nawl

We started with no plans, really, except for a destination for the first day. The idea was to see some mountains, see the sea, see some nice old seaside towns, maybe spend some time swimming or sunbathing. The weather forecast was good, except for a little rain expected on Sunday, so I packed light. This was a mistake. The whole week was unseasonably and unreasonably cold and rainy. So much for summer.

We took the train from Budapest to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Only just past the Croatian border, they herded us all off the train and into a bus, with some explanation in broken English about constructing a wall. At this point it became clear that the only people on the train were teenagers from North and South America backpacking around Europe, though I suspect that most of those with Canadian flags badly stitched onto their backpacks were really Americans who heard that Europeans will be friendlier if they think you're Canadian. The bus drove for a few hours through farmland, and then we were all herded off the bus and onto a rusty regional train, a far cry from the sleek Italian train we had started out on. I thought to use the bathroom, and looked down the toilet bowl to see the track rushing by below.

Zagreb, hmm, was a table piled with religious literature in a variety of languages next to a small prayer room on the train platform, a park of flowers and a large yellow cake building across from the train station, an impressive selection of porn magazines (covers visible in all their glory, of course) offered at the magazine stands, and a wall of artistic graffiti on the way to the bus station, where we bought a ticket to Plitvice.

Zsolt at this point was waxing deeply nostalgic. Ten years ago, he and a friend hitchhiked through northern Croatia on 5,000 ft, about $25 with today's exchange rate. Of course, the war was still going on then, though they stayed away from the fighting. "This was where a truckload of (UN? NATO? US?) soldiers offered to take us to the front." "We saw an army marching through a city, tanks and all." "When we reached the sea, we decided we should have a party. So I bought a paprika, and Laci took out a can of fish we had brought, and I ate my bread with a paprika, and he ate his with the can of fish." "One night, we were so tired that we just fell over in a field asleep. In the morning, an old woman rode by on a bicycle and gave us two peaches."

The bus to Plitvice took us closer to the Bosnian border, and we passed many abandoned houses, some riddled with bullet holes. One particularly decrepit one was labeled with a large banner in Croatian and English that said "Future site of the Museum of the Homeland War". Many other houses appeared to have been constructed more recently out of a sort of bright orange new brick that I saw all over the country, but were missing windows, doors, large sections of roofs, and had no sign of life or construction activity around them. Were they abandoned in the midst of reconstruction? I don't know.

At Plitvice, we were supposed to meet up with Nikita and Lenore, who were also traveling through Croatia, but when the bus finally dropped us off in the middle of the park, we discovered we were 8 km from the campsite we wanted to meet at, the only accomodation in the park was overpriced hotels clogged with tour buses, and that there were no local buses at all. We walked a couple kilometers along the narrow shoulder of the road and at the front gate of the park an old lady offered us a night in her house for 200 kuna ($16 a person). Her house was just a little beyond the park, a small white place looking over a large crater in the ground where she kept a vegetable garden. We never did find Nikita and Lenore, despite confused negotiations with the old lady and her neighbors about finding a phone to call the camp, and Zsolt walking the remaining 5 km in the rain next morning to leave a message.

On Sunday, it rained all day. In the morning, it was mainly a light mist, and I decided it would be better to get a bit wet than miss a day, so we set out to explore the park. This turned out to be a stupid idea, albeit one with beautiful scenery.

Plitvice is famous for its waterfalls. There isn't just one, there are dozens connecting a stairstep series of bright turquoise pools. The paths in sections are wooden platform bridges curving their way across the water, directly in front of and over the falls, and the wood against the bright blue water creates an effect straight out of Myst. It is almost ridiculously beautiful, so that by the end of the day you're ready to groan "Oh, another waterfall." In a couple areas, the waterfall was entire wall of falling water overgrown with greenery, curving around for 100 meters to form a wall of one turquoise pool overflowing into another. The effect is difficult to photograph.

This attracts tourbusloads of old ladies with umbrellas. By the middle of the day, I was completely soaked through, but kept warm enough by walking fast. We took the long route around the lakes, walking where the old people took the ferry boats between easy sites, and walked for hours without encountering anybody else. We heard frogs arguing with unfamiliar calls, saw enormous black slugs and yellow snails, and saw many, many black and yellow spotted lizard-like creatures that must be salamanders. I believe I hit bottom after I fell down a muddy incline on a detour around a fallen tree that hadn't been cleared from the path, and could only hold my hands up to the rain to wash them. It's a miracle my camera survived the soaking. My wet wallet dyed a 5,000 ft bill purple, and when I got back to Budapest the store refused to accept it, despite the presence of the proper holograms.

