Bomb threats in Bulgaria

Overnight trains are rarely any fun. Unlike buses where you can be confident of the security of your possessions in the luggage underbelly, the train offers no such security. Moreover, it is inevitably the case that as soon as you begin to get comfortable and doze fitfully off, you hit a border and have to hand your passport to an impatient customs official. But overnight transport offers any stingy traveler the chance to save on a night’s accommodation, and so it was inevitable that this would be the means for the Potato and I to travel from Bucharest to Veliko Tarnovo.

Greasy and exhausted, we arrived at a deserted train station in the wee hours of the morn. There were no taxis outside and the free taxi call stand, when I attempted to function it, spouted only terse Bulgarian before hanging up. The Potato had more luck, and we had a taxi en route soon enough.

Forting with Potato Mike

It is not a good start to your stay at a hostel when the person manning the front desk is unaware that you are arriving. Particularly when you are arriving at 5am in the morning. After we woke him up by calling from a payphone at the train station to give him a small heads up and taxi’d over, we were lucky that he was kind enough to allow us to go and crash in the room, despite check-in being at midday. Less kind were his recommendations for the evening.

Having been informed that Monday is student night, the Potato and I fortified ourselves appropriately with a 4 euro bottle of vodka as the other denizens of the hostel looked on with barely concealed distaste. This might also have been due to the fact that at the free hostel dinner the Potato and I had quietly removed ourselves due to the tediousness of their conversation with our own barely concealed distaste. 

The view from Arbanasi (Yes, I just learned how to panorama)

With high hopes of excitement and boozy festivities, we began the 10 minute walk into town, at each turn reassuring each other we were bound to see people soon, after all, it was student night. We eventually made it to the club we’d been told was the best, Spider Club, but a cursory examination revealed it to be closed. We were directed across the street, where the bouncer greeted us by asking, “Why don’t you speak Bulgarian?” before ushering us in.

I had hoped that now, out of the Balkans, the clubs would no longer be of the Balkan style, with people clustered around tables and not really moving from them as they drank and danced with their pre-assembled crew. Sadly, I was wrong.

Potato Mike eyeing 2/3 of our lunch

Our time here was also quite surreal, as at some preordained moment out of nowhere the DJ randomly cranking the beats up to ear-shattering and scantily clad serving women started dancing in front of him, while those patrons around their tables started getting down. At one stage, every bartender stood on the bar and started throwing shredded toilet paper into the air, much to the delight of all. Throughout this, the Potato and I, sitting at the bar and the only two in the place drinking beer, gazed incredulously at each other periodically.

An intriguing eventide experience, the day had started in more standard eastern European style: with a fort. Not just any fort, however, as the fort at Velicko Tarnovo is pretty imposing and well preserved, and given the splendidness of the day it was a pleasure to scale it and eat peanuts as we enjoyed the panorama.

Exploring abandoned factories

Afterwards we sauntered to a strange sort of viewing platform on the edge of a promontory around which winds a river on which is a large obelisk surrounded by four horsemen. Curious, to be sure.

The next day Aaron arrived to join us, and as he slept the Potato and I went on a hike to Arbanasi, via an abandoned factory. The abandoned factory was at the bottom of the hill from Veliko Tarnovo and had evidently been home to more than a few itinerants, but also had some cool graffiti as well as relics from a communist time past. 

Preparing the barbeque

Slightly hung over, the hike was rough and sweaty, but the view from the top worthy of our efforts.

We celebrated that night by having a barbeque, grilling every vegetable they sold at the supermarket, along with some stuffed peppers, mystery sausage and pork chops. Some local Bulgarians appeared at our barbeque, obviously realising that this was where the party was at, and decided to hunker down and join us. Eventually they had to go, but invited us out afterwards with them.

Stone forest

Apparently tonight was really student night, so we again headed to Spider Club in the hope of a rollicking good time. Yet this time as we got there, everyone began departing en masse as there had been a bomb threat called in. So we retired to a proximal bar to continue drinking with our local friends in a not entirely unfortunate twist of events.

