A Cossack in Qazak*

I really wish I had just gotten over my distaste for humidity and really just got ‘er done in Azerbaijan, but unfortunately I didn’t and I have had to live with the consequences ever since.  I got so little done there!  After I got back to Baku from Quba, the next morning I went to the bus depot and bought a ticket to Ganja, thinking I might enjoy myself there.  Upon entering the bus depot, I discovered that it was highly unlikely that I would enjoy myself there.  I think it was raining or something made me not want to exit the bus so I paid for an extension to the end of the line, which I think was Tovuz.

The Tovuz terminus was actually quite a run down affair and I was actually a little regretful I had decided to take the bus there.  I kept walking out of town in the direction of the Georgian border and I stopped in at an internet café to make sure I was on track.  The kids in the internet café (as usual playing some sort of war game) loved me and would not let me leave (Azerbaijan.  They didn’t want me to leave the country at all) and I promised them I would return.  I’d still like to, because as I have mentioned there is a lot I seem to have missed. 

So I walked towards Qazak and I hadn’t made it too far out of town when a marshrutka stopped for me.  It was empty so I was a bit hesitant, but for days now I had been practicing how to scream “No!  That is NOT the price!  It costs X manat to go from (blank) to (blank) and this is the not the accepted fare!  I will NOT pay that!” in Russian and I was just itching to use it.  I was so trigger-happy.  So as we inched towards Qazak I was getting so pent up ready for the impending scream-fest that when the marshrutka stopped and I handed him 50 kopek, he smiled, and swatted his hand in a gesture to indicate it was on the house.  Of course, this gesture also knocked the money out of my hand and I never did get back 25 kopek and I presume it’s lost forever somewhere in the woolen blankets covering the bolted in seats of that orange Mercedes van.  

Qazak is, as the name suggests, full of Kazakhs.  Or at least it was.  No one can really be certain any more where anyone is in the former Soviet Union.  A popular past time has been to take people from the Caucasus and other troublesome regions and ship them to Central Asia.  I believe some Kazakhs were shipped to Azerbaijan.**  In any case, the town was really nice and the entire centre seemed to be composed of huge parks with outdoor seating and people sitting around drinking tea, or playing pool, or having shashlik.  In fact, I kind of wish I had stayed the night there but sometimes when I have my mind set on something I will achieve it come hell or high water. 

Both Hell and high waters seem to have manifested themselves in the form of a TWO KILOMETRE long truck lineup at the border to Georgia.  Or it was more like 5km.  It was friggin’ long is what it was.  After leaving Qazak on foot, I caught a ride with a great truck driver who took me to a gas station where we hung out for like 30 minutes while he smoked and did whatever, and then we got on the road for 5 minutes and hit this enormous lineup.  He also tried to get me to throw his old Coke bottle out the window but I refused and carried it all the way with me to the border where I could find a garbage can.  

He apologized for not being able to take me to the border, and I apologized for how his day was going to be wasted in this traffic jam, and I continued to walk towards the border.  I passed all sorts, doing all sorts of activities, and there were trucks from everywhere trying to get through.  I made it to the border but was totally disoriented on as to where I was supposed to go because the crossing was being completely overhauled and I foolishly went into the building that had absolutely no personnel working in it and I came out the other side and realized that I was entirely in the wrong place.  No sooner had someone started screaming at me and soldiers rushed at me with guns that I used that ol’ western charm, flashed a white and toothy grin and said in about as clueless-American-tourist as one can get, “Sorry, where is the crossing?”  They took my passport, passed it around, took me to various offices, and then a young soldier personally escorted me to where I was supposed to go, which was a corralled section down the hill.  

Down the hill by the river was a temporary crossing, made up of a portable and some wire fencing.  The soldier, probably 18 years old, asked me if I had an iPod.  Instead of saying, “B****, please, I have two” I coyly hinted that I might.  He told me to give it to him.  I upped the coy factor and said, “No.”  He said okay.  My main take-away from this experience is that being coy always wins the day.  And while no one else finds it funny, you can write about in your travel diary later and then post it to a blog three years later and still find it extremely funny.  

