Welcome to Hungary

Hungary welcomed us with immediate delays. We sat and watched goldfinches bathe in the puddle of a leaky pipe for thirty minutes.

When we moved it was into a very different country. New roads were under construction, new houses, even new railway track was being laid. Pylons waited empty for cables to be slung, factories had new roofs, cars and trucks were busier, cleaner, newer. Graffiti sprung up in great swathes and rubbish was everywhere. Beyond the towns fields were the hedgeless expanses of Western Europe.

I asked the guard in my best mime whether we should put our clocks back. He assured me we shouldn’t and I passed the information to my fellow travellers. We were two hours from our due arrival time. An hour later I approached the guard again.

“One hour to Budapest?” I asked, making one circuit of my watch with my finger.

“Yes, yes. Budapest, one,” he agreed.

Again I passed the news to the others. An hour later we pulled into Szolnok; we were two hours from Budapest. And the station clock was an hour out..

I decided to beat a retreat into the toilet. After six countries and three days I was getting a bit ripe. I locked the door and put my bag on the toilet seat. A tiny metal washbasin was fed by a thin spout operated by a foot-pedal. In the rolling train there were only two positions, off or full on, the latter causing the water to slam against the basin and scatter everywhere.

I stripped for action and the train promptly stopped. No using the toilet while the train is in the station – everyone knows that; to do so would attract a knock at the door. I waited while feet climbed up the steps and then receded. We started again. Barely had I shaved when we again stopped. Still unmolested but definitely disturbed – I had visions of arriving at Budapest naked and wet – I soaped what I could as we rolled off.

Sudsy water washed to the floor. Slipping and squirting, dabbing and splashing, I did the best I could, packed up my stuff and left with what dignity I could muster.

“Achtung, liebe!” the hairy German said as she surveyed the dripping scene.

As we slipped through the outskirts of Budapest I threw the CRAP down the toilet. It seemed appropriate: it tasted as it was labelled. I kept the lid as a souvenir.

Transylvania by moonlight - no vampires!

I felt a bit of a cheat leaving Romania immediately but the truth is I could never stay there long.

Travelling alone is always a series of gambles with calm periods amongst the storms. Go with the wrong guy to change money, find a cheap hotel or an internet cafe and you could lose more than your shirt. The result of knowing this is that you are always on your guard – for the guy slipping up to the next ticket window, for the piece of luggage left momentarily unattended, for the directions that seem wrong, the advice that seems suspect, the eyes, the hands, the body language..

After a while it overwhelms your ‘holiday’, taints your views, prejudices your notions.

It had been a long time since my nine month trek across the world but the nerve-tightening awareness was all too familiar. Thus when I found myself alone for a 17 hour journey in a compartment I could lock, I did so and enjoyed an oasis of pure bliss.

I love trains more than any other form of transport. They offer the scenery denied by planes and ships and a relentless rhythm that cars can never achieve. True they are inflexible in direction and destination, but within them they offer an unequalled freedom of movement.

I watched as Bucharest went by. It’s hardly fair to judge a city by an airport, an arterial route and a railway station, but I did so. The houses near the airport were alike in that their roofs wouldn’t stop a light shower, such was the state of the tiles. The Gara de Nord was stationed in downtown Beirut and the houses I was now looking at had little or no glass in many windows, judging by the broken reflection of the moon.

The conductor came and went and I relocked the door, made a bed of the bench and turned the light off. Brasov and other stops came and went in the small hours. No-one disturbed me.

At 4am I got up and looked out of the window. In the moonlight we sneaked through the low hills and woods of Transylvania.

At 6am I woke to a dry mouth and sore throat. My underwear had about 25,000kms on the clock and I ponged. I was happy.

For the next few hours I watched the rural Romanian countryside wake up. The sun rose about a dozen times as it ducked and dived amongst the hill tops. Fields of sunflowers raised their heads, mist cleared, school-kids wandered down dusty roads, men and women went about their chores.

Insanely long, thin strips of crops flicked by. From the air they had looked like the teeth of thousands of combs hachuring the landscape. On the ground they might measure five metres by several hundred.

Maize, fallow, sunflowers, grass or freshly turned earth, each showed signs of the oppressive heat. In neighbouring Moldova they were waiting for the worst drought in 60 years to break.

Romania had scores of heat-related deaths, Hungary hundreds. Even at 7am and 100km/h the air was warm and sweet.

