Well, nine days minus three hours. A more accurate, though rather too unwieldy title for this post would be 'Three hours in Montenegro, eight days and 21 hours in Croatia'.
I had no intention of visiting Montenegro. It looks like a great little country, and I could easily have come up with a week's worth of things to do there if I'd been able to squeeze in a visit. But even though I'm moving around pretty quickly, and covering plenty of territory, you can't go to every country and you certainly can't go everywhere *within* each country that makes the cut. I'm already visiting more European countries than I'm missing: Montenegro, unfortunately, wasn't going to be one of them.
Jadrolinija Lines had other ideas. I'd booked a ferry they run from Bari, in Italy and Dubrovnik in Croatia. It was pricey, but barring a flight - and flights are definitely barred - it was the only practical option to get to Dubrovnik, which is just about the worst connected major tourist city in continental Europe. So from Rome I returned to Bari, chewing up a day that was spent first on a train, then sheltering from a freak storm on the floor of a chip shop, and then making a half-hearted, unsuccessful effort to find a replacement for my pants after their sudden conversion to Catholicism, before finally boarding my boat to Dubrovnik.
Except it wasn't going to Dubrovnik. A couple of weeks earlier I'd gotten an email from Jadrolinija, regrettably informing me that the service I'd booked to Dubrovnik now goes to Bar, in Montenegro. Service changes are annoying enough, but I was being shuffled over to the next country along. I could cancel the service and get a refund, but Jadro weren't about to compensate me for the train I'd booked to Bari or the hostel in Dubrovnik. There was no option but to allow myself to be shanghaied to entirely the wrong country.
To rub salt into the wound, if I'd had a car I would have apparently gotten the car passage for free, but because I was a foot passenger the only compensation I got was a free bus to Dubrovnik. That's not a 'free bus', I pointed out in an email. That's just a free - but deliberate - delay in your service. They chose not to respond to this feedback.
I was mostly pissed off about the sudden change of plans because I had set myself a rule for the trip: I didn't want to pass through a country's territory without doing something in that country. Now that I was going to Montenegro, I wanted to actually do something in Montenegro, but I already had (expensive) accommodation booked in Dubrovnik, and moving it back would have cost a lot. So I extended my stay in Dubrovnik by a night (this was cheaper), and planned a day trip from there to the Bay of Kotor, which is in Montenegro and only about 60km from Dubrovnik.
I'm lucky I ever made it to Dubrovnik, because I almost didn't get as far as Montenegro. I arrived at the ferry terminal a couple of hours early and waited around for somebody from Jadro to arrive. Nobody did. The terminal started filling with passengers and I noticed that a Canadian couple - or possibly father and daughter, it could have been either so I was very careful - already had their boarding pass. Where, might I ask, did they get those? "At the check-in office", came the reply. The check-in office, it turned out, was at the other end of the harbour. Two kilometres away. There was a shuttle bus running every 20 minutes or so to get people between the office and their terminal.
That makes sense. Why would you want to have your check-in where the boat is parked and where people are arriving? And why would you want to, I don't know, have a staff member there to explain the situation to people who don't know that the check-in counter is (literally) somewhere over the horizon? Instead we relied on word of mouth: I got back from the office and had to break the news to a Utah couple, who made their own, even more frantic, dash to get there on time.
The boat was rather more spartan than the one from Greece, but I had the cabin to myself and the breakfast even passed the scrambled eggs test. And when we arrived in Bar I got to see the Montenegrin Navy:
I'm pretty sure that's the entire Navy. All of it.
As far as unwanted bus rides go, this one was pretty spectacular, with Great Ocean Road-level views. At one point the bus took a shortcut across the Bay of Kotor by boarding a ferry, and I recognised parts of the highway from whatever James Bond movie it was that was set in Montenegro (I think it was Casino Royale?). I spent most of the time talking to the same Utah couple who had narrowly made it to check-in the previous night, and the time went quickly until we reached the Croatian border, where we spent no less than an hour and a half waiting to have our passports stamped.
My enthusiasm for coming back this way for Kotor waned from the moment we hit that border crossing, and after doing some research and finding that the only plausible way to do it was to join a tour for around €40, leaving at 7:30 in the morning, I ditched the idea. I'm not satisfied with my experience of Montenegro, but I saw the Navy, had a scenic bus ride, a great conversation and rode a bus ferry. It's not much, but it's *a* Montenegrin experience. Or so I shall tell myself.
Because of the border travails, the bus didn't get to Dubrovnik until after 2PM, a full six hours after Jadro had initially pledged to get me there until they decided Montenegro sounded nicer instead. It's lucky that Dubrovnik is a small place - if pressed for time you could see and do all the important stuff in a day - because out of six days here I only had two that weren't significantly interrupted for one reason or another. Apart from the bus, the Swans were playing on day two (another win, I am currently undefeated in former Communist countries, but still without a win in the Western bloc). That night I stayed awake until 6AM to wallow in schadenfreude at Theresa May's expense, and so I barely had the energy to go outside on day three. I lost day six, as well, for reasons I'll get to shortly.