Aaron and I killed another day in Veliko Tarnovo moseying around and cooking shakshuka before heading to Varna where the Potato had headed 24 hours earlier.

The hostel here was pretty cool, run by a guy with a penchant for music and animals such that every night he’d head off to a different gig, and during the day a rabbit could be seen on the couches, eating and pooing, fish swimming in various tanks, and the dog Ziggy roaming around.

Watch out.

 There was also a restaurant under the hostel that catered for those who ran it and the guests where you could sample the owner’s dad’s rakia, and eat for cheap—provided you liked meat. Aaron had some difficulty ordering here on their stripped down menu, ending up repeatedly eating Bulgarian salad (a Greek salad with Bulgarian fetta instead of Greek fetta), fried cheese and soup, while Potato Mike and I could enjoy any number of meaty dishes including porky stews and grilled duck hearts.

Aaron and the bunny

We rented bikes to go and see the stone forest on a whim, the 40km cycle along highways quite exhausting when done on pretty useless bikes that were undersized and didn’t hit half of their gears. Thankfully the forest itself was pretty cool, and worth the effort.

More stone forest

 But really Bulgaria was a stepping stone, a portal on the same cross country pilgrimage so many travellers I have run into have been following, the path to Constantinople. So we boarded the bus at long last from Varna to Istanbul—which, it should be noted, in contrast to Balkan buses was of Sybaritic delight—with lofty dreams and fancy notions, braced for some wonderment and awe.

Hostel cookery at its finest

Romanian style

“Left turn soon, 90 degrees.”

I was hunched over an iPhone with a satnav app in the front passenger seat of a dirt-crusted Lancia rental. Peering alternately at the screen and in vain out the front window, we shuddered over the rutted Romanian highway. We were driving over a mountain just outside of Brasov and attempting to make our way through the mist that had set in over the increasingly obscured road. It was dense. So dense that putting the lights on high-beam simply revealed more whited-out nothing. Rob, a British second-hand clothes magnate, was behind the wheel. A driving enthusiast and keen to get back to Brasov as early as possible, he refused to slow down. In an attempt to avoid further imperilment, he had suggested I try to offer some rally-style instructions to improve his anticipation of the road.

Pigeons in Timiosara

 “Shit. Hair-pin right. Slow down.”

But the real danger was his compulsion to overtake on these winding, unlit roads. Roads that were frequented by horse and carts with no illumination whatsoever that rumbled slowly up and down the mountains carrying anything from hay and logs to families of walnut-faced gypsies. Roads with bush-shrouded corners of negligible visibility that the locals liked to hurtle around at breakneck speed.

This combination of circumstances led to a certain collective brainstorming, the net result of which was the resolution to do things like the locals. Do things Romanian style. This is a fairly simple change in attitude and it involves the conscious decision to throw caution to the wind and overtake wherever you want. On corners, blindly, swerving in and out of multiple trucks, and generally using that one thing a group of young men have in spades: brash stupidity.

View from Rasnov fort

This was the end of a long day’s drive along part of the Transfăgărăşan highway. For those not well-versed in Romanian road lore, this is the road Top Gear dubbed the best driving road in the world. Sadly, our attempts to drive the whole thing were thwarted by the fact that the high mountain pass that opens out into the sweeping valley with the most famous section was closed, rendering our grand pilgrimage slightly anticlimactic, even though we did get to enjoy the section preceding that winds around an enormous dam-lake.

It was an ambitious plan that had us ending up here. See an old fort at Rasnov, visit Bram Castle, and then drive indefinitely through increasingly dilapidated Romanian villages en route to this fabled stretch of tarmac.

The day started reasonably enough, waking up Rob and James—who had ended up at the same hostel as us in Brasov after Potato Mike and I met them in Cluj-Napoca—and asking if they wanted to join us for a casual day’s driving. Clearly the Potato and I are quality company, as they seized the opportunity. So after the rental man dropped the car off, we set out. The first fort was pretty and of ruin, and after a photo opportunity was taken we set off to Bram Castle, the most popular tourist point in Romania.

