DEFCON 2

Ulysses on his way home suffered the wrath of Poseidon at sea. We suffered it on land.

Right from the beginning, rain had been always a constant threat. In London it respected us. In Paris and until Prague it looked too grey. In Wien it threw all it had over us, wetting us in a matter of seconds –and giving me a cold. In Budapest it confined us to our rooms. And in the Balkans… Intermittentshowers had been a constant in Sarajevo but we surely weren’t prepared for what was about to come in the rest of the country, much poorly prepared and with a worse infrastructure to withstand the attack of Mother Nature. The disaster was on way to collision with us.

We boarded a train supposed to last for eight hours, from Sarajevo to Belgrade. The plan was to arrive just on time to have a quick view of the city and then catch another train to Sofia. And everything was working fine. The train went out of Sarajevo on time, without problems, good speed and it looked like rain was forgiving us for a while.

Well, not so fast. After three-four hours, we arrived to Doboj –town to add to the axis of evil of Alençon and Hollendretch. Suddenly the train stops. After the first few moments of not knowing what’s going on, I asked the ticket inspector. “No English”; great. Fortunately, there was a Canadian-Serbian girl around that translated it to me: the railway is flooded and the train cannot continue; we must get off the train and wait for a bus that will connect us to another train to bring us to Belgrade. Knowing what was going on, the ticket inspector used me as a speaker to communicate the news to the rest of foreigners aboard the train, so I went compartment by compartment telling the news.

Resigned to wait –and hungry- we got off the train and waited in the station. It’s strange how these experiences unite you with your fellow travelers. Up until then, David and I almost never had exchange words with other travelers –apart from Prague and mostly because David wasn’t too eager to that. But there in Doboj we befriended am English couple, two French girls, two Canadian-Serbian girls and several Bosnian and Serbian old fellas that didn’t have a clue of English.

Five hours later the bus appeared. We thought the wait was over, but it had just started. The cause of our delay –the floods- had flooded the road and the bus spent more than two and a half hours trying to cross what looked more like a river than a road, even though it was just about two kilometers long. Once we crossed it everything went quicker, including border formalities.

Still, it took us five hours to get to the train waiting for us. It was like a palace in an oasis in the middle of the desert, even though it was just an old train in a station in the middle of nowhere. But they had food onboard and we were moving. Three hours with little sleep but good food and funny waiters made the trip to Belgrade easy and a pleasure compared to what we had just had.

We finally arrived to Belgrade in the middle of the night. Our night train to Sofia, although a night train, had gone several hours ago and the next one wasn’t running until 7 in the morning. It was too late to find a hostel and too early to board the train, so we had to sleep in the train station in Belgrade, just the one that our guide discouraged to sleep in. David could get some sleep, I didn’t.

With too much sleep to recover and too little food eaten, we boarded the train to Sofia. Eight hours, this time without major problems. And just like that, after 32 hours of travelling, we arrived in Sofia. And what’s our prize for all that travelling? A dull city, a grey city, a boring city; probably the worst city we’ve visited so far. Fine, Bulgarian women are awesome and our couchsurfer Mila was a great host, but seriously, Sofia is a city worth to skip.

No wonder we took the first train out of the city to Athens.

The Balkans was one of the highlights of the trip. For starters, it was going to be the first place where we'll get our passport stamped. And apart from that, there was Sarajevo. And certainly, until that (Sarajevo) it lived to the expectations.

The journey from Budapest to Zagreb was straightforward and easy. It was the first long duration train (8 hours) of many to come on our schedule. Arriving into Zagreb, finding the hotel was relatively easy and a bit surprising –it was a hostel for Japanese people, run by Japanese people and with Japanese hosts; somewhat like the little Tokyo of the Balkans. It was at least, picturesque.

But the city itself didn't have that much. None of the beaches from Dubrovnik, none of the war tourism spots of the Krajina; not even any historic landmark –and the few interesting buildings were covered on scaffoldings. But plenty of beautiful women and cafes –plus watching Italy losing against NZ for a short time- helped. And we spotted a great place –Alcatraz café bar- where spend our last kunas; only if we had found it before…

But the big fish had been from the beginning Sarajevo. The day after we boarded a night train to a city that kept a few good memories from my past. It was, after Palestine, my first destination for work, back in 2006. But then I was travelling with a tight budget and now I had a few more bucks to spend in the city. So, accomplishing one of my lifetime dreams, I stayed in the Holiday Inn. And treated myself with pleasure.

Not only I was changed. Many things are different from my last visit in the city too. For instance, the old Government building, in ruins when I visit it back in 2006, had been restored and looked now impolitely clean and new from my room of the Holiday Inn. The Bascaricja, the old town, has recovered much of the life that never lost completely and was a vivid mosaic of people even in a weekday.

But too many more remained still in great need to improve. Transport was unreliable, many quarters of the city remained in a semi-abandoned state of ruin and main spots with a high potential for tourism continued to be poorly developed and not enough promoted, like the tunnel under the airport.

Sarajevo itself, however, left on me a good taste like the first time I was there. The feeling of the atmosphere is incredible and the lack of tourists is at the same time a pain in the arse –not enough services for tourism, even in a hotel like the Holiday Inn- and a bless –no one around ruining the pictures or the atmosphere. And you cannot beat the cevapcici of the Bascaricja.

Belgrade and Sofia… That's another story.