Zak Attack

I was as surprised as anyone to
 discover that eastern Europe receives
receives snow in March.

Finally, it appeared that my push towards the Steppes was going to pay off and that I would be in the Ukraine, or at least the historical polyglot of Zakarpattia, by nightfall.  I left Sanislau at a fairly late hour but I was so close to Ukraine that I could practically taste the starch-heavy culinary delights within.  The train took me directly to the border, and I assumed it was wholly reasonable for me to expect to be able to just walk across and into Ukraine—after alerting the appropriate authorities, of course—and receiving a coveted bright orange stamp.  At Halmeu, I was such a gathering force and things were going so smoothly that it seemed like nothing could stop me.  Until I was stopped.  Alas, it would appear that unlike Hitler and Napoleon before me, my invasion of Russia was thwarted by Romanian border control, and not the usual case of inadequate, non-season-appropriate clothing.   

Les Roumains told me quite pointedly that despite the wishes of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada on behalf of Her Royal Majesty QE2 to let me pass freely and without hindrance, they would not let me pass and instead would hinder me.  As for the section that asks them to provide assistance to me, they shrugged and said, “I don’t know.  Maybe wait.  Maybe try to catch bus.”  Far from the ceremonious greeting I was expecting from the local consul—“our man in Zakarpattia”—providing me with the finest in accommodation and hospitality that the British Empire afforded, I instead ended up wondering why we had signed up for this whole Commonwealth thing in the first place if I wasn’t being directly helped in a backwater border crossing in eastern Europe.  But nevertheless, I learned that walking across the Halmeu border is not okay, and I tucked that little nugget of information away for next time.  

Not to let anything get me down, I decided to go back to Satu Mare to see if there was a night train I could take across Romania and enter Ukraine from another point.  Of course, I had to be certain I was able to go back to Satu Mare at this point, as it was late and I wasn’t in a particularly renowned transit hub.  I caught the last train to Satu Mare and was heartbroken to find, upon return, 1) no trains to anywhere of use to me, and 2) to my gumbootless delight, a blizzard, awaiting me.  Naturally these are the things I live for: after briefing the Plecări (departures) board, consulting my weather-beaten Europe map, and looking really intense while talking to myself and molding my face into expressions that indicate to curious onlookers that I’m up to some pretty serious business, and that now was the time to not bother me (—or, alternately, to bother me and ask me if I needed a place to sleep for the night.  I was hoping my body language and facial consternation conveyed both messages.  I did take acting in high school, after all, and had starred as Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web in a very indie, underground 1995 production), it appeared that Satu Mare would play host to me for the night—a mere 50 km from my starting point in Sanislau.  

I could barely make it away from the station to find wifi to alert my father and sister of my inevitable tardiness due to the flurry of fresh falling snowflakes.  In March!  Three days earlier I had been wearing a t-shirt in Croatia and now it would appear I was going in wholly the wrong direction.  Through the whirling snow and fog, I saw a light for the Casanova Hotel—either a one star or a no star—and decided to see what the rate would be.  Surprisingly cheap, as it turned out.  A single was 60 lei, or $20.  The receptionist was excited by my evidently Russian name, and then they directed me to where my room was—just through the large lounge, around a couple of the tables, past the stage with the pole with the dancing, scantily-clad young lady on it, then through the door and up the staircase.  Everything sort of clicked together for me retrospectively why they had expressed surprise when I said I needed a room for the entire night.  

But no worries!  Vice and establishments of ill-repute are no stranger to me; in fact, one of my friends in Point Grey lives in a home that was formerly a brothel in the 1920s.  My environmental circumstances had little or no effect on me, except for a couple trying to key into my room at 4am and the pulsing club music that played throughout the evening.  Aside from that, I had a warm, dry bed, a shower, and I was right across the street from the train station so I could rise early and take the train to Moldavia, the other region that makes up the trifecta of Romania (along with Wallachia and Transylvania, of course!) at 6am.  

Surprise! –I didn’t.   I slept until 7 or so and then caught the 8am train.  Something about not being able to see anything out the window except whirling snow has that effect on me.  I opted for the later train which had a transfer in Dej Călători lasting three hours, connecting with the Timişoara–Iaşi  Express which did a formidable arc covering much of the country.  We crawled through the thoroughly snowed in Carpathians mountains, the landscape asserting to me exactly why there were no border crossings between Halmeu and at Suceava, and arrived in Suceava just after 7 at night.  Stepping off the train, a woman walked right up to me and said my name.  I was taken aback.  She had written down on a piece of paper my name, and the hostel I had completely forgotten that I had booked.  

Nothing could indicate more clearly my
eventual destination of the Ukraine
quite like the interior of this bus.

Evidently, in Dej I had managed to find some wifi and inquire about hostels in Suceava.  Not many, but the one I stayed at was definitely the right choice.  The lady picked me up at the station, drove me to the hostel which was considerably out of town, and had dinner prepared for me (soup, salad, cabbage rolls, a non-alcoholic beer, bread, and dessert).  I also got my own room, a large breakfast in the morning (including coffee that I drank out of the enormous Friends-style cappuccino cup that I was informed was meant for the cereal but “Americans always make that mistake”) and was driven to the bus depot in the morning.  Unaccustomed to this level of pampering, it was nevertheless exactly what I needed to get back on track and to the Ukraine on time to meet one half of my family.  I think the tab was $25, which at the end of the day is money very well spent considering I would have probably wandered around Suceava desperately and inevitably slept in the train station with still no clear plan for finding the way to the Ukraine.  Instead I got all the aforementioned and still had time to buy gogosi before boarding a bus for the motherland.  At the appointed hour, we were off, and the die was cast.  I was about to, quite literally, meet my maker.  

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.