Diary of a disorganised traveller part 4: Istanbul, Budapest and a brief stay in Paris

I can’t quite believe that this is the final chapter of my travels around Europe this summer. It really seems like only yesterday that I was a disorganised teen let loose on the continent with no practical shoes and a rucksack the size of a small child. And five weeks down the line, little has changed.

Our long and delayed journey to Istanbul was made slightly more amusing by the company of two German theology students who were in our cabin. Like so many Europeans, they had great English (although had no idea what bestiality was, so I feel like I taught them a valuable lesson there). They boasted to us about the luxury hostel they were travelling to, but rather pleased with ourselves for securing accommodation for €4 per night, their talk of swimming pools did not impress us. How quickly things changed.

Of course at that price we weren’t expecting anything above average, but what we were given was beyond our wildest nightmares. The place was crawling with cockroaches, the ‘beds’ were paper thin mattresses on top of tables and every ‘bathroom’ ceiling leaked. It was utterly vile. To make things worse, the place was run by a guy who was permanently stoned and didn’t actually care about the hostel he was pretending to run (I overheard him one morning saying that he ‘couldn’t wait to shut this fucking place down’), and an incredibly strange American man who claimed to be a ‘God like human.’ I shit you not.

Now I appreciate that doing Philosophy as half of my degree incites an inquisitive spirit in those who may not get the chance to wax lyrical about the meaning of life as often as they wish (for the record, we study nothing of the sort), but what happened on the first night was far from normal. It started with a half naked Italian guy asking me to explain space-time physics and the argument for the plausibility of time travel to him. This was all fine(ish) until he left and the old American guy sidled up to us for what transpired to be a three hour long non debate. It was too long and ridiculous to summarise for you now, but he believed that he had evolved to a superior human state and was travelling to Egypt the next week to ‘mentally reconstruct himself.’

Anyway, I had to spend the next few days hiding from him and his really weird teeth as he had taken a bit of a shine to me and I was slightly scared for my life. Nothing scared me as much as when we travelled to the Blue Mosque, however, the jewel in Istanbul’s religious crown. Tash and I had spent the last five weeks visiting places of worship around the globe, but the mosque was truly spectacular from the exterior, and we couldn’t wait to go inside. As it was Ramadan, we were told to come back a little later after prayers had ended, so we decided to sit in the nearby park until we were allowed to go in.

We were enjoying the sun when we realised that two men were circling us, and edging closer to where we were sitting. Initially amused by their lack of subtlety, we decided to get up and move away after they got a little too close for comfort. In short, they spent the next two hours following us round Istanbul in spite of the fact we hid out at the mosque for 45 minutes and also tagged along with a family visiting the city hoping that there would be strength in numbers. One of the guys in the family we took refuge with couldn’t quite believe that two girls had travelled to Istanbul alone, essentially telling us that this kind of behaviour was to be expected. I’m not going to start a rant here about the sexual oppression in Turkey but going to such a masculine dominated country was both incredibly eye opening and upsetting. Going from the freedom and independence we enjoy having been brought up in London to constantly worrying if our bare calves would attract the wrong kind of attention in Istanbul was very difficult to say the least.

We ended up getting a cab away from the mosque to try and get rid of our stalkers, and were feeling a bit too scared to go out alone for drinks that night as we’d planned. Not wanting to have our fun ruined completely, we decided to ask a couple of Aussie guys who had just moved into our room if they wouldn’t mind walking us up to a bar that evening, but things, as usual, went a little haywire.

It ended up being like a kind of awkward double date, made a thousand times worse by the street sellers who were trying to coerce the lads into buying roses for us every five seconds. We had intended to go our separate ways when we reached the strip, but the Aussies hadn’t got the memo, and instead frogmarched us from bar to bar bemoaning the hefty drink prices.

In the end, we took the sophisticated option and sat on a street corner drinking alcohol purchased from an off licence (class levels clearly at an all-time high) when one of the guys dropped the bomb that it was his birthday. Or the ‘worst birthday ever’ to quote him directly. I can only hope that he was just a little on the tactless side when he spent the next part of the evening ranting about how they normally ‘meet such great people in their hostels but this one sucks.’ So a truly wonderful end to a wonderful day.