On a side note, the park people are apparently completely unprepared for people who come on foot, and it's possible to accidentally enter the park (and avoid the entrance fee) just by walking off the road.

That evening, cold and miserably wet, we continued on in the bus to Zadar on the coast. Zadar is somewhat unremarkable in comparison to other, bigger, tourist-destination towns on the coast, so I don't have much to say. I was mostly hoping we'd be able to catch a ferry to continue down the coast. There is an attractively lighted bridge to the touristy old town. The old town was bombed to shreds in WWII, but it has an old church and marble car-free streets (which, incidentally, are incredibly slippery when wet).

So we caught a bus to Split. More abandoned houses. This time, we saw wide expanses of wild countryside cris-crossed by low stone walls. Sometimes the walls looked like the foundations of ancient houses. Sometimes they were on hillsides holding up terraces that could plausibly have been farmed. But most of the time they just formed mazes in completely untended land. What were they for?

I was somewhat surprised, though I'm not sure why, to see nuns riding the bus on all of the trips we'd taken thus far. As I was exiting the bus in Split, a nun in full traditional habit grabbed one of my braids and held onto it while saying something long in Croatian to a non-nun conversation partner across the aisle. What am I supposed to do? I've never had my hair grabbed by a nun before. After that she started trying languages on me. After a couple attempts, "Parlez-vous francais?" "Oui, qu'avez-vous dit?" "Excusez-moi." And she delivered me into the waiting arms of a sobe-lady.

Right, so the sobe ladies. In Croatia, the place to stay is not in a hotel, not in a hostel, but in a private room. The guidebook told us that private rooms are supposed to be negotiated by a local agency that sets a fixed rate and has quality standards, but it was clear that the majority of people offering rooms side-stepped this bureaucracy by going in person for obvious tourists on the street. So the moment we stepped off the bus anywhere, we were surrounded by a waiting crowd of women (and a few men) holding signs saying "sobechambreszimmercamererooms", and had merely to negotiate a price and figure out the location in a mix of broken English, German, and cognate Slavic words.

The tide of tourists coming off the ferry meets the waiting wall of sobe ladies in Dubrovnik:

Split is a neat little town spread out on the lower part of a peninsula ending in a hill. The big tourist attraction of the old town is Diocletian's palace, a Roman ruin that big posters everywhere advertised was a UNESCO world heritage site. The cool part of the ruin, though, was that the town was built straight into it in a mess of white stone construction of all different eras. Apparently they tore off the 19th-century facades of the buildings to expose the original stonework when someone finally figured out that the town was a Roman ruin, but as it was it was hard to figure out where palace ended and other building began.

There were lots of old stone coffins everywhere. I don't think most tourists realized what they were looking at. "Excuse me miss, do you realize you're using a 600 year old receptacle for somebody's corpse as a bench?"

A group of boys was playing soccer in a small stone courtyard area on the way to the upper part of the palace ruins. Further on up, a group of children was playing a game of dodgeball that looked to me more like a game of "hit the littlest one with the ball". I can't imagine growing up in a such an ancient place.

We took a 7 am ferry to Dubrovnik. Along the way, there were lots of spectacular views of the sea and the islands along the coast. The boat made several stops at adorable old island ports along the way. And for once, the weather was nice. We lounged in the sun and read along with all the other tourists. There were a large number of people speaking German with a hoidy-doidy accent.

Arriving in Korcula:

Do you want your own stone tower on a tiny island isolated in the middle of the sea? I do.

Did I mention that the Adriatic is perfectly smooth? It's disturbing. Seas are supposed to have waves. The Mediterranean around the coast of France at least has small waves. Here there were none, except for boat wakes. No waves, no tides. A saltwater lake.

I liked Dubrovnik. For one, the old town is amazing, a perfectly maintained and reconstructed town all in white stone, surrounded by amazing fortress walls, a real-life seaside incarnation of the town of men in the Lord of the Rings, and just as striking as Venice.