*I've frequently been referred to as being a cossack in the past.  Partly due to my steely blue eyes and striking features, and partly (mainly) due to the way I can devour an entire loaf of bread in one sitting with my bare hands.  
**Or it's actually full of cossacks.  I have no idea.  Very little research went into this one.

In Kars

If you’ve ever looked at a map of Turkey , you’ll know that Kars is not on the border with Georgia.   But if you’ve ever looked at a map of Europe that happen to include 2/3s of Turkey in the bottom right-hand corner—which I was, and still am—then you won’t even see Kars, and you’ll assume that because it’s clearly so far from Europe that it could only be close to wherever in the Orient I was planning on going.  So, as my finger followed the train off the map—and, presumably, off the edge of the world—I was not expecting the task ahead of me in this former Russian colonial outpost/ancient Armenian city.  

This is basically the map I was using.

The first task was finding the bus depot, which was easy enough with the help of my hosts.  I took a dolmus (Turkish for furgon/marshrutka) to Ardahan, and then had to find the second bus depot, way on the outskirts of town where they told me that the next bus to Posov, near to the border, would leave in an hour or so.  I used this time to eat a second delicious chicken doner and access some internet, from which I had been absent for over two days.  I used this opportunity to get acquainted with the geography of the region and to find the right route to the Georgian border because surprisingly, not every Turkish person in the region frequently up and decides to go to Georgia for a wild weekend getaway and therefore could not advise on the best crossing point.

So Posov it was.  And the change in geography between Ardahan and Posov was nothing short of remarkable.  From the dusty and deserty plains surrounding Ardahan gave way to grassy rockland with mudhut villages, and finally to leafy hills and high, rocky grasslands, with hints of real mountains as we approached the lower Caucasus range.  Thanks to it being a former border region between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, there was no shortage of military bases as well, and I got to witness a lot of tank manoeuvres and fun examples of containment policy.   Another fun moment was when we stopped in the absolute middle of nowhere to pick up an old woman with several plastic burlap sack full of potatoes, or shoes, or something, and she sat on one of them in the dolmus talking on a mobile phone loudly the whole time.  Then we dropped her off in another middle-of-nowhere spot.  I’d love to know more about her.  

When I uploaded this, in the thumbnail these rocks looked like tanks. 

The critical moment came when I realised that Posov was up on the hill and that the turnoff to Gurcistan was at the base of the hill.  I was able to deduce this from the fact that we passed the turnoff on the way to Posov.  I urged the driver to stop and let me off, shouting “Gurcistan!” and lots of people responded with, “Yes! Gurcistan!” smiling in a treat-this-tourist-like-a-young-child sort of way while the driver continued to take me up the hill to the centre of Posov.  When I disembarked and started back down the hill, I was asked by several people to stop and drink a tea but I was on a mission.  So downwards I marched, and then up again because the turnoff happened to be in a valley. 

I was hoping for a ride on the back of tractor but as luck would have it got picked up by border guards.  They spoke no English but insisted I go with them.  Just before the border they turned off onto a gravel road and said something about a lake.  I thought, “Ah, this is where they kill me” so I naturally behaved irrationally and began speaking rapidly and panickedly.  They said, “Time problem?” and then turned around and drove me straight to the border.  So it turns out they were actually really nice and just wanted to see this lake, but the good news is that when I go into survival mode, people sit up and take notice. 

UR Ung Up

One thing that is not only not a good idea, nor at all feasible, is fording* the Prut.  And if you take the 3pm train from Chișinău to Ungheni, then you’re going to miss the once-a-day Ungheni—Iași Express which crosses the train bridge.  If you’re thinking that this ain’t no thang and you can probably make the connection by running through the door with the “DO NOT ENTER” (purposely suppressing any knowledge of French and denying any plausible connections between the Moldovan “Interdis” with the French “Interdit”) sign on it, up the stairs and into a room full of border guards exclaiming, “PLEASE LET ME OUT OF MOLDOVA!” then you can just stop right there, because I can save you the effort and let you know what the result will be: they will tell you no, you cannot do this.  They will, however, be really nice to you and they will appreciate your can-do, go-getter attitude.  But they will also ask you to please leave their office. 

