Japan to Australia via Eastern Europe Part 19 - Day 17 - Welcome to Sarajevo...

We both had a really sh££y night sleep. It was incredibly hot in the guesthouse as the hired help (from last night) with his poker mates had cranked up heater more than the Nelly "Hot in Herre" video - which made it completely unbearable. I think I had woken up at around 4ish and didn't go back to bed.

We "got up" from bed at 6:30am, then showered and dressed and I headed at the ungodly time of 6:45am to a nearby Spar supermarket (yes - that obscure ex-supermarket from Fyshwick seems to be everywhere in Eastern Europe) to try and find some supplies - preferrably bananas or something vaguely healthy - alas Spar didn't stock bananas... So I picked up some chocolate and chips instead...

Upon return to the Guesthouse - I'm sure I spotted about 3 people including the hired help at the upstairs-bit of the guesthouse making out... Connections was living up to its name.

We helped ourselves to breakfast (we didn't want to interrupt the luv from upstairs) and headed with our packed bags to the nearby subway (a hellish 15 min walk with our bags).

We arrived back at the same station we had been dropped off from the sleeper train and made our way to (what Ant thought was our platform) - lucky platform 13. With the remaining 184F I had managed to put together between Ant and myself - I managed to spend 180 of it on some fresh bananas... I'm such a sh££ hot shopper dammit... After I buy the bananas - Ant realises that the Platform 13 isn't so lucky and that we should head to platform 7 if we want to reach Sarajevo sometime today...!

That stewpid fat lady who had sold us the train tickets seemed to have reared her ugly fat butt again - the seats she had reserved for us did not exist... After about 5 minutes of stressing out - I dig my feet in and just take some random seats in what we thought would be the right carriage to Sarajevo. Ant had bumped into some American tourists who were also going to Sarajevo and were having the same problem we were having - but instead of finding some seats on the second class carriage - they all plonked down in the first class carriage (which was surprisingly worse and grungier than the second class carriage - it had also reaked of 40 years of communist cigar smoking as well).

There were some strange Hungarian girls sitting in their own compartment who were strange beyond belief. Despite it being 8am in the morning - they were all in hysterics. They were all screaming their heads off - which was clearly audible throughout the carriage... and it was non-stop... I suspect drugs or women problems or something...

Our train finally left the Budapest station - and low and behold - the train conductor didn't even flinch when we were sitting in the wrong seat...

When we booked the tickets to Sarajevo - we both had found it a bit hard to comprehend why a 500km train trip would take 12 hours... But as the train got "going" at 50km/hr - it was starting to become apparent why this trip would take 12 hours.

The train had a big stop at a city called Pecs (yes I've been to Pecs City...!) - although it wasn't as sexy and exciting as it sounds. The front two carriages of the train were Bosinan - and were headed to Sarajevo - whilst the rest of the train was only headed to Pecs and it disconnected at Pecs (including the food cart bit)... This all happened around lunch time - and we hadn't had lunch (just a few nibbles on our supplies of a diet coke each, a bottle of water, 2 bananas each, a small choc bar and a bag of chips to share). Little did we know that for the rest of our trip to Sarajevo - there wasn't going to be any food service... nor the opportunity to buy food at any of the stations... What was this stewpid train - the Hungarian Nazi Train Service to Poland? Anyhow - once this realisation sunk in - we started to ration our food like there was no tomorrow. Ant made a plan of "Right Nick - we will have a half of a banana at 4pm and the packet of crisps (sorry I'm using the term "crisps" but I'm writing this from the UK£!) at 5pm" and so forth...

Meanwhile - we think that the American tourists bound for Sarajevo got off at Pecs city instead (heh heh heh!)... as there was no sign of them in the two carriage train bound for Sarajevo after Pecs.

If I haven't talked about the train situation in europe before - well its a bit bizzare. Because most trains operate in different countries - if the train starts in (lets say) the Czech Republic and ends up in Poland (sounds familiar) - there will be a Czech team running the train up until the border - when a Polish crew will take over... most likely with a different engine. Because our trip from Budapest to Sarajevo cut through the border of Croatia a couple of times - our crew (and engine) would change everytime we crossed a border. It sort of makes everything somewhat queer (in the non gay sense) because our train to Sarajevo is full of different sorts of hungarian and BIH (or Bosnina & Hergsovina for short) carriages and engines and stuff...

It was sort of quite hillarious through our first border crossing into Croatia - Ant got a text from the Croatian tourist board saying "Welcome to Croatia" before we passed through the border immigration policia. We could have shown Ant's phone to the guards saying "look! We are already in Croatia no thanks to the Croatian Tourist Board! You can't deny us entry dammit!". Plus I swore that those laughing hungarian girls were going to get deported at the border crossing - they were still laughing their brains out in earshot of the policia...

Once we hit the border into Croatia - the train seemed like it couldn't go past 40kms/hr - plus the train seemed to be scheduled to stop at every gawdamn tree in the country. Every stop would last for about 15 mins (where I don't think anyone would get on or off the two carriage train) and it was terribly painful. But I guess a bonus of Croatia was that you could see old huts and stuff with bullet holes in them from the recent war... coool! War zone baby...

The border crossing into BIH was a little on the strange side - I've never had an immigration policia poke my bag a couple of times before... (That tried and tested method for detecting drugs - poking a backpack). Plus there was the added bonus that the guy took our passports away (out of sight) for about 10 mins.

To be continued or something...