But the best part was that it was a town that kept some easy secrets, or perhaps I should say, not everything worth seeing was placed in the direct path of the busloads of tourists that came through every day.

We stayed in an enormous room in a building in the middle of the old town that was inhabited by two old ladies who spoke only a bit of German and a frail old man that we only saw once. The interior of the building had obviously been recently redone, and the main entrance and second floor seemed to be some sort of museum for an artist, but the room that we stayed in had three walls of unfinished cement, painted white and clumsily patched with gray concrete and one of white stone blocks. On the second morning, I sat out on the balcony as a herd of French tourists filed by, and the group leader pointed to our building and explained that it had burned down when Dubrovnik was shelled during the war. A large plaque near the entrances of the town showed a map of the old town and marked every one of the 600-some places that were hit by shells in 1991.

There were cats everywhere. Everywhere. They stalked pigeons, hid their kittens in storage garages with broken windows, and begged food from the outdoor tables of restaurants.

The first night we walked up to the entrance of a fort raised over the sea with a view of the town, then wound our way through stone staircases built straight into the rock down to a tiny rocky beach where a group of British teenagers were having a late-evening swim. Then we wound up to a parking lot overlooking the sea, then over some rocks to a deserted concrete beach area, and found ourselves trespassing through the garden of a nunnery to escape.

This is someone's front door, after already walking through a small maze of stone staircases overgrown with flowers to get here:

And looking down to the little rocky beach:

The second afternoon, we took a long hike in the general direction of up, in an attempt to see how far we could get up the hill towering over the town. We went up an enormous staircase to a busy road with a narrow shoulder.

The houses on the hillside along the road had built their driveways above the houses, much like in Berkeley, and many of them had spectacular views. After a short walk down the shoulder of the road, I noticed a stone path-staircase leading up the hill again.

The guidebook had mentioned that, in particular, the hills behind Dubrovnik had not been entirely cleared of mines from the war. This made us think a bit before deciding to take a random hike. But I figured that a path that had obviously been used in recent history couldn't be that dangerous.

The views were incredible.

As the sun set, we saw a large cruise ship pass by. As it passed close to Dubrovnik, suddenly it lit up in a sparkle of hundreds of camera flashes, an effect much like the sparkle-lights on the Eiffel tower. Hundreds of tourists will have memories of Dubrovnik of the form of pictures of highly illuminated grime on their cabin windows.

Along the path there were black crosses with roman numerals on them, some sort of holy hike.

Near the top we suddenly encountered a lot of shit. Some of it was cow-sized, some of it was human or dog-sized, and some of it was deer-sized. I don't understand.

At the top there was an abandoned old stone fortress, crumbling and full of holes. An enormous radio antenna had been built into it.

Further along the ridge, we encountered a hulking concrete and metal structure with enormous holes blasted in it that had been covered with chicken wire. The metal door bled rust from dozens of bullet holes. From another angle, I finally realized what it was: the war-torn remains of a ski-lift (more likely a carriage-lift thing) that had once brought people up the mountain.

There were memorials to people who died in 1991, and a new large white cross that was illuminated at night, without an inscription.

From there we could look south and east, towards Cavtat and further towards Montenegro, and towards the brown mountains of Bosnia.

And then my last camera battery ran out. No more pictures.

We walked down the hill on a new asphalt road. Behind a fence, I could barely make out a skull and crossbones on a sign that had been bent and twisted to face away from the road. Further down, I found another skull and crossbones sign, with a Croation inscription about "mina", lying face-down on the ground.

This caused some consternation. There was a shortcut past some huge concrete structure to a dirt road that appeared to go more the direction we wanted to go, but right next to it was a tree tied in white tape reading "mine".

So we stayed on the nice safe asphalt road, and made it home, all limbs in place. From so far up the mountain, there were incredible views of Dubrovnik lighting up at night.