I could literally fill a book with all of the bizarre things that happened to us in Turkey but a few that spring to mind include a family coming up to us in a park and taking posed holiday snaps with us without our consent, restauranteurs trying to con us and blaming it on the starvation they were feeling because of Ramadan (we had seen them play the same trick on the table next to us) and market sellers asking us if we were Japanese/needed walking sticks. It was a novel experience.

We were pretty thrilled to be leaving our grotty hovel for Budapest, but things went a little off the rails when the first leg of our 32 hour train journey was delayed by 10 hours. Wanting to get to our destination as quickly as possible, we decided to get an extortionate coach to the Hungarian capital to save time. However, when we arrived there at 4am, we had no money and no clue where we were going. We spent the next portion of the morning traipsing from hostel to hostel, bags in tow, desperately trying to find a bed for the night. In the end – and it pains me to say this – we resorted to cracking out our sleeping bags in the doorway of the hostel we had booked for the next couple of nights. We struck lucky when guests opened the door at around 6am and spent the next few hours in our new luxurious location of the icy cold hall through the doorway we had been sitting in, much to the dismay of the proprietor who arrived hours later. So much for a 24 hour reception.

Budapest was a really lovely city but disaster struck on what should have been our penultimate day. We had bought festival tickets and were really excited to be doing something apart from sightseeing/eating/hiding from Hungarian pickpockets (SO many!), but at the last minute were told that the train we needed to catch in order to make our Eurostar from Paris to London two days later was fully booked. With the disdain for our ‘lack of organisation’ from our respective mothers hanging over our heads (this genuinely wasn’t our fault), we were literally half way to the festival when we decided to sell our tickets, rush back to our hostel and try and get as close to Paris as soon as possible.

This went reasonably smoothly and I played a bit of a blinder in skipping a huge queue at Budapest’s train station after befriending some Irish guys at an opportune moment, and before we knew it, we were Paris bound. We arrived there late at night and had the usual struggle to find our hostel in the dark, made worse by the fact that I was now convinced that all Europeans were about to rob/kill me. And after one short night, it was back to the station and ready to come back to blighty.
The past month has been my first real experience of traversing a continent and it has honestly been a wonderful experience in the vast majority of ways. Of course it wouldn’t have been the same without Tash, who has been an amazing travel companion, my parents, for kindly contributing towards my trip, and those who have taken the time to read about my European misadventures. It saddens me to say goodbye, but I will end (somewhat cheesily) with a quote that I was reminded of when staying in Istanbul. St Augustine said: ‘the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page,’ and I could not agree more.

Diary of a disorganised traveller part 3 – Sarajevo, Novi Sad and Sofia

As I mentioned in the last post, our travels to Bosnia were never going to be simple due to the five different modes of transport we were using to reach our destination. Things weren’t going too terribly until we arrived in Ploce, a tiny town in the southern corner of Croatia. As we sat in the depressingly  grey cafe entertaining ourselves with talk of our dream meals (a bacon sandwich topped the list), we were approached by the waiter, or palpitating crack addict depending on one’s interpretation. He recited the one meal menu which just happened to be the answer to our prayers – a bacon sandwich. As we waited excitedly for our first piece of meat in what felt like an age, the reality of our order set in as he plonked two ham, cheese and pickle mayonnaise rolls on our table. The sense of disappointment was quite literally devastating. A consumer of both pickles and mayonnaise, I have no idea how the combination of the two can taste so utterly foul. We fell victim to the same criminal condiment in Slovenia and vowed never to eat it again, but sadly, we were caught off guard by the sweet piggy promises of a bacon sarnie.

Things definitely took a turn for the worse when we embarked the train, a rusty old two compartment wagon swarming with mosquitoes. As it hurtled through pitch black tunnels with no lights whatsoever, the no smoking sign clearly made no odds to the passengers (many of whom were ‘train officials’) whose charred embers simultaneously lit the frightening darkness of the cabins and choked us half to death with passive smoke fumes. I usually believe the smoking ban in England to be slightly over the top and a dampener on the atmosphere of pubs and such, but this particular journey changed my mind.