It worked out fine, though. As I mentioned, Dubrovnik's a small place, and I fell into a pattern of lazing about the hostel until the mid-afternoon before walking into town. My hostel was a good 20 minutes walk from the Old Town, but made up for it by being across the road from the marina:
Yes. This will do nicely.
It was late afternoon, inching towards evening, and there's no better time of the day to walk around Dubrovnik's City Walls. It's outrageously expensive - about $30 - but you can circumnavigate the entire town, and there's nothing to stop you going around more than once. And the scenery made up for the price:
There's a rock below the walls, but still a good 15m or so above the water, where crazy people like to jump. This fellow wasn't crazy, but all his friends had jumped and peer pressure was biting. He crossed himself, crept up to the edge, looked down and lingered for a minute or so. He stepped back, but looked at his friends and returned to the edge. Me and some other watchers on the walls decided to help by counting him down from ten, but I don't think he appreciated our gesture of support: he turned, waved at us to cut it out and tiptoed to the edge again to look down. He crossed himself again, but still didn't jump. I'd just about given up on him when he abruptly threw caution to the wind:
He got a well-deserved standing ovation from the walls.
Dubrovnik's walls are, of course, also King's Landing's walls. Game of Thrones is essential to the city's tourism strategy: official merchandise is available in all the souvenir shops, and there are heaps of tours that take you to all the filming locations. With only two seasons left to go they're going to have to come up with a new schtick soon, but apparently the next Star Wars movie was filmed here and there's already storm troopers in all the shops, so that should tide them over for another couple of years.
I didn't book a tour. I enjoyed recognising the occasional filming location - the steps where Cersei began her walk of shame, the little beach where Myrcella was packed off to Dorne, the ramparts where Tyrion and Varys liked to meet up to exchange witticisms - but I figured it was more fun to happen across them like that than to be dragged around and having them pointed out to me. I did eavesdrop on one tour as I was walking past: the guide was pointing to a patch of concrete and droning about how "this is where everybody's favourite character, Joffrey, was attacked by a mob", while holding a photo album open to a picture of little King Lannister². The hapless people who had paid €30 for this tour were standing about awkwardly, feigning interest. I think I made the right call.
There was one tour advertised that I wish I'd made time for, though. I'd very much like to tour a pie:
(Yes, I know, it's in Spanish. But it made me laugh.)
The pie tour might have caught my eye, but it was another part of the ad - for sea kayaking - that lodged in my brain. I'm a planner by instinct, and I have to push myself a little to be spontaneous: I much prefer to schedule my spur-of-the-moment decisions well in advance, to occur spontaneously at regular intervals. But sea kayaking? I'd seen them out on the water while I was up on the walls. Sea kayaking looked like fun.
I went to investigate. I was worried about the diabetes: if they put me in a solo kayak and I had a hypo, I was going to be all at sea in more ways than one. And I didn't particularly want to pair up with another clueless paddler only to have to stop halfway through and be carried home. Could I share a boat with a guide?
I was instructed to come back the next morning, and they'd sort something out. The something they sorted out wasn't teaming up with a guide, as I'd hoped, but they'd put me together with a fellow from Los Angeles, Donny, an experienced sea kayaker whose planned paddle-partner was land-bound with food poisoning. Donny is a recreational therapist. He's used to partnering with physically and confidence-curtailed types, and was fine with driving solo for a while if necessary.
Very well, then. Diabetes hedge in place, there was nothing to stop me from sea kayaking.
Crap. There's nothing stopping me from going sea kayaking. I'm going sea kayaking. Crap.
Getting into the boat was a little hair-raising - we almost capsized the moment I climbed in, before inertia worked its magic - but once in it was surprisingly easy. Donny had a little trouble keeping in a steady rhythm with me, but to be fair I wasn't exactly playing in tune. He warned me to paddle a little less furiously if I wanted to last the whole trip - we were going for three hours, minus a 45 minute swimming stop - and after 10 minutes or so my shoulders agreed with him.
The half-time swimming break was at a beach hidden inside a big cave:
The guides handed out snorkelling equipment, but I couldn't figure out how they worked, I can't really swim properly and the water was clear enough to see perfectly in any case. So instead of snorkelling I just splashed about in the water with all the grace of a beached whale on opposites day.
The second leg of the journey, around Lokrum - a big island that stretches out across Dubrovnik harbour - was twice as long, and Donny and I were having difficulty keeping up. Partly it was that kayaks have a mind of their own - ours had murderous intent and kept wanting to either crash straight into the rocks or head directly out to sea - but I also couldn't help but notice, whenever I turned around, that Donny's paddle wasn't in the water. Just who was supposed to be carrying whom in this arrangement, exactly?