Anyway, all this sort of left me feeling a bit defeated, but it was still early enough in the day, the weather was getting warmer, and the border guards gave me a hot tip that the only crossing for me was 10km north of town.  No buses or marshrutkas seemed to be around, and I reflected on whether this is my fault or Moldova’s, and began dictating a terse-but-friendly letter in my head**.  I decided to walk to the border, thinking that 10km in Moldovan was, like, 2km in Canadian.  I found the main road and hadn’t gone very far into the countryside when I met a policeman who was standing at the side of the road.  We chatted, talked about hockey (I hadn’t the heart to tell him that the Quebec Nordiques aren’t as “nordique” as they used to be), and he told me to wait.  I assumed he was indicating a bus was coming.  But no, even better: a police car.  Full of more policemen.  As voluntarily getting into unmarked police cars in the former Soviet Union is one of my passions, I assumed absolutely nothing could go wrong and I gladly went along with them.

And thank goodness I did.  They drove me straight to the border and gave me priority boarding.  Pyotr/Pietr, the veteran border guard who I had been speaking with before, put the Soviet general’s hat (given to me as a parting gift from Transnistria) on my head and led me to the front of the long, long line of cars trying to get through the border.  He introduced me to the whole gang, and one of the smokin’ hot border babes*** in charge of interrogation and fear-mongering arranged for me a seat with a Romanian family who lived in Iași.  I bid adieu to the ol’ gang and set off for Romania and was dropped off at the train station by a seriously concerned family (though not serious enough to offer me lodging).

*If you’re not familiar with this word, I suggest you go back to grade 2 and play Oregon Trail on a Mac Classic.  

**On a bus in Chisinau an advertisement caught my eye and while I cannot quite ascertain what it was about, I think it was hinting that public feedback was welcome by posting something like Moldovan.Transport.Ministry@gmail.com at the bottom.  Looks like someone has finally gotten off the Hotmail bandwagon.

***Seriously, these women are unreasonably attractive.  It’s like the market for Moldovan supermodels is flooded so they have to find regular jobs.

Quiche. Now.

Some may ask whether the last post was about Romania or Moldova, but at this point I am not quite sure it matters.  What matters is that I was now in Moldova.  If, god willing, the Soviet Union still existed, getting to Chișinău (literally, "quiche now") from Odessa would have been quick and easy, but of course no trip in the FSU is complete without needlessly extending your trip by several hours in order to circumvent a breakaway republic (more on this later).  The bus went directly to Chișinău and stopped at the border for three hours while everyone else’s bags were searched and our passports were taken en mass.  Then the customs officer came back on, handed the stack of passports to the person in the front seat, and then let that person distribute them.  Chaos ensued as passports were passed in every which direction and I panicked, trying to figure out the grammatically correct Russian for “Wait! I need my passport back first, it’s more valuable than yours!”  Yes, I said it.  My main fear was actually how expensive and time-consuming it would be to replace it, so in dollar terms it actually was and is more valuable.  Furthermore, anyone can get a Ukrainian/Moldovan passport (I actually know a girl who knows a guy who can get me one for $3000) so this was serious business.

Borders are usually so intense that I like to see what kind of impish, zany antics I can get up to lighten the mood.  While the customs officials were rummaging through every plastic burlap bag full of socks, or Crocs, or chocolates, or something that didn’t need to have been bought in Ukraine and brought to Moldova, I left the bus of my own accord and walked up to a group of cold and forbidding armed soldiers.  This is my “hot travel tip” of the day:  when there are a group of soldiers with guns yelling at you, walk directly up to them smiling and speaking loud, nasally English.  The smile lets them know you’re harmless, and the English lets them know how much paperwork is in store for them if they shoot you.  I asked to use the bathroom and they begrudgingly indicated that it was around the building, but all I could find was a little wooden shed over a swamp with a plank up to it.  I went back and said, “Wait, where is it?” and they escorted me to the shed.  I walked up the unsteady plank into the shed that simply had a hole in its wooden floor.  It’s this kind of investigative journalism that makes me understand the motivation behind border guard corruption. 