We arrived many delayed hours later on the pitch dark streets of Sarajevo, guilelessly wandering around in an attempt to locate our free car journey to the hostel. We eventually found the very lovely elderly man in question, who had an equally elderly ride to match. He did his level best to fit us and our huge rucksacks in his tiny car, and let me tell you, driving up those steep cobbled hills was a real treat.

The stay in Bosnia was a lot nicer than expected, and Sarajevo definitely has a lot of charm (even if it does try to emulate Turkey just a little bit too much). After a few days in the tiny capital, though, we were ready to move on to our next destination, the town of Novi Sad in Serbia. Best known for hosting EXIT festival each year, we were excited to be checking out a new city that wasn’t a capital (for once!). We got slightly worried when we reached what surpassed Ploce as the vilest European train station, Stara Pazova, waiting for our connecting train to the city. Everyone there was half naked (it was early evening and I was wearing a cardigan) and stank of urine, and as they shouted at us in Serbian from across the tracks, we quietly prayed that the train would come and save us from our torturous surrounds.

On a lighter note, we struck pretty lucky with our new accommodation – even if it was a sweaty 40 minute walk from the station and up three gruelling flights of stairs – as we had a nice apartment pretty much to ourselves for our three day stay. Well, left to ourselves may be putting it a bit strongly, as our lunchtime cooking sessions were peppered by many comical interjections from a friend of the proprietor. Several years of work as an insurance clerk had ‘given him a heart attack’, so he had turned his hand to coming round to his friend’s house to watch TV all day and breeding ‘champion’ German Shepherds with the rest of his time. The fact that one of them had taken a hefty chunk out of his arm just a few days earlier had not deterred him, rather spurring him on so much that he spent the next 15 minutes showing us photos of his prized pooches on Facebook. When I told him I wanted to be a journalist, he quickly dismissed the idea as it would apparently give me a heart attack, and insisted that I should set my sights on creating a guard dog rental company like the one he was planning to start. I politely declined.

With a final goodbye to our canine controller, we headed to Bulgaria. Sadly, a combination of incompetent conductors and delayed trains meant that we missed our connection to Sofia – a 10 hour sleeper that only travelled twice daily. Faced with the prospect of a 12 hour wait and then a 10 hour journey, we dashed (as fast as one can dash with a 19kg rucksack and unwieldy handbag) to the bus station, where we found that a coach was heading for our destination just a few hours later. For £50. Not wanting to waste any more time on our trip, we decided to forget the budget and complete the bus ride (much as it pained both us and our bank accounts). Enjoyable moments included being hauled off the coach at 4am and being motioned to change vehicles in several different languages, and using the filthy squat toilet in our only stop off that we had to pay actual money for.

Mercifully, the sun was (sort of) shining as we made our way to our next abode, but my mood definitely soured after a 45 minute wait in a bank that had promised to change our foreign currency and then refused at the last minute. Bulgaria was not as fantastic as we had hoped, and our slight preoccupation with not getting pickpocketed was definitely a distraction. For once we had really nice roommates, although one did snore so loudly on the first night that none of us could sleep (the same guy who tried to convince me that I had contracted dengue fever after an attack of the bed bugs).

A couple of days later, we waved a not so tearful goodbye to Sofia and the dozens of she-male prostitutes that lined the streets and headed for perhaps the most exciting destination on our travels – Istanbul.

All I will say for now is that my ‘bed’ is a mattress on top of a table. Until next time…

Diary of a disorganised traveller part 2: more Venice, Ljubljana and Hvar island

I last left you in Venice, where we spent our day strolling along the idyllic streets and enjoying a free gondola ride (although true to form, it took much panic and frantic phone calls to England to actually locate where this was taking place). It was a lovely end to our stay in Italy, which truly is the most beautiful country I’ve ever visited. Suffice to say, then, Slovenia had a lot to live up to.