I gave up bear-in-the-woods spotting – Romania has half of Europe’s bear population – as we came down onto the plain again. All too soon we left behind the bucolic charm of a lost century, the haystacks built around a central stick and capped with a little waterproof hat, like great thimbles, the cattle byres, horses and carts, dusty roads and the vegetable gardens. This was a place even Caucescu had limited success in penetrating. As a goodbye, a gaggle of twenty or more geese walked unhurriedly along the hard earth of a village road and the train said goodbye.

Now we approached the border at Arad and Romania tried harder to be modern. I didn’t like it. We passed two cooling towers waiting for a power station to be built. They had been waiting a while, judging by the state of them. I slept again.

Somewhere along the way I gained a room-mate. As the train was being reshuffled a guitar-toting, hair-over-his-eyes youth got in: he’d been in the wrong carriage and narrowly avoided an unwanted tour of Romanian parts unknown. Alex, from Guernsey, told me he had come directly from 6 weeks in Moldova as a volunteer.

“Was it nice?”

“Beautiful!”

Impeccably polite, he told me to let him know if he disturbed me, as he put some earphones in to listen to music while I got out. On the platform an anxious German lady, whose idea of a holiday clearly included not shaving her armpits, fretted that the train wasn’t going to end up in Budapest.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” she asked a guard. He shrugged and indicated that he didn’t. She ignored this and jabbered away in German until he shrugged again and walked off.

“A lot of Hungarians speak German,” she said. We were still in Romania.

As the train neared the border crossing we were shooed into first class by a very uptight guard who didn’t appreciate one little bit my pretending first not to understand and then to prefer second class. To be fair, she was a little less uptight before my antics. Later it became clear why we had been moved, as school-kids and Hungarians started to occupy our old quarters. I felt a little bad - she should have left me there to suffer the fate of a thousand children!

For now, passports were checked at a station with ‘Romania’ in huge letters and a bigger flag complete with eagle rampant.

Evening on the Gara de Nord

I was pounced on almost immediately by a stocky guy with ID hung around his neck, although even a cursory examination revealed it to be nth generation photocopies. I asked where the train would go from as even the ticket lady hadn't known.

"Probably 10, but check later"

Where could I find a phone? He pulled his cell phone out offered me its use. I had to get in touch with Jan: I needed to let him know I would be early.

After digging around in my rucksack I found a string of numbers and he punched them in. He passed me the phone and I heard a recorded announcement. In Chinese. We checked the number: it was what I'd told him. He started to chuckle about how many digits there were - 15 - and wondered out loud whether that could be right. He'd already braced me for a big bill by telling me how expensive calls from Romania were, but I figured he'd just played with the phone's cost multiplier and I'd replied that I wouldn't go over 10 Lei. For someone who knew all about international call costs, he seemed unduly excited by punching in so many numbers.

The cost, when he showed me was 14,2 Lei. I made him sweat by asking about internet cafés and said, in passing as we walked to the exit, that 10 Lei should be enough. He pointed and gestured at where I should look for the internet cafe and then looked hopefully expectant. Fifteen Lei came out with some reluctance and as my reward he shook my hand and pointed at a cabin selling "cheap beer, my friend." Then he was gone.


Gara de Nord is a wide length of concrete roofed by an arched Victorian-style iron and glass roof. At right angles the arse end of fourteen tracks abut. On the platforms fixed plastic seats are given scant shelter by small roofs angled in a way last popular in the 1950s.

On the platforms proper, quiet groups awaited their trains. Dogs begged for scraps and a group of gypsy children ran sorties away and back for no apparent reason.

On the main concourse things couldn't have been more different. With exits to the Metro at either end and one in the middle, there was a constant flow of people. Serving their needs are diners, pizza shops, kebab stalls, a supermarket and a 'non-stop pani pat'. In the best position, straddling a corner, was a McDonalds. Tables and chairs gave it a Champs Élysées café look and as the sun went down and shadows swallowed the dirt, the station became almost pleasant.

For the smokers and drinkers, which seemed to include everyone, small kiosks displayed their smokes and snacks. Fridges of beer, arranged like outstretched arms, embraced the thirsty.

I wanted the internet. I was coming a day early to Budapest and I still needed to let Jan know. Now well after hours, the shops that were open plied their trade through small serving hatches. The internet café was not one of them. It was firmly shut.