The Moldovan countryside was beautiful but there was something a bit strange about it.  The landscape was decidedly greyish-brown, punctured by villages the whole way to Chișinău (interestingly enough, Moldova is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe).  The roads were narrow but perfectly straight and gridded, which reminded me of driving along backroads in Saskatchewan (or would have reminded me if I had ever done that in my life.  But I assume life in Moldova and Saskatchewan are roughly the same).  Each village had a stucco bus stop with decorative mosaics on it, depicting traditional Moldovan life and the triumph of socialism (the two were not mutually exclusive) and we also passed an abandoned Palace of Culture or two.  While the detailing on each individual house was remarkable—well-kept and painted wooden siding with ornate tin roofs and eavestroughs—the village as a whole was obscured by the early spring dusk that obscured each village and its environs into a monotone,  almost 19^th century haze.  Of course, I was on a French bus from the early 1980s (TRANS-Isere Voyages et Loisirs was stylishly slashed across the side) and for entertainment the radio was turned to this song which the DJ liked so much that we got to hear it about 8 times.  This, complete with a smattering of Russian techno, helped to complete the dichotomy that I so eagerly search for and embellish upon in Eastern Europe.  

It took about 7 hours to reach Chișinău , and the litre-and-a-half water bottle that I emptied on this duration came to haunt me about halfway through.  We stopped in a medium-sized village for some unknown duration (this is the main problem with travelling in other countries.  No one tells you how long we are going to be stopped.  Or else they announce it in some impractical language like Moldovan or whatever) and there was no way of changing money so I was in it for the long haul to Chisinau.  When we docked at the Chișinău bus depot, I burst from the bus anxious and desperate to not only find where the actual city of Chișinău was*, but most importantly a bathroom.  Continuing in this pattern, I burst into a restaurant exclaiming, “I have no money! Where is your bathroom!?” which was unsuccessful.  Consequently, I have learned to enter an establishment calmly, use the bathroom, look at the menu and see what they don’t have, ask for it, and look sweet and apologetic when you say that you’re a tourist and you were really hoping for that one dish that you already knew they didn’t have and then exit.  In today’s neoliberal world of pay-per-pee this is how one person is beating the system.  Ultimately, I pretended this was southern France and I peed behind a dumpster.**

*For potential visitors, the Northern Bus Depot is on the Northwest side of the city, across a small river and a major highway.  It’s actually fairly easy to access by foot but when you de-bus, it looks like you’re in an industrial wasteland in the outskirts of town.  Which you actually are.

** I’m totally kidding!  That was unfair.  If I were actually pretending this were southern France, I would have waited until I was in the centre of town and then peed against the side of a government building or school in the middle of the day. 

Kickin' it in Kikinda

Kickin' it.

 All the negative PR I have propagated against Serbian rail in the past had become so ingrained in my psyche that it gradually became accepted as given; Serbian rail was a constant, like an unchanging National Geographic photo in my mind’s eye and I factored this into all my transportation planning regarding the entry, exit and traversing of Serbia.  So imagine my lack of delight, as it were, to be dropped off in Belgrade on time rather than the usual 6 hours later.  Wholly unprepared for this massive paradigm shift, I could barely focus on the task at hand while the foundations of what I thought I knew about the world, about life—about myself—crumbled around me.  At this point, all I was certain of was that there was a train from Belgrade to Timisoara in Romania at 4am which would be the perfect base to launch an attack on the Ukraine.  This was true in 2007, so why shouldn’t it be now?


To backfill a bit of requisite information, from Repulika Hrvatska I had crossed with ease into Serbia.  I bought a ticket to the border and simply “forgot” to de-train when we reached the Croat border.  My eyes fixed on the Croat conductor who left the train in the town of Tovarnik and the border patrol came on to stamp my passport, I sat nervous and painfully self-aware as we left the town behind and the train rolled along the plains into the heart of my would-be captors and potential aggressors.  Instead, nothing could have gone more smoothly.  The Serb border patrolman entered my cabin and, so delighted at the prospect of stamping a Canadian passport, did not even look at it but placed a small, rectangular, Cyrillic-befonted stamp bearing the proud monogram for Sid, Vojvodina Autonomous Province, Serbia, and marvelled in my thorough knowledge of Serbian (‘thank you’ was back to ‘hvala’ at this point).  Serbia was my oyster—provided they let me out.

