Our co-worker David was getting married Aug 27 in his hometown of Prague, and that is an event we were determined not to miss. We realized that plane tickets to the USA are much cheaper from Prague than from Sarajevo, so we decided to travel by train to Prague, and then fly home after the wedding (well, and a few days to see the city of course).
Our other co-worker Vedrana was traveling with us, and we had the four of us plus our entire entourage of suitcases containing our life for the next year. We’d brought the absolute max allowable by Lufthansa: one checked bag for each of us including Gabi, one carry-on, and a “personal item.” Add my guitar for an extra cost, and overfill the bags with food and diapers to last a week, and it would be an understatement to say we were traveling heavy.
Day one on the train was Sarajevo-Budapest in 12 hours, and day two Budapest-Prague in 7 hours. Having never taken the train for a lengthy trip, we were nervous about it with Gabi. But if we drove our car, we wouldn’t have anyone to return it to Bosnia when we left. And driving means Gabi would be locked down in her carseat, while on the train she could play and move around. Plus, many friends had told us that the Sa-Buda train has enclosed small cabins, and since Sarajevo was the beginning of the line we were sure we could stake our claim on one and be comfortable.
When we got to the train station at 6:30am, it took two heavy trips to get our bags onto the platform. Surprise #1 hit when we saw that the train was just the engine car and one passenger car…no enclosed cabins, just a communal car with city bus-style seats. Oh, and a teeny bit of space above the seats for luggage. I asked a couple workers what was going on, and they gave me a Balkans shrug that means “Ain’t nothing I can do about it” and walked away. One added that some more cars would be attached in Doboj, three hours north of Sarajevo.
We can handle that, we thought, and stuffed our bags everywhere possible on that car…on free seats, overhead, at our feet, next to some other guy. We got the anticipated “what is wrong with these people; bringing so much stuff?” looks, and I avoided eye contact. I wanted to yell “We’re traveling for a year, not just a week!”
Fortunately, the busyness of getting settled distracted us from the sadness of pulling away from our beloved Sarajevo. The passengers around us were wonderfully kind, largely because they were enraptured with Gabriela. She talked and smiled and waved, and they melted and made small talk with us. One thing we love about the Balkans is that people are tremendously kid-friendly. No one would ever criticize parents of a kid who’s making noise, and they instead offer their food to the child–watch out for chocolate…it’s not the best before 12 hours in a confined space!
We made it to Doboj uneventfully, and when we saw that the cars being added to the train had enclosed rooms, we jumped to move our stuff over. The mother and adult son sitting next to us helped us transport stuff and ooh-ed and ahh-ed over Gabi one last time, and we shut ourselves into the 6 seat cabin (one of about 10 on the car, almost all empty) and celebrated. This would be doable for a long trip!
But soon it became apparent that the temperature was rising, ahem, significantly. This was late August, and it had been abnormally hot lately and getting hotter. Oh, and did I mention the train had no A/C? This communist-era dinosaur had sliding windows which did not stay open, but instead had to be held in place to allow any breeze in. A mild annoyance at the beginning, but after a couple hours we were hanging heads out the window for air. All four of us were soon bathed in sweat.
Speaking of train quality, the bathrooms were a separate adventure. Weak non-potable water from the faucet, no soap. A rusty metal toilet with a square metal plate at the base to catch everything, and a foot pedal which, when pressed, released the panel and dropped the cargo on the tracks below. As I prepared to use it, the train rolled into station and stopped. Oops…better wait until we’re moving again. And it was hot in there, with no window. I was soaked in sweat after 10 seconds.
So all of this is tough enough, but the kicker is that this train does not sell water or food, and the stops are only long enough to change passengers–no getting off to stretch your legs or find supplies. This is one of the bummers of the Balkans: tourism isn’t big enough here for anyone to be investing in the infrastructure, so rarely is anyone making improvements or offering any of the little bonuses (like say, water) that make the trip comfortable. It’s like buying a train ticket means “we’ll get you there, somehow, sometime…you may be dehydrated, drenched in sweat, in pain, and unhappy, but you’ll arrive.”
As the temperature rose, it became clear that we didn’t have nearly enough water. Gabi was slugging it down like we’ve never seen. At a stop on the border with Croatia, I asked the ticket-checker if there was a place to get some water nearby. He said no one sells it there, but that there was a spigot nearby and that I had about 5 minutes. I sprinted with all of our bottles, and when I arrived another worker there said that he wasn’t sure the water was safe to drink. I was ready to take our chances, but then another worker walked up and chugged some. I filled up and made it back just before the train pulled away.
In the ensuing kilometers, I tried to put Gabi down for a nap in a nearby empty private cabin. It seemed very workable: our awesome travel bed fit in the leg space, so I had her set up just like anywhere else. I even turned on the little rain noise maker we use to make the location feel familiar. But two factors were working against me/her/us. The first is that it was melting hot inside, and she was sweating. The second is that every time she seemed to be calming down the train pulled into a stop, and the jerking motion and sound of people walking around alerter her. She’d pop up and look out the window excitedly, yelling “Guck, guck, guck!” Gabriela is enthralled with trucks these days, and anything that rolls on wheels is a guck. I tried valiantly for 30min, and Gabi was no closer to sleeping than before. Probably further, as it was kind of a game to her. Nap fail.
Jess walked up to me and told me that our former train car, the communal car, the one we left about five hours earlier, had air conditioning and was much cooler. I stood there, soaked shirt stuck to my chest, leaning desperately into the tiny breeze creeping through the window I held open with my hand, wide-awake child standing in her travel bed behind me alternating between crying and guck-ing, and at Jess’ words felt so deflated I wanted to collapse. I wanted her to be wrong, so that I could know that the entire train was suffering like we were. Equal pain on all sides, in these moments, can seem better even than the chance for improvement. Especially when improvement means we were wrong. And when it means I have to move all. our. suitcases. again.
But she was right. The other train car was a lot cooler–though still quite hot. And so we moved Gabi and all of our luggage through the moving train a second time, baring the blank stares and whispers in Hungarian of passengers aghast at the number of trips back and forth I made (about 5, I believe).
The last four-ish hours of the trip passed slowly, even in the new car with semi-AC. Gabi was overtired and thus cranky and quick to holler, so we tried desperately to placate her with crayons and a new coloring book. We walked up and down the aisles with her, trying to keep her from touching sleeping people. Oh, and the train was delayed an hour, prolonging our joy. When we finally hit Budapest Deli station (a different station than we had been told by the Sarajevo station…Budapest has three), we were relieved to see that our friend Laci had somehow found out which station we’d arrived at, and was waiting for us. We were stinky and looked like we had just run a marathon in our clothes, but we were there.
On the way to his house, Laci told us that the Budapest-Prague train would be at a quality level called “European standard”. We all agreed that we had no clue what that meant, but it sounded wonderful and luxurious. And it was. Air conditioning, private cabins, very friendly German grandparents and granddaughter sharing our cabin and happy to help us with Gabi. Who, bizarrely and blessedly, was amazingly well-behaved the entire 7 hours and contentedly played and sat in our laps. And napped on our seat for an hour. What a difference a day makes!
In the end, our verdict was that train travel is a wonderful way to see most of Europe, but we can’t quite handle the roughing it of Balkan trains. If it were only the two of us, the entire experience would have been funny and quite do-able. But with a toddler…next time we’ll have to find a different way.
Notes from the Edge 