Back inside, the night had erased the harshness from the day and the people seemed more relaxed.

In the cafés and diners the patrons lent an air of permanence that the masses had none of. Here and there eddies formed in the flow, around sweepers, the policeman, those checking the departure board and around the headscarved, black-dressed lady who sat, bad leg outstretched, her crutch to her side, calling out a conversation and laughing at the responses.

It was 10pm: no sign of 'Budapest' on the board.

I had a 'cheap beer, my friend' : at 2,5 Lei (NZ$1.40) it was cheap. When that was finished I took another, plus a kebab (8,5 Lei) and wandered up an unused platform. Opposite me a group of girls waited for their train, laughing and looking. A gypsy boy, no older than 7, cart-wheeled up to me, said something and cartwheeled on. His older brother did cartwheels on another platform. Inside the kebab, amongst the usual suspects, were cold fries. It was 11pm.

I went to the supermarket and came out with 2 litres of imported beer (5,5 Lei), a packet of chips and a small tub which caught my eye. It wasn't the legend 'Salata de Icre' that did it, it was the word below, in big red letters: CRAP.

11.15pm and I still couldn1t see Budapest on the board. One line, all the other details correct, displayed Arad as its destination. I checked it out - the train changed there, but I was to keep my seat while it changed around me.

There was one last thing to do. Down some stairs tucked behind the pizza shop was the tiled splendour of the station toilets. I peered down and saw a troll on guard. Turkish music blared from a cassette recorder which nestled amongst a mass of papers on a desk. Behind the desk sat the troll, old and fat and the ruler of all she surveyed. I went down and handed her 1 Leu. I paused for my 20 bani change but she dismissed me with a wave.

Inside was no place to loiter. When I came out a girl was paying. She got her change then picked two pieces of paper from the desktop and went in.


The train arrived. I walked up the length trying to find carriage 142. There were more than one carriage with second class seat number 75, so it seemed important: I didn't want to end up in the wrong section and find myself in Venice.

I asked a uniform.

"Three from engine. Three, three."

It was a first class carriage. I asked another uniform. He looked confused and asked his friend. I allowed myself a small panic.

"Yes," he said pointing to the same carriage.

"It's first, prima," I said.

"No, first, second. Half, half."

And indeed it was. I swung myself aboard and walked the corridor. I was the first to arrive.

Seat 75 was in a six-person compartment consisting of two opposing benches. Above each seat was a print showing some an in Hungary. Keeping the travellers apart were raisable armrests. two tiny tables jutted from the open window.

I hung my arms on the window and leaned out, watching the train load. It wasn't busy and the few rucksacks that got into my carriage didn't make it to my compartment.

As the train pulled away, doors wide open, it confirmed what I had hoped: I had the carriage to myself!

Gara de Nord

Gara de Nord, the hub of the Romanian railway system and my way out. I had to stay somewhere that night; it might as well be on a train. And if it was it would have to be somewhere on the way to Hungary. Beyond those criteria I didn't much care.

I asked the ticket clerk about Brasov. It was 7.30pm: I'd just missed it. She pointed at the screen. The next one got in around midnight. I made her give me both the first and second class prices.

"Cluj?" She tapped the buttons and checked the prices and times. Again.

"Timisoara?" Again with the tapping. Each time, I hummed over the timing or haaed over the cost. First class, second class, sleeper?

"Oradea?" She smiled. It had just dawned on her that I was going to list every town I'd ever heard of, and that this could be a long evening. A rather pretty young girl behind asked for a pen, agreed that she spoke English and was roped into the madness.

When it was clear I was headed for Budapest the International train was suggested, not least because it wasn't handled by that clerk, I suspect. We traipsed, the girl and I, through the huge halls, decaying and emptied, headed for the information clerk, were sized up by a sharp-featured youth who could barely keep his eyelids at half-mast, exited that building and entered another, equally past its prime. There the girl left me to buy her ticket for the next day's train to the Danube Delta, back to her family. We had spent an hour together; she seemed eager to get away.

I, ever unsure, launched into my insane questioning again. It boiled down to this: either I paid 174 Lei for a second class seat to Budapest, leaving at midnight, or headed to the border, paying who knows what and tried to get to Budapest from there.