Jimmy and Stefan Stan

 This should have been all the warning needed for me to anticipate an over-priced, disappointing shit hole. Suffice to say, that is what it was. Over-restored, full of head bangingly low ceilings and uninteresting information and décor, it was a bit of a chore.

So we grabbed some sandwich makings from a supermarket and jumped in the car in search of the highway, the semi-tragic ending of which I have covered already. We assuaged any mild woes by that same night celebrating Thanksgiving for Potato Mike at a local restaurant where they sold meat plates, which, as the name suggests, involve a lot of protein. After this we met Big Joe at the hostel and went out to try and find something to do. As a group of five men, this first involved drinking at a bar and discussing, amongst other things, poo and hookers, before the evening end with us taking photos with Romania’s pop idol of 2011, Stefan Stan (a Romanian doppelganger for Sydney’s Tony Ly) after watching his incredibly cheesy set.

Church.

My journey through Romania started out of Belgrade, where I had returned to after Budapest. A rather uptight city where people are fervently religious, the young men aggressive, and the women of classic Balkan styling, it is not one of my favourites. The highlight of my brief stopover here was meeting a cool Dutch couple, Bram and Anouk, after the three of us made the same mistake of getting to the walking tour an hour early due to a confusing flyer. We bonded over a coffee and after tottering around the city enjoyed a burek and made plans to try to find somewhere interesting to go in the evening, given that Serbia allegedly has the best nightlife in the world.

The place we ended up going to, despite having some rather cool light projections on the wall, left me feeling rather indifferent. It didn’t help being constantly bustled into by shaven-headed youths, the attitude of whom I think is best reflected in their walk. It involves a flexed back and shoulders to appear as large as possible, with the option of rolling the shoulders forward to appear more menacing. Preferably one’s hands are in one’s pockets such that your flared elbows add to the total space you occupy. Meanwhile the actual walking motion involves a wide-set gait, kicking out your feet aggressively to punctuate each manly stride.

Our rally car

Leaving Belgrade to enter Romania is a drag. I was trying to meet Potato Mike in Cluj-Napoca, but the only place I could get to was Timiosara, a small town near the border. Even this small feat involved catching a bus to Vrsac, a town near the Serbian border. During the bus ride the landscape became progressively more impoverished as we left the Eastern-European glamour of Belgrade behind, passing through a land of shepherds where we slowed and stopped for cows to cross the road, overtaking tractors and horses and carts laden with pumpkinesque gypsies.

Fancy projections in Belgrade

At Vrsac four of us were ejected and told to walk along the highway until we found the train station, at which point after a two hour layover we could catch a train to Timiosara. Thankfully we were able to fill this layover by going to a nearby supermarket, replete with all of our luggage, and collecting some supplies to make some snacks for the train.

I arrived at my hostel in Timiosara feeling a little worse for wear, but when a German asks you if you want to go to a Romanian rock gig, you don’t say no, and so I found myself watching Travka Okean at a bar of a location entirely unknown to me. From here we followed a small fat man into an unmarked building that looked like a flat, on one level of which we opened an unmarked door to find a biker bar full of men in leather jackets who stared quite pointedly at four backpackers with no real explanation for why they were there. We weren’t in too much of a hurry to leave, though, as the bar had a swing in the middle of it, sold hotdogs for less than 1 euro and beers for even less.

Haunted dog

Timiosara, once I got to see it in the daylight, is a really pretty town. Full of churches and large squares perfect for lounging in whilst enjoying a coffee, but other than that not too much is going on there. So at 5am the next morning I set off for the 6 hour train ride to Cluj-Napoca, on the taxi ride to which the driver had only two questions once he found out I was Australian: how much is petrol and how much do taxis charge per kilometre.

At Cluj-Napoca I was met with a city shrouded in fog, as well as Potato Mike. We celebrated our being reunited by going to have some traditional Romanian food, some stuffed, rolled cabbage with ice-cream scoops of polenta and chunks of pork knuckle and a dollop of sour cream. This of course comes with the obligatory free glass of firewater to warm you as you come in from the cold.