In Šid, I traded some euros for dinar (after being laughed at when I asked where the nearest ATM was) and settled into the Grill Kod Ljub for a chicken sandwich and some local entertainment.  Actually, I was the local entertainment as everyone tried to communicate me with me with little to no success.  One young student spoke English and he was on his way from Belgrade to Zagreb for St. Patrick’s Day.  He had forgotten his passport and was waiting for a friend from Belgrade to arrive on the train and bring it to him.  20 years earlier, a passport would not have been necessary, and now because of the regime change, Šid was experiencing an inadvertent tourism boom (after all, two people in one day were at the Grill Kod Ljub).  

In the Belgrade station I was as horrified as anyone to find that there was no train to Timisoara (accelerating my existential downward spiral), nor to anywhere remotely close to the Romanian border.  The tracks were laid and featured on the network map as if to tease me, but not so much as a parliamentary service existed to the eastern marches.  A woman approached me and was absolutely amazed that a Westerner had wandered into Belgrade at such an unseasonable time of year and insisted on advising me of the best place to eat for breakfast and how to find the bus station.  She said, “I will be your guide” as she took me to the bus depot.  As soon as we had exited the train station she said, “And now I kill you!  No! Ha! I make joke!”  It was exactly the welcome I wanted in Serbia.

Serbia, the outro.

I slept in an almost empty hostel across from the train station, ate salty goulash for dinner and opted for the breakfast recommendation in the morning, loaded my bag with cherry pastries and boarded a bus for Kikinda, which I assumed was a great launching point to get into Romania.  Surprise!—it wasn’t.  I assumed there would be the following things in this border town: a sign indicating the border; a bus to the border; a border crossing.  Unfortunately, people who live in villages in the Banat don’t really care about moving around much, even if they live directly on a border shared by Hungary, Romania and Serbia.  As such, I was in a bit of pickle in getting across.  After a bit of hitchhiking I learned that I needed to go to Ruskoe Selo, a village to the south, where I could cross.  I hopped on a bus and attracted a fair amount of attention from some teenagers.  One walked with me and tried to figure out what I was doing there.  Suddenly, a pimped out SUV came tearing down the road and an over-tanned young gentleman, presumably on his way to an audition for the Serbian version of Jersey Shore, picked us both up.  The two were friends and they were beyond belief that someone from Canada would ever be walking in this village at such a time of year that they insisted on driving me right to the border crossing and pumping some hot electro beats the whole way while they tore into the parking lot of the customs house and tore off, base pounding and the border guards perplexed.  I wouldn’t have arrived any other way. 

If you like flat, arable land and the opportunity to see Hungary, Romania and Serbia (and invading Turks) from one point of vantage, consider the Banat.