We arrived in Ljubljana in the early hours of the next morning and navigated our way through the dark streets. When we arrived at our hostel, which was a former school, we eagerly asked what time our free buffet breakfast began. Needless to say, we were hugely excited  at the prospect of being given food that was 1) free and 2) not bread or cheese, our staple diet throughout the trip. Unfortunately, however, our enthusiasm was short lived as we discovered that the meal was not free at all. Well it was, in exchange for money. We did briefly contemplate this indulgence  but after having a peek at the sliced gherkin and sausage casserole on the breakfast menu we decided against it. So more bread and cheese it was.

In fairness to Slovenia, we were both shattered from a week of Olympic level sightseeing and thus spent our first day there napping in our comparatively luxurious private dorm room. On our second day, we resolved to see more of the city, which was marred a little by the rainfall and our continued exhaustion. The place was very pretty in an Eastern European kind of way – but coming from the kitsch quirks of Berlin and the sublime beauty of Italy, some of its charm was definitely lost on us. Apart from a few pastel coloured buildings, the place just seemed a bit grey, and all of the people were either miserable, in possession of a bad haircut, or both. Honestly, I never knew so many variations on a mullet could exist. Forget business at the front and party at the back, there were crimped bits having a rave on one side and dyed blobs making an appearance on the other. It was truly a sight to behold.

We then began the next part of our journey, travelling to an island in Croatia that my equally disorganised sister described as ‘paradise’ on her return from the place four years ago. In fact it was so magical, she couldn’t actually remember its name. We had been promised (by her) that we would step off the ferry and be inundated with adorable Croatia landladies offering us their stunning beach apartments at bargain prices, and were thrilled at the thought of some quality sun and sea time. Surprisingly, or rather unsurprisingly, this did not quite work out.

We had travelled overnight and taken two trains and a ferry from Slovenia in order to reach our destination, and when we stepped off the boat, there were only two remaining landladies waiting at the docks. The first one we approached spoke no English but seemed to be offering a private room and bathroom in her house with use of the communal kitchen for a reasonable(ish) price. After consulting the only other seller there, we opted for the first place. And what a grave mistake that turned out to be.

We were bundled into the car by Hada, (or Hades as is much more fitting) who had decided not to wear underwear for the occasion, and her husband who did not have a single tooth in his mouth. Not one. We arrived at the house to find it was a pretty grotty room with a double bed, which in this case translates as a slab of wood with a paper thin mattress over it. I have never before feared spinal injuries after waking up in the morning, but hey, this trip is all about new experiences.

I do not wish to overexaggerate the cruelty of her nature. But she was the epitome of all evil. She barked at us in Croatian whenever we crossed her path, tried to add extra charges to our fee at every opportunity and generally made life there rather miserable. Between our bra-free fuhrer and the tropical storm we got caught in on the island in which tree branches and roof slates were smashing all around us, things got pretty scary.

Particular highlights of her abuse include her agreeing to drive us to the ferry port only to refuse the next day unless we paid her gummy hubby a hefty sum for the five minute trip, shushing us in the ‘communal’ kitchen as we searched for the utensils she failed to show us and scooping a cockroach off the wall, stamping on it and tossing it down the toilet with reckless abandon. The ominous black smudge left afterwards was ours free of charge.

It also transpired that her and her husband not only wore the same clothes every single day (in his case a rather fetching luminous orange t-shirt, and in hers, no bra. Ever) but also slept in the kitchen, where she spent all day every day staring at the wall. Oh, except for her morningly excursion to the local bakery to shout at anyone who would listen before returning to the house for another scintillating day of wall-watching. I kid you not.

Our departure was the kind of emotional goodbye you would expect in a relationship as close as ours. She shouted ‘OKAY’ in our faces as we made our getaway -truly a precious moment. In fairness, it was the only English word she knew (although she seemed to only have about five words in her Croatian repertoire that she shrieked at us on an incessant torturous loop), so I suppose in some sense, she was making an effort.

