stranded (a bit)

a european odyssey in several parts

Let's see ... yep, I think there's time for one more flashback before I finally tell you why I'm in Krakow tonight. And you know I can never resist those ... so, are you ready for this?

Ok, let's go.

*flash*


4: THE END OF 'NEAR MISSES'

Hi! Welcome to the recent past )))

It's like this: a few days ago I left Lviv and travelled overland to Bratislava in Slovakia, to see two of my oldest and dearest friends, Span and Jits (and to meet their children Inka and Sidney for the first time).

Although Slovakia and Ukraine are neighbours, working out my route and acquiring the necessary tickets was no mean feat – Ukraine is, after all, a former Soviet country, so naturally the job of public transport providers here is to make life as difficult as possible for prospective travellers.

On this particular occasion, the award for Most Effective Hindrance to the Travel Plans of Foreigners went to the "international" booking office in Lviv. When I dropped the word "Bratislava" to the lady-at-the-window there, she gave me a completely mystified look, as though I'd just walked into a shoe shop and asked "Do you happen to know if they have Rochefort cheese on Mars, and if so, could you tell me the approximate price per kilo?" I'm absolutely convinced that the irony of having the word "international" stuck above your window, and yet being unable to help me get to the capital city of a directly adjacent country, would be entirely lost on this woman and all her colleagues.

Anyway, in the end she sold me a ticket to Krakow, leaving at a minute to midnight. I travelled in a bunk so high up in the carriage, and so cramped, that I could sit with my legs bent and touch the ceiling with my knees ... which felt kinda fun and adventurous (though not overly comfortable!). Then, as morning broke in eastern Poland, I bought my onward tickets at Krakow Glowny station. With some time to wait, I wandered into the city and walked around, seeing it for the first time with greenery and without snow. Then I continued south-westwards, crossing three borders in all, making four train journeys, and kind of enjoying the road-trippish nature of it all.

Seeing Span and Jits again was, I have to say, a real highlight of my year so far. The last time we were face-to-face was 2005 in Sydney, and since then we've come very close to meeting on several occasions, but never quite made it happen. Span works for the UN, so he can randomly turn up in almost any part of the world ... as in early 2009, when he wrote to me and said "I'll be in Turkmenistan next month. Can you make it across to Ashgabat** to hang out for a couple of days?"

I naturally thought "Yep, fantastic!". It's only two countries over from Kazakhstan (where I was living at the time), and it seemed like a golden opportunity. So I tried to get an express Turkmeni visa from the consulate in Almaty.

Of course, you can see what'scoming here. I arrived at the consulate to find it closed, so I returned during their opening hours (displayed on a sign outside the door), was re-directed to another office, tried again, was redirected again, went to an agency, was told the lead-time for a visa was almost infinite and the flights were irregular ... and so on.

I recently read in an ESL coursebook that beating your head against a wall burns about 150 calories an hour. So, when the Turkmeni bureacracy defeated me and I was forced to give up on our Ashgabat rendezvous, I felt frustrated and disappointed – especially as it wasn't the first time Span and I had planned to meet in the 'Stans. (There had been a vague plan to meet in Tashkent the previous year.) But hey ... at least now I know that I was getting some decent exercise ;-)

Anyway, as I was saying: after the repeated 'near misses', to finally be in the same city as two of my favourite humans was fantastic. We did the usual touristy 'walk through the Old Town' thing, we hung out and philosophised about life, the universe and everything, we told travel stories, we drank good coffee and good wine, we played scrabble, we learned to make blinchiki***, we strolled along the banks of the Danube ... we more or less did all the usual things you do when catching up with friends after a long period of geographical separation. And all were good.

Also, three-year-old Inka was a real charmer, and as a parting gift she gave me an original artwork that's sure to be worth millions one day. (As an innovative contemporary artist, her preferred medium is corn chips coloured with food dye.) It's on my fridge now.

So the weekend was definitely one for the 'plus' column )))


5: ONCE MORE WITH PRZEZ

My journey back to Lviv was basically the same route in reverse, and I almost made it without incident. Getting on the right train in Katowice (Poland) was always going to be the difficult part – the station management there seem to consider it acceptable practice to omit some trains completely from their published timetable, and to leave platform departure signs blank or display random names on them. I guess they feel a duty to imbue the humdrum business of intercity travel with an air of mystery and a surprise element. To which one can only say "Thanks, guys ... Maladyets!***".

When I got to the platform which I thought was the right one, the signs there simply read "Przez". Now, I've no idea where Przez is, and I feel fairly confident that if you surveyed 200 random people on the streets of any world city, none of them would have a clue either. In fact, for all I know it might not be a city at all – it could be Polish for "sign out of order", or "apologies for the delay", or "Hey guys, guess what? Poland just qualified for the next World Cup! No more trains tonight ... we're gonna party like it's 1999!".

Ok, so it probably isn't the last one. But you never know ...

Eventually a train did turn up on my platform, and I saw the reassuringly familiar word "Lvov" (Russian for "Lviv") on the front of it. I cheerfully boarded the sleeper carriage – or at least, I tried to. The carriage attendant told me that my ticket was for platzkarte (a compartment full of seats; no sleeping berths), and directed me to the back of the train. I'd specifically asked for a spal'niy wagon (sleeping cabin), and the woman behind the counter had repeated the phrase as she handed me my ticket. But ok, whatever. At least I wouldn't be spending a night with the good folk of Przez ... and that was probably something to be thankful for!