The border guards joked with me over who knows what and sent me on my way into Romania, where for some reason the border guard made me sit and wait in a little portable.  He was younger than I was and new to the border guard scene, I suspected.  He was overrun with work and it took a while to process my passport.  He also asked me lots of questions, not in an interrogating tone, but more of a why-on-earth-are-you-at-the-Jimbolia-crossing-on-foot-in-mid-March sort of way.  You know what I mean.  He asked what my plans were and where I would sleep.  I told him probably Timisoara if I couldn’t find a night train north.  Nonsense! he insisted.  He gave me his number and told me that I could easily stay with him in Timisoara when he got off work later that evening.  I thanked him and said I would contact him later after I checked the train schedule.  I continued my walk to Jimbolia and gazed out in amazement at just how flat and arable the Banat is.  So arable!  My eye also caught a large cluster of trees and a tower in the distant that I have come to learn was part of some sort of forest-gravel pit complex known as the “Babin Raj”—my dream to own a quarry had just come prophetically closer.  Walking into Jimbolia from the border, I was feeling entirely unstoppable, until I was stopped by a car driven by two men who offered me a ride.  They picked up some other guy as well and then they said in extremely broken English that they were charging me 30 euros.  I said no.  They said 30 euros.  I said no, I am a student.  And I don’t want to pay 30 euros.  They said they would take me to Timisoara for 30 euros.  I demanded to me let out of the car.  In fact, this was my dream situation.  I have always wanted to become entirely inconsolable and start screaming and swearing in rapid-fire English and thrashing about.  Unfortunately, they let me out after my third demand, but could you imagine how much fun that could have been?  Anyways, the good news was that they left me in the centre square, close to the train station.  I spoke with the station master who assured me a train would be leaving.  The “taxi” men returned to holler at me but the station master put them in their place.  And so he should.  Someone needs to keep order around here, and the Romanian national rail network does not need competition from these free-market upstarts.  

Old Romanian women have strong thigh muscles.

Upon exiting the station, a fat man hollered “Timisoara!” at me (story of my life) but I wasn’t to be swayed by their persuasive ways.  I was in search of something to eat when a young gentleman stopped me and started speaking German to me.  Surprised that he wasn’t aggressively offering to drive me to Timisoara, I ventured to find out what was amiss.  If someone in this village didn’t want to drive me to Timisoara, something was amiss indeed.  As it turned out, he spoke English (and French, and Serbian, and Romanian) but thought I was a German like himself.  He was from Bavaria but his family had originally come from this area—his father was a Banat German and his mother a Romanian who grew up in Serbia.  They met at medical school and moved to Germany where they reared this polylinguist who was spending his spring break visiting the village where his family was from.  And not to disappoint or stray from what I perceived at this point to be a well-honoured local tradition, he also asked if I was going to Timisoara.

The Timi Gara du Nord

He invited me to have dinner at the home of his father’s friend’s sister, who lived in a grand old estate in the centre of the town.  We entered through the former carriage doors, up the stairs and into the apartment she had carved out from this mansion.  Evidently, her family had been very prominent prior to the communist takeover and had produced the first prefect of Timisoara in Austro-Hungarian days.   She served up a delicious feast of traditional Banat food—aubergine spread, cabbage salad, stew—and homemade wine, and then Martin and I caught the rickety commuter train to Timisoara.  I called my border guard friend who was unable to host me due to working late, so I instead stayed with Martin.  He gave a personalised tour of the city, we saw the museum of the Banat and then made way for the brutalist train station to buy my ticket north.  Upon our tearful departure he asked, “What happens when you arrive in a city at night and have nowhere to sleep?”  I simply replied, “Oh, I drop a couple of F-bombs, drink a few beers and then find a place where I can curl into a ball and cover any exposed skin.”  He was and I think continues to be worried about me.  Then I clambered onto the train, wedged myself between two formidable babas carrying everything they owned in those plastic burlap bags, and plotted my next move.  

*Unfortunately, I seem to have lost all pictures that I may or may not have taken at this time.  It is possible that a battery shortage, or the sheer thrill of fleeing from Bosnia and evading the clutches of Servian border patrol led me to forget to snap any shots of the landscape, but unfortunately I am missing all my photos from this leg of the trip.  But for reference, perhaps a quick Google Image search of “Esterhazy, Saskatchewan in March” will paint a picture my words never could. 

Sieging Sarajevo

Whoa, slow down.  Looks like Bosnia wasn’t the next stop.  Apparently “Montenegro” or whatever declared independence in 2006 and claims to be an independent country.  Last I heard, “independent countries” have their own currency but whatever.  Anyway, this great Black Mountain stood between me and my goal of Sarajevo.  I awoke bright and early the next morning ready, once again, to get myself out of Kosovo at all costs.  The Finn walked me to the bus depot where I flat out refused to pay 15 euros to get to Podgorica.  Instead, in my mind, it made sense to buy a ticket to the border between the two countries and walk across.  My geographer’s intuition hadn’t tuned me into the fact that the border crossing was way up in the mountains, and that it was a steep and tiresome walk up and out.  I was able to convince the driver why I needed to  be dropped off at Kalicane (‘Calitsany’—not ‘Cally Cane’ or ‘Calichan’ as my first two guesses were, prompting further confusion as to why I would be going there) and he did so, without charging me.  Leaving me behind, we both started our ascent up the hill at roughly the same time, though I have since come to concede defeat. 