Fog in Cluj

Cabbage is quite popular in Romania. In ensuing days Rob would tell us of how he ordered a side dish of cabbage with a meal one night only to receive a bowl of raw, shredded cabbage. When he inquired about it to the waiter, he seemed upset that Rob was not savouring this local speciality. Speaking of Rob, in his  work as a second-hand clothes middleman, from charity bin excess to shops all of the world, he explained that even mismatched shoes have a market—he sells them by the ton to Pakistan.

With Cluj being a student town, the nightlife is frequent and cheap. So it was that we met at the hostel Gazel, a Japanese guy who had been staying in the town for three months now, spending all day sleeping and all night partying. One night as we lounged around before heading out, he fortified himself for the evening by eating a packet of BBQ chips and necking warm Jagermeister straight from the bottle. 

The local tipple. 96%,

 After spending a night with Gazel the only appropriate recourse is to retire to Samsara, one of the coolest tea houses to which I have been. Opening at the appropriate hour of 2pm, the beats are mellow and the beverages healing.

The allegedly haunted forest Grigorescu borders the town. While the grim Romanian trees provide a certain Transylvanian atmosphere on their own, the little shanty villages with chained up dogs, roaming livestock, and destitute scrapheap sheds are far more eerie to behold. Not quite as eerie but more difficult to navigate are the botanical gardens. Heading here for a quick nose around, the dense fog combined with my less-than-stellar sense of direction found me lost and unable to get my bearings, my scaling of a tower just shrouding me more deeply in fog. Eventually I jumped a fence into the adjacent university’s observatory to get access to a street and work out my location.

Samsara with a pickled Potato

Entirely unrelated to arcane Transylvania and a scathing indictment on my priorities in life, it is telling that perhaps one of my favourite things about Romania is the ever-present pretzel. Pretzel shaped or round, filled with jam or festooned with salt and seeds, one can buy them for 1 lei, which is basically free, and warm from the oven that churns them out all day, there is little more a man needs during a cold walk home. These little hole-in-the-wall bakeries also sell all kinds of pastries by the 100g, both sweet and savoury, and are little beacons of hope in the bleakness of near winter and fog.

Our last stop in Romania was Bucharest. We travelled down here with Rob and James having heard not the greatest things about the city, but with high hopes for a hostel with a bar and apparently a free Jacuzzi. When we got there, however, they claimed they only had one spare bed, which was a problem as the Potato and I had rocked up without a reservation thinking off-peak winter Bucharest would hardly be popular. Eventually we ended up squeezed into a 12 person dorm by throwing a mattress on the floor. Despite the fact that there should have been a locker in the room for one of us, our lockers ended up being out in the hall. The beds had sheets clearly designed for a different mattress entire and the door had no lock. These were not salubrious surrounds.

Jammy

 Moreover, the bar was temporarily closed and in its absence there was no common area, so we commandeered a couple of couches in a hall as our drinking quarters and struggled to see the 100 strong capacity of the hostel reflected in the 10 same faces that wandered around, one of which numbered a Spanish-looking gentleman who seemed perpetually shirtless. Also numbered in our fellow travellers was a haggard looking American who without an ounce of irony responded to Mike’s inquiry as to why he’d come to Bucharest, “Just yoloing around.”

The lake around which the highway runs

Bucharest, by the by, claims to be Parisian, even going so far as to emulate the boulevards and Arc de Triumph of gay Paris. Sadly, it is closer to a concrete armpit, dirty and with craterous footpaths. Massive glitzy stores alternate with grim grey buildings against a grey sky stained with billboards. The old town, the only vaguely nice area, is packed with shitty bars and shittier restaurants. All in all, don’t go there.

What the fuck, Bucharest

 Nonetheless, this was where I was to celebrate the ticking from 11.59pm to my birthday, so in order to tolerate it the Potato, Rob, Jimmy and I got rip-snortingly drunk. This is only really worth noting because Rob and Jimmy went straight from being out to the airport before having to somehow work their way home, something that was no doubt a chore.

