Buses and meat

Balkan public transport is too hot. Every bus and train I have caught while traipsing around former Yugoslavia has been airless and sweaty such that by the end of it I am malodorous and unhappy.

I had given up on it ever changing. Every time I would attempt to communicate my concerns about the temperature of the bus or train carriage, the language barrier would render my entreaties futile, and I had resigned myself to this being a weird Balkan thing I would never understand. A bit like turbofolk.

Feed 'em young

 But then on my overnight bus ride from Pristina to Belgrade I realised I was not alone. Packed with gypsies and grandmas in their Balkan shawls, the bus was of course a sweatbox. Wearing as little as possible I had finally slipped into a shallow slumber when I was awoken by altogether too much noise for 4am and the blasting of the air conditioner. The gypsy on the seat in front of me had passed out from heatstroke. The resident doctor on the bus was treating this by talking furiously at her and crowding all the other gypsies around, each of whom were armed with a small sheaf of gypsy paper which they were using as improvised fans. More helpfully, the bus driver cranked the superbly powerful aircon and the bus was once again habitable.

Despite the unfortunate circumstances it was nice to know I wasn’t the only one struggling with the heat. The question still stands as to why they insist on keeping the buses so hot when no one is apparently comfortable, but I doubt I’ll ever find out the answer to that.

Photos at the concentration camp

 Speaking of buses, on the trip from Belgrade to Budapest we were stopped at the border for more rigorous searching. On the Serbian side the border guard slouched down the bus collecting passports and staring suspiciously. As he reached where Aaron and I were sitting, side by side in our allocated seats, he took my passport. Then he peered suspiciously. Then he looked at Aaron. And asked, “Together?” Incredulously I replied, “We’re travelling together…” He eyed us suspiciously one more time and slouched onward.

Homosexuality is frowned upon in Serbia, but I am baffled as to what he was going to do had I replied “Yes”.

Concentration camp, Nis

 Bus trips are what brought me to Nis, along with Serbian border rules, as in order to go from Kosovo to Serbia, one must enter from Serbia. This is because of some simmering Serbian resentment over Kosovo’s independence and their refusal to recognise it, which somehow means if you come from Kosovo into Serbia the Serbs interpret your time spent in Kosovo as unaccounted for, unless you are already Serb-stamped in which case they interpret it as time spent in Serbia.

Suffice to say it was a fairly tedious detour, and due to my disorganisation leaving Kotor, a product of the hedonistic excesses enjoyed while in the town, I ended up at a strange bus stop in Nis at 4am in the morning with nowhere to stay.

Thanks to some small modicum of prescience I had the map to a hostel open on my computer, and after much confused wandering found it staffed by a startled looking man and beyond my occupancy, completely empty. Since I was there, I figured I’d spend the next day in the city and have a look around.

Balkan transport

Nis  is fairly Spartan. On a dead-flat plain and soviet styled, its saving aesthetic grace is the ample greenery and very pretty modern parks.

What Nis definitely has going for it, though, are these little grills that are everywhere. Serving up every meat you could imagine, one can easily locate them by following the plume of savoury smoke that by some divine culinary providence drifts tantalisingly towards you no matter where you are.

The Balkans are meat-heavy, but Nis was another level. Packed into a roll with a cursory bit of salad, in the 24 hours I was in Nis I devoured three of them. At the first place I visited the owners spoke no English whatsoever, so I put my faith in the good will of a local to basically pick my mystery meat and salads. He insisted on serving it to me, and then shaking my hand post-meal. 

Nis grillery

Nis, like all other Balkan cities has a fort, but the most memorable part of the city was the concentration camp. One of the best-preserved in Europe, I was the only person there and it was eerie. Bullet-holes in the walls and barbed wire on the floors of the cells of the important prisoners, 50-150 people were crammed into the tiny bare concrete rooms on the bottom level and the grainy black and white photos of their gaunt faces show a hopeless resignation at their perverse fate.

By complete luck, after I’d sequestered myself in the empty hostel for a lonely night-in, Potato Mike from Sarajevo messaged me on facebook and it turned out he was in Nis and keen for a beverage. So I whiled away the evening with him and Harrison, a particularly Australian Australian, and took part in some of the lowest-brow banter of the trip to date as the empty city languished around us. We had to make our own party in their hostel’s bar, a three seater with a laptop that I soon commandeered and youtube-DJ’d the night away.

The bus the next day into Kosovo was of course, overheated, and the transition from the rather impoverished Nis to the even more impoverished Kosovo was apparent as we overtook men on bicycles, men on tractors, and gypsies in horse-drawn carts.

Pristina, Kosovo

 The landscape was a brown smear, flat and grey-skied with rutted dirty roads. Pristina on the other hand, is (relatively) quite modern. In a perpetual state of building, the city varies from old Turkish town to the (relatively) modern centre with shiny glass-walled buildings next to block-ugly communist relics. Peculiarly for just about any place outside of the US, they are huge fans of America here. Bill Clinton has his own statue on his eponymous boulevard and the US flag flies next to that of Kosovo in most places. This is due to his hand in helping Kosovo rebuild after the ugly wars that ravaged it, as well as in providing support during its push for independence.

Pristina has a similar infatuation with Mother Theresa. She has a statue that was just around the corner from the hostel at which I was staying, as well as a huge church that is in the process of construction, situated at the start of Bill Clinton Boulevard.

All in all I found Pristina strangely entrancing, oddly new and densely alive in a brown-green interzone of wrecks and hideous concrete worthy of a Cormac McCarthy apocalypse. A city sprung up in defiance.

Pristina

The other pleasure of Kosovo was the fact that outside of the tiny 14-bed hostel at which I was staying, I don’t think I saw another tourist. Run by two brothers, it was a very laid back place where one could lounge on the couch and order-in sandwiches while watching The Big Lebowski, or partake in a boardroom meeting and eat mandarins while watching the World Poker Tour.

From Pristina one can day trip all over Kosovo, and during my brief stay I managed to visit Prizren, Gracanica and Gazimestan. Prizen, a 2-hour bus ride away is a rather charming old town that is even cheaper than Pristina. I lucked out on a gloriously sunny day and scaled the fort for a pretty impressive view. In Gracanica with my Dutch friend Toon we examined a random Serbian patch of Kosovo that houses a monastery surrounded by barbed wire walls, and the battlefield at Gazmestan is another place of Serbian import where 500 odd years ago the Serbs stopped the military advances of the Turks. 

Kid had chops

After Pristina I headed up to Belgrade to meet up with Potato Mike, Andrew and Aaron, and a glorious reunion it was. The overnight bus got me there at 6am and while I waited for them to awake I undertook a formidable tour of the city. Sadly this was interrupted by a dire need to take a tremendous poo and blessedly I found one at the church around which I was nosing. Sadly, the toilet was rancid and there was no toilet paper. Rooting around in my bag, all I had was a pamphlet from the Spanish fort in Hvar, which had to do the job. It was an unsavoury experience.

Fort, Prizren

That night we headed to Bigz, a run-down old building that has been repurposed and is full of art studios and bars. We used the decrepit old lift that groaned ominously en route to the top floor where there was a really cool jazz bar at which we passed the night.

'Illing with Toon

At last it was time and our convergence for the final leg of our collective pilgrimage had us all giddy with anticipation: to Budapest and to Aquaworld.