a romanian adventure

My accommodation in the coastal town of Bar was nothing special, and that’s being kind. We had shared toilets. No problem, but where’s the loo paper? Then I realised about a dozen sheets of bog roll had been draped over the side of my bed. He’s staying three nights, so four threes are twelve, yeah, that should do it. The guest house seemed to be in a wind tunnel. It really whistled through.

Thursday morning. I was ravenous. I wolfed down a breakfast, briefly looked round the town that was named after one of the top five things a visitor would want, just to confuse everybody, then I hopped on the bus to Stari Bar, the old town. On the train I’d been warned by the Serbian bloke not to visit the old town because it was “just like the WC”, but off I went to check out the lav. “Lav”, by the way, means “lion” in Serbo-Croat, and is also the name of a common Serbian beer. The English guy who bought a can of Lav on the train thought it was an apt name for the contents. I instead got a can of Jelen, which means “deer”. Anyway, Stari Bar wasn’t anything like this guy suggested, and was very picturesque, even if the steep main street was a little touristy. For two euros I visited the ruins dating back many centuries, where you could wander and climb to your heart’s content, and they weren’t touristy at all. On the main street I wanted to buy some rakija as a present. The lady couldn’t speak English as far as I could tell, so I practised my extremely sketchy Serbian. I wanted to confirm that the price was €6, and the next thing I knew she’d fetched six bottles from around the back, when I only wanted one. I’ve clearly got some work to do. That day was the first day I tasted the quite wonderful figs which were in abundance.

The following day was quite stressful. I was up early and got on the first bus to Ulcinj, a town just along the coast, supposedly with a very good beach. I fancied the idea of spending the day lying on the beach, reading a book, not having to do anything. The bus took 40 minutes, and when I arrived, suddenly half the signs were in Albanian, full of weird and wonderful combinations of Qs and Xs and Ës. Right, now where’s the beach? I asked a lady. The big beach or the small one? I didn’t realise there were two. The big one, I guess. Straight on. It had to be at least three kilometres to the beach, perhaps more. The beach went on for miles and miles, and it was lined with hotels that each had their own blocks of sun loungers. I just wanted to lie on a towel somewhere. Now, where can I leave my stuff? After perhaps an hour of searching for somewhere safe-ish, I left my belongings behind a bar and had a swim, but I could never relax. I spent two hours on the beach, got my stuff, tipped the barman, and trekked back to the bus station. I was glad to get away from there. Back in Bar I ate goulash and drank beer at a basic and wild-looking fig-tree-surrounded eatery called Berlin, which you could also stay at. Heaven knows what that would be like.

On Saturday I checked out of the guest house and got the taxi to the train station. The driver couldn’t speak English; I enjoyed my chance to practise some basic sentences. Or basic words, rather. I’m not at the sentence stage just yet. The train from Bar to the Montegrin capital Podgorica (now there’s a good quiz question) took just over an hour. I was going back along the way I’d come previously, only this time it was daylight. We went past Lake Skadar, which straddles Montenegro and Albania. I had to hang around in Podgorica, and made sure I had a good slap-up lunch, while I waited for my bus to Mostar. My ticket spelled out clearly that my departure was from platform 11, but everybody else seemed to be going from either 10 or 12. I was fine; my bus was just late. We set off half an hour late and after eight hours along slow, winding roads, and another border patrol, I arrived in Mostar. There was some drama along the way as an Italian passenger, also going to Mostar, ranted and raved at the driver in stereotypical Italian fashion, after refusing to let him out at the border for a smoke. “You’re a Russian fascist,” he said.

It was 10pm on a Saturday, and Mostar was buzzing. I didn’t have the faintest clue where I was, however, and my two maps weren’t much help. Which bus station had I just got off at? There were clearly two. Streets weren’t signposted. (This was about as bad as in Bar, where the streets were occasionally signposted, but very confusingly and in about size-8 font.) My guest house, which I found eventually, was down a narrow street called Stupčeva, which means “beehive something” in Romanian. My key was under the left flowerpot, as promised. There’s something quite nerve-wracking about these unmanned, unmarked apartments, but phew, I’d made it.

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.