by I woke up this morning after more than eight hours’ uninterrupted sleep. For a few fleeting seconds I didn’t know where I was. Mostar? Sarajevo? Belgrade? No, Timișoara. That felt good.
I got back yesterday from my twelve-day trip around the Balkans. It was great to get away and see and learn about that beautiful but complex part of the world that happens to be almost on my doorstep. But travelling is, at times, quite stressful. So much to think about. So much to organise (and that’s never been my strong point). So much can go so wrong, so fast.
On Monday 12th August I took the door-to-door minibus from Timișoara to Belgrade. The driver called me to say he’d arrive in 15 to 20 minutes, and the bus showed up 80 minutes later. On the bus was a Taiwanese bloke who had lived in Barcelona for 30 years, and was travelling with an interesting-looking fold-up bike. I arrived at the guest house in the scorching mid-afternoon. It was near Skadarlija, where I stayed with my parents last year, and was perfectly adequate. On the table in my room was a laminated set of rules, in Serbian and English. I marvelled at how, in 2019, they got the English so spectacularly wrong.
I spent most of my day and a bit in Belgrade just pottering about. It was too hot to do much else. On Tuesday morning I picked up my train ticket from the old station, which closed last year. The ticket was inside an envelope, which had been dropped off by the fairly famous (as I was to find out) Mr Popović. I intended to visit the Nikola Tesla museum, but there was an enormous queue, which I didn’t fancy in the searing heat. I came back later, and was turned away because the museum was full. In the meantime I sat in Tašmajdan Park (which was Tasmanian Park in my head) and chatted to an older woman in French. (When I asked her in Serbian if she spoke English, she told me no, but she learnt French at school.)
On Wednesday morning I panicked a bit, as the taxi I’d been promised by the receptionist never showed up. I hailed a taxi eventually, and the driver took me to the train station, or rather a field with a track running through it. The middle of nowhere, or so it seemed. Uh, is this it? The station? Are you sure? I asked a man who was working on the track. “Tamo!” he said, and pointed. Over there. It was a short walk to Topčider, which was only a provincial station. At the time I didn’t realise that the new central station, replacing the one that closed last year, is in the process of being built underground.
On the dot of nine o’clock we were off, and before long we were climbing, through the mountains and beautiful, lush landscapes. It was a dull day, but that didn’t really matter. I got talking to a family who lived in Wales, another British couple, and a man in his sixties from Zrenjanin in Serbia. We talked about all sorts of interesting topics, as well as Brexit, which has become this huge amorphous all-consuming monster that you can’t escape from. We travelled through 254 tunnels, comprising about a quarter of the total length of the line. After a while I realised the number and length of each tunnel (varying from tens of metres to several kilometres) was posted on a sign at its entrance. The two longest, one in Serbia and one in Montenegro, both exceeded 6 km, and all the tunnels longer than about 2 km were named. At one point our phones beeped to let us know we’d entered Bosnia, and ten minutes later they chirped again to tell us we were back in Serbia. At the half-way point, where we passed a beautiful lake, we could buy beer and thick Serbian-style coffee, the only refreshments available on the journey. Passport control, on both sides of the Serbia–Montenegro border, took an age, although on one side at least we had an interesting monastery to stare at. At around six, as we reached Kolašin, the highest point, we finally caught sight of the sun. As we descended at a steep 1-in-40 gradient, I could see some wonderful rock formations. For the last part of the journey it was dark apart from the full moon. We arrived at Bar at 9:15 pm. When the railway was completed in the late seventies (quite a feat), the journey apparently took seven hours; it had taken us more than twelve.
