberg, Germany. He plans to get to India, and is taking the train to Istanbul, from where he will take a plane.

And Anna is taking a trip through Eastern Europe on her own before she succumbs to regular work.

As we draw close to the border, the train gradually empties, until it is almost only us four solo travellers in our carriage. Then we pull into the first town in Serbia.

'Get ready, we are about to be invaded by Serbs' says Maddy.

I feel a flush of anxiety. But, as I have learnt time and time again, people over the border are really just like us. Some pretty, some ugly, some drunk, some dreaming, some singing along to pop songs in a different language. She's right in one sense though, the carriage fills up, and suddenly it feels no longer comfortable to chat away in English about the breakup of Yugoslavia. Everything else is fine.

*Her thesis is to do with the way the civil war of the 90's was due more to constructed ideas of nationality, rather than deep-seated ethnic differences.

Edit> Her focus, as far as I can remember it, looks at the alliances and growth of various right and left wing student movements during the sixties.

Which city?

Pretty, paint-peeling, buskers that know they are bad, riverine, statuesque, the most amazing spas, inexpensive hidden hostels.

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To the mountains

I originally planned to 'city-hop' from Prague to Budapest, to Sofia, to Athens or Salonica, but after living for two months in Konigstein, it felt almost painful to rush through language groups, alphabets and especially landscapes like that. I'm also somewhat overwhelmed by the mass of tourists (and tourist prices) in Prague. So I did what any good Golden Bayite would do, and headed for the hills.

First I head to the hills north of Prague...



Then next, to some bigger hills, actually the Western Tatra mountains, a tight cluster of granite peaks around 2000 m high that lie about 12 hours by train and clunky bus away from Prague, on the Slovakia-Poland border. They are gorgeous.




It's the first time I've shared a park with bears. and the excitement is enlivening, especially as it is spiced up with signs in Polish. I understand the picture of the bear. That's all.

I stay in a 'shelter' (more like a hostel) in the Chochowolska valley. The building is made seemingly of boulders and Polish enthusiasm. Like the Norwegians, they seem to love the outdoors On the Friday and Monday, I am practically alone, but during the weekend the hills are peppered with gung-ho Poles racing up peaks.

About to climb into the Western Tatry valleys for a few days.

Finding mountains in a foreign country can be suprisingly hard, considering how large they are! Actually the Tatrys are small in area but high.

 

For the sake of safety, I plan to stay at Polana Chocholowska and do day trips.

A moment in Prague

With Libor and Petr, my Czech friends, we pop into the grand Prague 'Castle' (more of a palace complex, I would say) . The guards at the gate are as solemn and imposing as outside any palace. The president inside, however, doesn't have his head screwed on. He's a global warming denier.

'A few years ago there was a bit of a scandal' Petr tells me. Some of the guards, apparently, have starred in pornographic films in their official uniforms. "We have no respect here in the Czech Republic" he half-jokes "not the presidential guards, no-one"

(photo: petethepainter: creativecommons attribution noderiative licence)