Some bad men in an ugly city

I celebrated the night of the 25^th by catching a night-train to the middle of nowhere Bulgaria from where I pen this rambling missive.

Behaving responsibly in Budapest

The freedom of travel and the extroversion it encourages, along with the proximity and intimacy of hostels, allows for friendships to flourish quickly and profoundly. Knowing that you might never see a person again makes it easy to open up to them in a way that would normally feel unseemly. And of course there is little more unifying than a shared evening of reckless boozing, a means of breaking down reticent shyness as well as providing banter fodder for the next day.

As a result I am forced to conclude that both the best and the most depressing part of travelling is this ease in developing friendships, as implicit to the process of meeting someone is having to say goodbye.

As it was I was on my way to Budapest with Aaron, Potato Mike and Andrew, a few quality people I had met thus far on my travels and with whom I was lucky enough to be meeting up again. Also coming to join the party in Budapest was one of Andrew’s friends, Sarah, who was flying in from Ireland, as well as Martine, someone I’d met in Kotor, who was coming from Sarajevo. Curiously we were all solo travellers who had somehow fallen in together through various fateful meetings.

Well-illuminated

We were gathered for Aquaworld, but arriving on Friday night there were 24 hours that needed to be killed first, so after some cursory drinking we were sent off on a booze cruise on the Danube with the promise of a party with various other hostels, as well as a view of Budapest at night. With regards to the latter, I have seen few cities that illuminate themselves quite as well as Budapest, with lighting skillfully showing off so much of its beautiful architecture and monuments. 

Always know where the camera is

 With regards to the former, sadly the party that was taking place on the boat was immensely depressing. Perhaps it was the charmed luck of a long string of excellent hostels filled with people of meritorious company coming undone, or that no longer was I in Balkan countries off the European city party circuit, but suddenly we found ourselves on a floating prison of douchebaggery and overpriced drinks. The worst kinds of party people milled around us, those one delicately refers to as cunts, and those with whom I have nothing in common and no interest in associating. To give some frame of reference, think of the type of people who proudly wear shirts proclaiming their having been on a pub crawl, or those who endlessly talk about how much and how frequently they drink and get oh so drunk.

It was some small measure of my discontent that as we left the hostel that night slightly behind the main group of people I remarked to Aaron—and apparently quite loudly, “This is such a mediocre crew,” such that one of them turned and inquired as to whether this was actually what I’d said, a situation I defused unconvincingly.

Langos

In a similar situation later that night as Aaron and I jammed out to some late night Dream Theatre to unwind, an unfortunately unlikeable chap tried to endear himself by asking the usually unfailingly nice Aaron if he could play any number of painfully mediocre songs on the guitar on which he was strumming. A string of terse “No” replies clearly failed to indicate our disinterest in association, as the next day he sidled up to me as I was preparing some food asking, “What’s up, short-stuff?”

Now I know such people have to go somewhere, and I have no objection to them all being in one place—in fact, this is an ideal situation as I then know where to avoid. Sadly, on this first night avoidance was not an option as once the boat began its boozy path up and down the Danube there was no escape.

Small salvation was the company with whom I’d come to Budapest, as well as the fact that in anticipation of this cruise we had all liberally consumed beverages to facilitate tolerance of all that might come. Still, this proved to be insufficient, the unhappiness rendering me more impolite than usual, and forcing those like Martine to entertain themselves by looking under the kilts of those Scots foolish enough to wear them in the Autumn chill.

Thankfully redemption was at hand in 24 hours.

Hostel barbershop

It is some small measure of the quality of your company when over the course of one night you can be crash tackled while urinating, have another man’s fingers down your throat after you demand the bus be stopped so that you can vomit, and have someone change you into your swimmers while you incoherently cast your belongings all over the changing room. In sum, people who tolerate your belligerent drunkenness.