"Hang on," I said after about 15 minutes. I went back to the first clerk who entirely failed to suppress her emotions on seeing me again. She smiled wanly. We both knew what was coming, me because I'd failed to write down anything at all during our previous hour's fun, and she because after her years in the job she knew a berk when she saw one, and for the second time today, she was looking at one.

"Timisoara?" I said, trying to sound like I'd made a decision. Sort of.

She pulled the prices up and I recalled there was no second class available.

"Cluj?" It was 87 Lei.

"Ok," I said with uncertain finality. She tapped some more. I panicked. When I'd mentioned going to Cluj to the airport taxi driver, he'd simply asked "Why?" I would get there at 5.45am and my plans for Cluj were as magnificently malleable as all my other plans.

"No!" She looked up.

"Um, sorry." I fled.


Back at the other hall I tried to buy a ticket to Budapest.

"Just two minutes, my computer's broken. Five minutes."

Windows XP! No calling IT technicians, though, she fixed it herself while I loosely held my two 100 Lei notes. To my left a slim and muscly youth whom I'd noticed hanging around on my first visit slipped up to the next window. He was built for speed and in his cut-off T-shirt obviously wasn't going to Budapest.

I gripped my notes and prepared to throw them into the ticket office. His chance gone and the other ticket lady obviously ticked off by his stupid questions, he sloped off. I walked the other way.

I had a midnight ticket and three and a half hours to kill. I entered the world that is the Gara de Nord proper..

Six down. Bucharest

I have to admit to being a bit apprehensive. My plans for Bucharest could be seen as either magnificently malleable or insanely non-existent depending on your point of view. My own view had hovered around before coming firmly to rest in the latter camp.

As we landed at what was clearly an afterthought of an airport, I barely suppressed the murmured thought "Fuck me, I'm in a field in Romania." Now would have been a really good time to wake up.

My neighbour, a middle-aged man in a check shirt and baggy jeans, simply stood up and walked off the plane. No carry-on luggage, not even a jacket or newspaper. With his walnut skin and lean looks he gave me the impression that he had been working in the field and had simply popped away for a moment. Now he was back.

In first class a priest adjusted his robes. Head to foot in black he placed a black doughnut of a hat on his cowled head and prodded it to perfection. As we walked off I could see past him to a group of black-clad priests who formed his welcome committee, smiling and taking photos. Later they would sweep past in a convoy of black cars, lights blazing despite the sunlight, precede and followed by wailing police cars. At the time I had no idea: when they look closely at thier photos, in the near background they should see some blond guy with a big idiot grin, waving.

I waited forty minutes for my luggage, still twenty fewer than at Heathrow, and repacked everything into my rucksack. Outside, the taxi drivers descended like wolves on the fold. I managed to lose all but one, who insisted on giving me unnervingly good advice. The bus?

"Downstairs to the right, about forty minutes to town. I give you good ride, about one hour. Eighty Lei good price for you, not me. One hundred Lei good price for me."

It was immaterial. I had pounds sterling, New Zealand dollars, Euros but no Lei.

"Where is the ATM?"

He pointed it out.

"You know how much to get out?" I nodded and he wandered away.

I pushed my card in and was relieved to see language options.

"PLEASE ENTER YOUR SECRET PIN NUMBER!" a voice screamed.

I felt a hundred eyes on me. I stabbed at 300 Lei.

"All right?" a voice on my left said. It was the helpful taxi driver. The ATM machine beeped loudly.

"Take your money" he nodded, and I saw three one hundred Lei notes peeking out at me.

It was hot and I was flustered. I also needed change for the bus. Beer time.


The ghastly Bucharest suburbs gave way to beautiful parks and Caucescu's little attempt at urban planning. I jumped from the bus at Victory Square - five Lei well spent - and made for the Metro. In the bowels and the semi-gloom an unbelievably bent old woman held out an unmoving hand. Equally unmoving passers-by did just that.

At the gates a lady took my five Lei note without even asking where I was going and handed back a ticket and a handful of one Leu notes.

I came up from the Kafkaesque Metro to what was apparently Beirut. Dark grey buildings overlooked a maelstrőm of traffic. A spaghetti of black cables sinewed overhead and great killer slabs of cladding had fallen away from walls. From potholed pavements drunks and toughs eagled everyone and down dark alleys dogs skittered here and there.