About three hours in, faced with a dying iPod and only mildly sweeping view of the Kosovar domain, I tried cutting switchbacks and ended up cutting my jeans on barbed wire instead.  The site of me emerging from the woods onto the road high up in the mountains was enough to make the first car stop to pick me up, driven by a Macedonian-born Bulgarian man with an excellent grasp of English.  We past the first border crossing leaving Kosovo and 20 minutes later made it to the snowy Montenegrin side.  He mused that I probably would have died.  I told him that he could drop me off at the nearest railway line, where I was unpleasantly surprised to find no train running.  I opted for a 5 euro bus (1 euro of this was a receiptless “baggage fee” which reeked of corruption) which took me to Mojkovac, a town that did have a railway, but for which the ticket was 8 euros.  I set up shop in the train station bufé, hoping to establish myself as a local ‘person of intrigue’ by spreading my map on the table and plotting my route by candlelight and pushing salt shakers around the table as one often does while contemplating an assault on the Balkans.  Failing to attract any attention, curious glances or even a holler, I decided this town wasn’t ready for me, packed up my things and boarded the first train going to Podgorica.  Having neglected to buy a ticket, I inadvertently supported the bribe economy by paying 3 euros to the conductor who tapped his nose, smirked and left me alone.  This would have upset me but I was tired and sometimes it feels good to be bad.  

Podgorica was anything but a sight to behold.  It was late, the train station and bus terminal were crawling with taxi drivers, and I was on the hunt for wifi and a place to sleep.  I found none, after a grueling walk around the city with all my belongings late at night.  I decided that perhaps my best choice was to take the 11pm bus to Sarajevo and put this whole experience behind me.  While I can’t argue that Montenegro was particularly bad, there was no reason why a bowl of goulash and a beer should cost 6 euros—this isn’t France (mainly because they were serving goulash).  A group of old  men asked me where I was from and what I thought of Montenegro (and the other Ex-oslavia countries I had been to) and all I could remark was that I was surprised that it was ever one country.  Of course, I can believe that it was one country because they are all exactly the same—with the exception of Kosovo and Slovenia—but lately the Montenegrins have been particularly feisty about having a ‘distinct’ language and culture, and securing their name in the linguistic group that is Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian-Montenegrin.  Note to potential users: it’s all the same.  After the right combination of stew, beer and bread, I was sufficiently self-medicated collapse in a comatose state aboard the late night express to Sarajevo.

Rarely do my preconceived notions of a place live so perfectly up to my expectations as Sarajevo did.  Or at least, initially.  Usually I have to scratch beneath the Potemkinesque glossing of today’s Eastern Europe to find the not-so-subtle reminders of the 40-or-so odd years spent on their peoples’ socialist wonderland projects.  When you do, it’s worth it.  But when you don’t even need to scratch—rather, it scratches you—it’s a bit of a rude surprise.  If someone had told me that Sarajevo was a war-torn wasteland of bullet-ridden pre-fabbed apartment buildings, empty potholed streets, and a pervasive mist comprised of dense fog and smoke from tanks, I would have believed it.   The interesting thing is that someone did tell me that.  Peter Mansbridge, or one of his subordinates, made me terrified to even think about Bosnia since the 1990s, and when CBC moved The National from 9 to 10pm—which in 1995 was well past my bedtime—most of my knowledge of ‘current’ events became frozen in time, specifically 1995.  Until I found out about this so-called “Dayton Accord” I had been under the impression that Bosnia was still a disputed warzone and everyone had just stopped caring about the pockets of fighting still going on.