6: BACK IN REVERSE GEAR

Next came a lucky break – or so it seemed. A few hours after I'd boarded the train in Katowice, it pulled into Krakow Glowny station, and all the other passengers in my seating compartment got out. This meant that I'd be able to push all the arm rests out of the way, and sleep lying across four seats.

"Brilliant!", thought the Word Nerd.  

As I was getting comfortable on my luxurious four-seater bed, the train pulled out of the platform ever-so-gradually, and for a few seconds the sensation of movement felt very satisfying. Then my deja vu sense began tingling. We were going back toward Katowice – i.e. back to where we'd come from!

"Hmmm", I thought. "That's a little weird ... but ok, not entirely unprecedented". 

We continued Katowice-wards for about five minutes, and then started going forwards again, at which point I guessed correctly that the train was going to pull into a different platform. Back at Krakow Glowny, I jumped off – a little surprised that there were no other passengers on the platform – but then had to leap back on a few seconds later, because the train had started moving backwards yet again.

The next humans I saw were railway maintenance workers and cleaners, standing beside the track and waiting for my train to arrive in a siding. By this time, I'd walked up and down my carriage and noticed that it was completely empty. I'd also noticed that the door to the next carriage was padlocked. Don't know if you've ever seen a padlock on the door of a train while you were inside it, but I can assure you that it's a sight which inspires neither calm nor confidence!

Anyway ... when the crowd of maintenance staff saw me through an open carriage window, I heard a few of them gasp. The train stopped and a guy in a bright orange vest got on, carrying a two-way radio. We attempted to communicate in a mish-mash of languages (a word of Polish here, a Russian or Ukrainian phrase there, the odd bit of English thrown in), and after this difficult exchange I understood that the back end of my train had been detached at Krakow Glowny. The first three carriages had gone on to Lviv – meaning that the spal'niy wagon which I'd attempted to board in Katowice was in fact the right one! Either I'd been sold the wrong ticket, or the carriage attendant had made a mistake when I tried to board.

Either way, my ride home tonight was well and truly gone.

The situation was undeniably bad, 'cause my Belle was waiting for me to return and I had no way of telling her what had happened. It was saved from complete and unmitigated awfulness, though, by one thing: namely, the incredibly sympathetic and eager-to-help maintenance staff of Polish National Railways.

After explaining things to me as well as he could, Mr Orange Coat got on his radio and said something that included the words do L'vova ("to Lviv") to gods-know-who. Then he motioned me off the train, and I climbed down onto the stones with my suitcase. He ushered me along the track, shining his flashlight at pieces of wire and other stuff that I should try to avoid, and took me to a huge man standing in front of another train. This guy just said "Wait" in Polish (luckily the same word as in Ukrainian), and there was some more two-way radio action.

I stood for about two minutes, then heard (or maybe felt) a deep approaching rumble. A few seconds later a diesel locomotive appeared, and stopped about three feet away from us. The huge guy lifted my suitcase into the cabin and gestured for me to follow it. There were two drivers on board who, with smiles but without a single word, gave me and my suitcase a private lift back to Krakow in their enormous machine. I watched them drive the train, and smiled to myself at the fluffy toys and other stuff sitting on the dashboard.

How's that for customer service?!

And so, here's where I find myself: a nearby clock is showing a little after 2am, I've moved off the market square to get out of the pouring rain (which started about 20 minutes ago) and I'm sitting at an outdoor table beside a closed café, writing on damp paper and hoping that none of the frequent police patrols will decide to hassle me as they pass. I've got about 30 more minutes to wait before I head back to the station to board my 3:20am train to the Ukrainian border where, after the usual customs palaver, I'll hopefully be able to hop back to Lviv by bus.

My pockets contain approximately enough Polish Zloty to buy half a cappuccino (if there was an open place to buy one), some fabulously useless Euro coins (they're accepted by the internet kiosk on the railway station concourse, but when I walked through there earlier, a homeless guy had unplugged the kiosk so that he could use the socket to charge his mobile), and a wad of Ukrainian Hryvnia which is unexchangeable anywhere outside of Europe's largest country****. Oh, and I have a banana and about four or five butterscotch candies.

Gosh, how I love this traveller's life!

Anyway, now you know more or less the full history of my slightly odd relationship with Krakow. With any luck, I'll get the chance to come back here once more before I leave Eastern Europe, and enjoy it properly in non-freezing temperatures and without transport hassles. We'll see.

Hope you enjoyed my extended ramble about nothing in particular. I promise the next entry will contain something more than a bunch of tangents and train rides!

Bye )))


* Ashgabat is Turkmenistan's capital, and a place I'd absolutely love to visit – especially after realising last year that I'd unknowingly turned into one of those people for whom "the Stans" exert a strange fascination. The city is a modern Islamic metropolis with touches of the typically Central Asian 'God King' mentality in its architecture ... like the enormous Neutrality Arch, topped with a 12m-high gold-plated statue of President Niyazov which rotates to always face the sun. This kind of 'president worship' never fails to interest me ... it's like stepping back into a land of Khans and Emirs. So there you go.

** Blinchiki = Russian-style pancakes. 

**** "Well done".

**** Europe's largest country is Ukraine, btw ... unless you're talking to a French person, in which case it's France. Or so I've heard, at any rate.