Suffice to say, I was the one at the thoughtful end of each of these gestures. With the promise of a boozy waterslide-filled night club looming, I decided best practice was to get rip-snortingly drunk at the hostel. Somehow this got slightly out of hand. I do not remember how I got there, or much of how I got home, but in a defiant bit of rallying perhaps triggered by the adrenalin of a waterslide or two, I have a bevy of quality memories of that after which I’d lusted and that which had brought us all to Budapest: Aquaworld.

Table tennis at a ruin bar 

It really is a simple premise, adding booze and lights and music to what is already fun: a waterpark. But it is something you would struggle to find anywhere else, especially in Australia. It is also one of the most ridiculously enjoyable things I’ve done, something best summed up by Aaron when he remarked that usually he is not at all disappointed when something closes and he has to leave, but for once he was upset and really wanted to stay on until dawn.

In the wake of Aquaworld there was little recourse but to retire to the Turkish baths to sweat out the booze and recover. From the 37 degree pool with the back massaging fountain, to the green and particle filled mineral pools; the saunas hot enough to melt, the power and giggles of the whirly-pool, as well as the testicle-shrinking plunge pools, it was a very fun and relaxing way to spend six hours that left me feeling wholly relaxed and healed of all evils.

Old men could be seen playing chess, and old women could be seen scoping out the best jets. Observing the latter could be quite amusing, particularly in one pool where the jets were really quite strong, and old ladies could be seen manoeuvring themselves on them to some effect. One went even so far as to raise one leg up and rest it on a nearby rail for better access. It wasn’t subtle, but she was having a good time.

Marching to the baths

 In another pool where columns of bubbles would alternate with the whirly-pool, one time we lucked out and took up some prime positions on the bubble columns as they came on. Martine had inadvertently chosen the best spot, and was bustled out of the way by a particularly matronly veteran of the bubbles.

Over the course of the six days I spent in Budapest I had ample time to wander around, including a rather dry walking tour as well as improvised ones with Aaron and Potato Mike and Martine. Traversing both the hills of Buda, as well as going on a self-guided bike tour with the Potato and Martine was a fun way to get around a rather large and beautiful place. Like so much of Europe it is a city that has played host to many wars and occupations, but it does not bear too many scars and comes across quite new and fancy.

Sadly, Budapest is not a very bike friendly city so on our tour we battled multi-lane roads and on one side of the Danube, a very unfriendly cobbled path about one foot wide that separated us from a steep slope into the river. But we bravely soldiered on knowing a hearty bowl of goulash awaited us.

But Goulash, delightful as it is, was not the gastronomic highlight of Budapest. That award goes to Langos. Deep-fried dough smeared with sour cream, squirted with garlic juice and sprinkled with cheese and any number of equally healthy toppings, it is one of the most diabolical foods I have consumed.

Aaron, Potato Mike and Tiger Tim hang out

 In pleasant contrast, at Szimpla, the most famous of Budapest’s ruin bars, in addition to the pizza that they served, also available were freshly peeled carrots being proffered by a charming young lady that one could purchase for about 65 euro cents. Aaron managed to convince her to let him try and sell the carrots and it soon became apparent that most of the carrots were sold on the back of her feminine charm, rather than on the back of the public’s lust for root vegetables.

Bikie gang

Speaking of ruin bars, it is quite a grungy term for what is really just a bar in a repurposed quasi-rundown looking building. Basically what any cool bar ought to be, anyway. On one night the proprietor of the hostel at which we were staying, Tiger Tim, joined us for a ruin bar-crawl at the end of which he insisted we join him for a Hungarian car bomb. The Tiger is an Irishman and this is clearly his ode to the Irish car bomb and consists of one shot of Unicum, a Jagermeister style concoction, and one shot of Palinka, the local fruit brandy, which tonight was Apricot flavoured. Mix them together and down the hatch. Yummy.

Aaron working hard to sell a carrot

In addition to the ruin bars, the other frequent destination of the debauch-seeking backpacker is Morrison’s. It was here that we passed one night in blissful karaoke, during which we met the peerless Timo. A large gay German, he was in possession of two admirable characteristics: a fantastic singing voice and a passion for Aaron. Such was his determination that as the night ended he nibbled Aaron’s neck and looking deep into his eyes pleaded, “Just one night.”