Five down, one to go. London

With sleep snatching away the hours dawn soon came - we were over Greece. Soon the English Channel was underfoot and the patchwork of Kent gave way to the first truly indisputable landmark: the Millennium Dome. Not so useless after all.

A few circuits later we touched down. Six in the morning on an overcast Heathrow day. After twenty years away I was back. After twenty years of increasingly persuasive and frequent dreams, here I was, feeling as if I were dreaming.

But it was a poor dream. Heathrow, as the world's busiest commercial airport was a disgrace. If it was finished it was broken, or closed or just awful. Not dirty per se but the sort of squalor that no number of strange-tongued low-paid immigrants could brush up. The walk from Terminal 3 to 2 had me half expecting to be mugged.

When I got to Terminal 2 I was mugged - ten quid for a shower (if I walked to Terminal 1), five quid for left luggage, one quid for ten minutes on the internet! I told the information lady I'd rather smell thanks, held onto my luggage and spent four quid on the net.

Tarom, the Romanian airline, were checking people in three hours before the flight, so I went into the squalid hole that was Terminal 2 check in and got rid of the bigger of my bags. Once through security I was mugged again, or would have been if I wasn't so tight. Dixons, the electronics retailing chain, offered "Duty Free" prices that were just 10% below what even they said were the high street prices. With VAT at 17.5% it was the archetypal 'Duty Free' rip-off.

At 10.30 in the morning I declined a snifter of whisky in the Whiskies Galore shop but chatted with the Kenyan Indian lady in charge. She showed me a NZ whisky - Milford - I'd never seen in NZ. Mind you I hadn't seen 95% of the other whiskies either.

"I'm tired," I said in Swahili before bidding her "Asante sana" and heading through the ghetto to the gate.

Four down, two to go. Dubai

The new seat allocations meant I now had someone better for a neighbour - no-one - although I couldn't sit closer to the repaired engine if I wanted and the smell of petrol fumes as we taxied was a little disconcerting.

For the third time the prayers came up and for the third time I wondered how appropriate was the line "and to our God surely we must return."

In the blackness we flew to Vietnam, then turned westwards across Asia to Dubai.

I adjusted my watch to claim back another 4 hours: it was to be a 32 hour day. I slid across to my non-existent neighbours working entertainment suite and watched some TV and Shrek 3. I was no longer on the list for Halal food apparently, my Moslemness having been revoked. It suited me fine, I was tiring of it already. I was tired in other ways too, so I contorted across the two seats, lay on my two pillows and snatched some sleep, despite my rediscovered skill of becoming fully alert whenever a food trolley hoved into view.

Dubai at midnight was 38 degrees centigrade and before we even landed I was in love with it. From the night air a sea of soft gold and sharp diamonds defined the city. Inside the transit lounge the impression stayed. So this was where money went to die! And lights. Constellations made up the runways. Everything that moved flashed yellow at the night. In an isolated part of the airport dozens of vehicles devoured the passengers of an Emirates plane, all its orifices open and attracting attention.

We parked at the end of the vast tube that was the arrivals hall. Inside time planners advised it was an hour's journey to the far end and back. My kids were right: it was huge.

Even at midnight the place was a cross between Terminal Man, Bladerunner and the Star Wars cafe scene: cosmopolitan, exotic and alive with new experiences.

I was glad, judging from the state of undress of several of my co-travellers ahead, that I broke my 100% record of looking suspicious, and the system spat me out into the city that was the transit hall proper.

For an hour I barely scratched the surface of it all. Gold was big - too popular to get through the two-deep queues - and so were cigars: dedicated shops, dedicated rooms within the shops and a dedicated humidor housing what must be the world's biggest stogie. As thick as my thigh and all of five feet long it was very clever. And totally unsmokeable.

Past the motorcycles and cars to the electronics store where again, I was made to feel like I was just not keeping up with technology and trends. All I wanted was a replacement for my cassette recorder which had decided to die. Recording ambient sounds, rather than dictation, was something nobody did anymore.

Just as casinos never have clocks, so the Dubai transit shopping area seems devoid of information screens. When I did find one, after leaving the shopping concourse, it was in Arabic. Flashing red was probably bad in any language, so I guessed which sequence of squiggles meant 'gate' and applying my knowledge of Arabic numbers, gleaned from three years of Asian and African studies, I headed for gate three. Almost immediately I heard an announcement of the final call for my flight, boarding at gate eight. My education was officially useless, again..