The next morning, we took the bus to Montenegro. At the border, we were told to disembark, and we passed through the border on foot among the cars. Past the border, we resumed the voyage in a Montenegrin bus, much less well maintained. We passed the construction sites of new border buildings, and signs about the EU. We stopped to spend the afternoon in Herceg Novi, mostly because we didn't know anything about any of the towns. It turned out to be a fairly standard Mediterranean-style beach resort town, albeit a bit deserted on the beaches because the water was still to cold to swim. We spent a lovely few hours on a gravel beach, reading in the sun and appreciating the high green hills plunging into the intensely blue sea. During an early dinner of pizza, I watched in horror as the man at the next table asked for ketchup and mayonnaise and proceeded to coat his slice of pizza with both before eating it. (In Hungary you have to be attentive when ordering pizza by the slice because they'll often douse it with ketchup without asking, but I've never seen mayonnaise before.)

Some interesting things about Montenegro. Everything was in euros. People demanded payment in euros, the ATMs dispensed euros, and there was no hint that they were either a. part of another country (Serbia) with its own legal currency (the dinar), or b. mere miles from another country (Croatia) with its own currency (the kuna). Pardon my innocence if this is common, but for the first time ever I ran into an ATM that didn't accept my Visa ATM card. Also, as far as I was told, they speak basically the same language as in Croatia, but suddenly half of everything was in Cyrillic. I was amused by the appropriation and spelling of borrowed words: "pomfrit" "friserski salon".

Besides the apparently EU-funded new border control buildings, there was an EU-donated garbage truck (it said so on the side in Slavic cognate words). And along the road, we saw many signs next to old buildings saying "US AID". So, dear readers who are EU or US citizens, apparently your tax dollars and donations are being put to work.

We were still left with the puzzle of how to get home. We decided to take a late afternoon bus to Belgrade, in the hopes that it would be easier to take a train back to Budapest. We had thought to go through Sarajevo, since it's closer, but the train from Sarajevo takes an incredible 12 hours to get to Budapest. I asked why. "They destroyed all of the train lines during the war. It was a real war, you know. They're only just being re-opened."

So we bussed it to Belgrade. The ride through Montenegro was absolutely incredible. The first few hours were spent just on the road curving around the bay on the coast. Enormous green mountains and white rock cliffs fell straight into the sea. I tried to take pictures from the bus, but they don't show the incredible scale of it all.

From there we went inland to a rocky mountainous area of little farms built into valleys and enormous white boulders. At one point, inexplicably in the middle of nowhere with no obvious settlements to support such a development, we drove past a series of car dealerships. When night fell, it was completely dark, and I could look through the window and see the ghost-shapes of trees illuminated by the bus headlights, and high rocky cliffs on both sides of the road, and many stars in the sky.

We got to Belgrade (Beograd) at 6:30 am. A city of uncompromising ugliness as far as the eye can see. Pre-communist ugliness. Communist ugliness. Post-communist ugliness. At least they appear to have recovered from being bombed. We walked around for an hour and a half before finding an ATM that worked. I saw a large line of old men in front of the post office more than an hour before it was scheduled to open. What could they possibly be waiting for? I saw a city bus that said on the side, in English, "Donated by the people of Japan". Glossy magazines like Playboy were printed in Roman characters, serious-looking newspapers were in Cyrillic. Graffiti was in both.

I had been warned that Beograd was ugly, but in my innocence I thought ugliness could still be interesting, in a sort of fading-glory, horrors-of-Communism, bombed-to-pieces, signs-of-ethnic-war sort of way. Unfortunately, it was 10 C and raining, and my tolerance for such aimless adventuring dropped with the temperature of my sandaled toes, and there was a morning train back to Budapest. So thus was the trip cut a day short.

On the train ride home, I looked out the windows onto trash-covered shanty towns sandwiched between freeway overpasses and the train lines. I saw a Gypsy man and a young girl standing by a fire next to a pile of tires. The young girl waved at the train, and we waved back. From the other side, I realized that the pile of tires had a *door*, and that someone was coming out of it.

There were ugly dehumanizing high-rises, ugly industry, and ugly suburbs of houses built out of the same thick orange brick, as far as I can tell by the owners themselves.

So much traveling requires books. The ferry ride exhausted the second book I had brought from my expedition to an English-language used bookstore in Budapest (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and The Joy Luck Club, joined rather unexpectedly by the recurring theme of "americans are shallow people who have no emotions"), so I replenished my reading supply with Balkan Ghosts and a history of Croatia from a tourist-oriented store in Dubrovnik. The first makes for some rather powerful reading on the beaches of the former Yugoslavia. Nothing bad ever happens in America.