The heavens

Aaron left Budapest after only a few days to head to Pristina, and as Martine prepared to return home to Montreal, the Potato marched into Romania, Andrew headed to Amsterdam and I returned to Belgrade. The crew (Black Beauty, Nipslip, Potato, Alf, Nogag/GC) was suddenly scattered to the winds, and as I walked out of the hostel I was already starting to feel a bit nostalgic.

At least we’ll always have Aquaworld. 

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. 

Fishing for squids in Montenegro

A manly farewell hand shake and fighting back girlish tears, I left Aaron in his bed at the shitty hostel we’d stayed at in Mostar. My parting gift was what apparently passed as a blanket, some extra but still insufficient protection against the early morning chill.

I was alone again.

Shivering at the bus depot I contemplated why I was heading to Kotor simply on a whim and a half-remembered recommendation and with no idea of what to expect. Thankfully I was shocked from this grim reverie by the approach of a beanie clad fellow traveller in search of the ticket office, who as it turned out was also headed to both Kotor and the hostel of which I’d been so lavishly informed: the Old Town Hostel.

My chance meeting of Seb proved to be very fortuitous, as when a bus arrived at 6.30am I promptly jumped on it to avoid the cold as he lingered to finish his cigarette. Before long he was feverishly gesturing to me from outside as I reclined in the back seat, stretching my legs. I was on the wrong bus, apparently, and no one—including me—had thought to check my ticket.

Seb fishing for squids

 On the correct bus 30 minutes later we began the 7 hour drive down to Kotor. After just one hour, however, we were at our first border checkpoint where our passports were taken and we were instructed to get off the bus with our bags. Thus ensued the closest thing to a cavity search I ever wish to endure as a sullen Croatian man rifled through my belongings, made me take off my shoes and socks, and patted down every inch of my body while his snickering associate looked at pictures of the Croatian equivalent of page 3 girls on the computer and smiled sleazily when he saw I’d noticed.

By the time this process was completed across the few of us on the bus it had taken almost an hour. This was the beginning of a winding and unnecessarily tedious bus trip that crossed far too many borders and was far too warm.

Thankfully it was, in retrospect, very much worth it.

At last in Kotor we celebrated our arrival by having a mosey around the old town and finding some late lunch before drinking with Travis and Jordi, two Americans cycling through Europe. Inevitably, this quiet gathering escalated and we were next traipsing out of the hostel en masse following the slightly insane Uresh and Alex, the owner-managers.

Fifteen-strong storming into a nearby bar, the bartender was seriously unimpressed with our presence and didn’t take any pains to pretend otherwise. She was even less impressed when I noticed a bowl of fruit on the windowpane and after close inebriated examination, realised it was real and therefore apt for my consumption. As I was tucking in with gusto, the bartender came over and started speaking to me in a language that at least I didn’t recognise as English. I am guessing the gist of it was “stop eating my oranges”, but I paid her no heed and continued to chow down, even snaffling some for the road.

Biking around the fjord

Indeed, as we stumbled out not too long later, Travis and I had our chins running sticky with the juice of oranges eaten like apples. Rad, an American gent of 32 sober years and sporting a manly eurobeard decided to try and one up our orange enthusiasm by scaling a pipe. He succeeded in getting quite high up before a local old man started berating him.  

The next day I awoke feeling like a boiled scrotum and decided a swim was the order of the morning. Duly refreshed, Seb, Rad and I rented electric bikes and went motoring around the fjord.

This was one of the better decisions we could have made. The bikes were tiny and awkward, but incredibly fun as we raced around the bends and up the minor hills, chased by a pack of dogs at one stage and pausing in the autumn sun in awe at the steep cliffs around.

The fjord from the church ruins

Warned the bikes had a range of 25km, we stopped at what we thought to be a distance half that far away at what happened to be the narrowest point of the fjord and which also had the skeleton of a waterside church for us to explore. Once we tried to head back, however, it became apparent that my bike had no more power. With only one gear and a seat too low for comfortable riding, the 12 odd kilometre cycle home was unpleasant.