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn about the Dayton Accord until well after I had arrived in Sarajevo, and the southern bus terminal was exactly the welcoming that I was expecting.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the bus terminal is located about 10km south of the city, and while a small hub has established itself around there, I was pretty certain that it was the centre.  It had everything I expected the centre of a war-torn country to look like.  The crumbling Yugo-socialist realist bus depot, the bleakness, the rain, and the elderly androgynous gatekeeper of the bus terminal public toilets all pointed to the fact that the bus I boarded in Podgorica had actually arrived in my own imagination.  Of course, the vultures in their taxis were slowly encircling the recently arrived bus with its cargo of fresh meat, but I opted to forgo what probably would have been a 2 euro ride, and walked into the centre at 5am.  I assumed it couldn’t be far.  I assumed, after all, that I was in the centre.  But never before have I been so unpleasantly surprised to find such a charming and bustling alpine metropolis after a 2 hour walk in the rain.  While this was the third or fourth time in the past two days I had cursed myself for abandoning my gumboots on the side of the road in Kosovo, I had to calm myself with my firm belief in path dependence, and that it was the best decision at the time.  And following along this path, I was too proud to cave and get a taxi ride, assuming that the centre was just around the next corner.  This kept me going for two hours. 

My first impressions were that I had no idea Sarajevo in its present state existed.  It is still taking a while to really settle in that in 1984, Sarajevo was hosting the Winter Olympics and eight years later it was under siege.  Naturally I assumed that in 2018 Vancouver would be partially encircled by Serbian tanks.  My second impression was that the coffee and pizza situation in Sarajevo were tragic.  Uncooked dough and instant Nescafé laid out a lukewarm welcome wagon for me, while my wet feet began to warm up, even if there was no hope of becoming dry.  Utilising the free wifi outside of my prospective hostel, I booked online to avoid the off-the-street 2 euro surcharge, and asked about my reservation.  It was actually an apartment I was given, and I at first could not locate the kitchen.  It turns out it didn’t have a kitchen, but that didn’t stop me from barging into the apartment a floor below and start making some soup before realising that I wasn’t necessarily supposed to be there.  

Outside the sleet pounded down, making me regret leaving the warmer climes for the frigid north, and at this point, really missing my gumboots.  Sally arrived the next day, and our Canadian friend a day later*.  We decided then (actually long before, which is what prompted Nancy’s escape from Yellowknife for a six-day whirlwind Bosnian Spring Break) that the one thing one must do in Bosnia is walk the 25km coastline.  Of course, the other thing one can do is choose to continue sleeping in Mostar when I got up at 6am to catch the train to the coast.  This was the choice Sally made, and she missed out on the wonderful opportunity of walking along a highway with no shoulder and not getting her passport stamped at all.  Despite weaving in and out of Croatia and Bosnia all day, they flat out refused to stamp my passport.   This was a crushing blow, because around this time it became clear that I was really only in this game for the stamps.  

Some have argued, primarily via disdainful honks, that our chosen encampment on the side of the Dalmatian highway at dusk was not the best-positioned place from which to launch a hitchhiking endeavour back to Bosnia.  However, after screaming, “Good luck getting into the EU, Croatia!” in frustration, a work truck took pity on us and picked us up.  We huddled in open-aired back full of cement sacks and various implements for labouring, screaming “Best Bosnian Spring Break ever!” as it whisked us back into Neum, and into the arms of a family that let rooms for 10 euros per person and operated a pizzeria on the ground floor while a storm raged outside.  Clearly this is all we needed to justifiably say we “did” Bosnia, and after doing Bosnia, we went back to Sarajevo and prepared for our imminent departure from Bosnia.  After rejecting the chauffeur services of a man who stopped in front of us and pulled a suction-cupped ‘taxi’ sign out of his trunk, we shared a tearless goodbye outside the Sarajevo Holiday Inn and parted our separate ways—I north by train the mother of Slavic nations, Sally by bus to the south and ultimately Turkey, and Nancy by six different planes back to the Canadas.    

*I say ‘Canadian friend’ in this case because she speaks French and English, her dad worked for CBC, and she lived in Yellowknife.  These powers combined make her the most Canadian thing that can conceivably exist.