So our relaxing beach break didn’t quite go to plan, and as we travel to Bosnia on a bus, ferry, coach, train and car, I look forward to what the next few days has in store. Until next time…

Diary of a disorganised traveller: Berlin, Rome and a little bit of Venice

So as some of you may know, this summer I decided to take the plunge and spend a month travelling around Europe. I think it’s fair to say that my friend Tash and I had planned just about as little as humanly possible for the trip, and the night before we left was spent making long journeys back to Islington to retrieve forgotten tickets and frantically phoning Eurostar to book trains home after failing to actually read the terms and conditions of our InterRail Pass. Needless to say, it had not been the most promising of starts.

Things still felt rather muddled as we got into our taxi at 3:45am on the first day of our trip. Our weary heads and bleary eyes were certainly not helped by the driver, who deemed it essential to regale us with tales of his run-ins with drug dealers. All the way down the M1. After our delayed flight to Berlin, (InterRail Passes are not valid in your home country) we spent an hour misreading the map to our hostel, which was particularly soul destroying and sweat inducing due to the heat and our 19kg rucksacks.

We finally made it to our hostel Pangea People in Alexanderplatz and took a well deserved rest observing the beds of our new roommates. This was a fun game until we spotted the blood stained pillow on the bunk above mine, and that there was only one free bed in the room.

The staff were very kind in moving us to a smaller, six bed dorm, which we were to share with three lovely Australian girls. Things were going swimmingly and we couldn’t really believe our luck until our final roommate arrived. Oh, how quickly things soured. In exchanging pleasantries with the newbie, he decided to casually drop in the fact that he had just been deported from Israel for ‘unknown reasons’. And that he was an ex mental hospital patient. Amidst his insistence that marijuana was better than any of the institutionalised medication he had received, I began inconspicuously hiding my most valued possessions out of fear that he would steal them for drug money.

It’s definitely no exaggeration to say that we were worried he would go apeshit on a comedown and murder us in our sleep, but thankfully, we were spared this fate, and moved onto Rome with hopes of less terrifying hostellers.

After our 20 hour train ride spent in a packed cabin we eventually made it to the Italian capital. The sun was blazing as we made our way to the hostel, but float our boat it did not. The guys ‘running’ the place (and I use that term incredibly loosely) were leery and unsettlingly short, and told us that our room was not yet available in spite of the fact we had arrived after their check in time. We decided to take a shower in their filthy, ancient bathrooms before hitting the mean streets of the Vatican City, and hoped that things would look less revolting upon our return.

We had just joined the queue for the Vatican when we were mercilessly cajoled into taking a guided tour of the place at the ‘student rate’ of €40. In a state of mental depletion due to our long travels, we unwittingly obliged. What followed was potentially the worst tour of all time.

Our guide, who we have subsequently named Leandro, was the height of a small child and thus got relentlessly lost amongst the throng of Vatican dwellers on a packed Friday afternoon. His diminutive stature combined with his quiet voice, bad English and general lack of a clue about what he was saying made for quite the charming afternoon as I’m sure you can imagine.

We returned to the hostel at 5pm, a full six hours after check in, to be told that our rooms were still not ready. We sat in the dirty communal area loudly voicing our dissatisfaction until the pleb at the reception desk announced that ‘Sara’ (me) and ‘Mr Rickett’ (Tash) could finally enter the hovels they sold us as bedrooms for£55 a night. Everything in the room was grimy, broken or both, and apart from one wonderfully camp Mexican roommate who revelled in extolling the virtues of United Colors of Benetton, the rest of the people we were sharing with pranced about naked in the early hours/cried in the middle of the night/slept in their clothes. It was an interesting few days.

So we are now in the picture perfect city of Venice, gearing up for a gondola ride and a chance to experience a little more of Italy. Our roommates here have been less diabolical, although one snored all night and another is a  doppelganger of Kevin G from Mean Girls. But hey, it beats naked crying Brazilian women/fear of Japanese drug lords.

Tonight we will be travelling to Slovenia to sample more of the continent’s delights, so I will say ciao until next time!