We stopped at what became a favourite haunt of ours, a local butcher where you could point at a range of meats marinating in the window and have them grill it up and put it in a sandwich with some refreshing salad for the low price of 2.50. Having worked up somewhat of an appetite on the cycle home my speedy consumption of said sandwich was admired by one of the craggy Balkans working there, “You eat well,” he remarked, nodding approvingly.

We followed lunch with a swim where, as tourists in winter jackets walked past, we jumped off a pier into the brisk Adriatic. A passing lady stopped and took several candid photos of us, before we managed to get her to commandeer my camera and snap some for my collection. Seb rewarded her for her kind efforts with a wet but affectionate hug that she seemed to enjoy very much.

Enjoying the Adriatic

 That night as we sat around the common room drinking Uresh said we could go on a fishing trip the next day if we fancied. We did, and by some strange rule of the sea decided we should all shave down to moustaches, as sailors have moustaches. So with much giggling and the buzzing of electric razors, Los Moustachios were born.

6am the next day saw some moustachioed men and women (drawn on with marker pen) board what we grandly called The Ship, but which was closer to shabby dinghy. Cramped with 7 passengers and The Captain, a chain-smoking 21 year old with a fondness for fishing, we began hand-trawling for fish. It soon became apparent we weren’t going to catch anything, something which The Captain put down to the presence of cruise ships coming in and out of the harbour, and so we decided to tour around the fjord instead. Overburdened and under-powered, it was a slow and cold ride around, but still entertaining as the level of banter was high and Uresh’s anecdotes of youthful love and tales associated with various fjord-side buildings endless and amusing.

We ended up on a tiny island that simply houses a church and one minister, which was quite cool, before heading back into the fjord closer to Kotor to continue fishing. Uresh explained we were looking for a “school of squids”, but the squids continued to elude us, even as The Captain chirped out, “here squiddy squiddy squiddy” as we putted along.

The last Franciscan Monk in Kotor

 Post-fishing trip we went to buy a squids to show off at the hostel. Taking pity on our absurd request for one squids the fishmonger gave us a free squids, perhaps slightly concerned by the amount of upper-lip hair that surrounded her. Our savings were collectively lost by Rad, however, as he had a jar of 8 euro cheese flogged to him which he was too polite to return.

After a warm shower and some hot coffee the same crew that had been fishing for squids decided to head up to St. John’s fort for a view of the city and fjord. The view from the top was spectacular and we celebrated with a picnic of beers and snacks, but much cooler still was finding a way down off the fort and going up to the old town next to it. On this craggy hillside there grazed a lone cow and remained but one house. Here we met the last Franciscan Monk in Kotor heading up to the church to pray, accompanied by the last person living in the village, the owner of the stark stone building. After a brief sermon and many team photos taken of us by the last remaining ‘defender of Kotor’, we headed back down for another sandwich and swim, the icy water quite bracing.

Los Moustachios

In celebration of the fantastic quality of the day and our moustaches, it was proclaimed Facial Hair Friday, and much drinking was to ensue. Here things become blurry, but I remember having a delicious calamari salad dinner (one of three free meals that the hostel cooked for everyone), a vat of hostel-made sangria of perilous potency, and much moustache driven banter.

Additionally, one of the gentlemen working at the hostel who also sported a fine ‘tache, informed us that in Montenegro there is a saying loosely translated as “The man with the moustache spits fire in the woman’s loins.”

Church island

We eventually decamped, via a more welcoming bar than the previous night’s, to a turbofolk night club in one of the old town’s walls before somehow making it home in time to pass out.

Parting ways with some excellent company was again sad, but Seb, Rad and Caden were heading south to Albania and I was destined to meet some folks in Budapest in a week’s time, so again with manly handshakes and restrained tears goodbyes were exchanged.

The ensuing 16 hours of transit as I headed to Nis via Podgorica were entirely unmemorable, but a necessary evil if I wanted to enter Kosovo.