On the far side of the island the guide explained that Lokrum is cursed. For hundreds of years, whoever owned the island - a list that includes Archduke Ferdinand, whose death started World War I, and an Emperor of Mexico - died a violent, grisly death. Now the island is a nature reserve, owned by the Croatian government, so poor Lokrum is copping the blame for killing the economy instead.
Once done with the kayak - somehow, I made it back to Dubrovnik- I headed back out to look around Lokrum. I would have loved to spend a whole day out there - there's a ruined monastery, a fortress at the top of the hill and swimming spots and walking paths up and down the island - but not long after arriving I looked down at my legs, which were starting to get sore.
They were on fire.
I'd grown too confident in having an ozone layer over my head, and forgotten to put sunscreen on my feet and legs. So my visit to Lokrum ended up only being for an hour. I found a pond in the centre of the island called the 'Dead Sea' - it's salt water, connected to the ocean by an underwater tunnel - and sat down in it for a while in the hope that salt water is good for barbecued skin, before returning to the hostel to assess the damage.
Lots of damage. The walk back, with the burn exposed to full sun, was agony, and because my ankles were burnt every step I took only stretched and irritated the burn more. My time roaming Dubrovnik was at an end: without my newly-Catholic pants, I couldn't protect the burn from further damage even if I could tolerate the pain from walking. I spent my last day in the hostel, marinading in vitamin E cream, until it was time to head to the next city, Split.
The lack of pants wasn't for lack of trying, for what it's worth. I'd attempted to find pants in about half a dozen shops, but Croatia is not an ideal place for pants-shopping. I found plenty of leather pants, some velvet ones and even a vinyl pair, but none of those were *quite* what I was after. The few cotton ones I found, meanwhile, left rather too little to the imagination for physical *or* mental comfort: Croatian men evidently prefer a tighter fit up front than I'm accustomed to. I found one perfect pair, but whilst it had a fly and a button hole for doing them up, there was no button. It wasn't a manufacturing mistake: there were half a dozen pairs in different sizes, all of which had holes for fastening buttons, but no buttons. I only finally managed to replace them in Split, where I found a pair in a New Yorker store: you can always trust an American chain to cater to the well-rounded gentleman.
In fact, shopping in Croatia is just difficult generally, because none of the stuff in shops has any English labelling. I bought what I thought was butter, only to later find that it was really yeast for cooking with. But at least I can tell the difference between soap for washing myself with and soap for washing clothes with, unlike whoever left this in the hostel shower:
To be fair, almond milk doesn't belong in bath gel but it *certainly* doesn't belong in clothes washing liquid either.
From Dubrovnik I needed to get to Split, the other major city on the Croatian coast. Bigger than Dubrovnik, less famous but almost as touristy, it's best known for its old town, which is built entirely within the walls of what was once the Roman Emperor Diocletian's palace (or more accurately, his retirement villa: he abdicated from the throne after building the palace in Split to live out his days in). This was going to be my last significant Roman site of the trip.
First I had to get there, though, and the cheapest and fastest way is to go by bus. But If you look at a map of Croatia, it sort of looks like a badly drawn boomerang: the capital, Zagreb, is more or less in the middle, and there's a mountainous inland arm and a second, longer arm that stretches down the Dalmatian coast to Dubrovnik. Zoom in, however, and you'll see the coastal arm is broken: between Split and Dubrovnik is a 19km long stretch of coastline that belongs to Bosnia, not Croatia. The buses between Dubrovnik and Split, then, have to cross through Bosnia: they don't stop so you don't have to pass through passport checks, but nevertheless, through Bosnia they go. I could just about suspend disbelief about having done more than transit through Montenegro. But spend at best 15 minutes on a bus racing through Bosnia, without stopping?
Up with this I could not put.
So I looked for other options, and eventually found a catamaran that sails up the coast once a day, stopping in at a variety of islands along the way. The boat cost twice as much as the bus and was ridiculously noisy, but it was fast, it avoided the agonising question of whether I could say I've been to Bosnia, and once the heat went out of the day and I could bear to go outside the view was rather nice, too:
You get bored of those Mediterranean sunsets after a while. Ha.
I had about one a half days to play with in Split, and the city itself is tiny: you can see everything in a couple of hours. Many people stay longer and use it as a base camp for day trips, and I'd planned to go out to one of the islands before disqualifying myself from beach activities. So I tried getting out and about in Split itself, but apart from a disappointing and over-priced walk around the excavated remains of the palace complex (it costs $10 to visit and amounts to a concrete basement), everything else was out in the sun.
So I retreated back to the hostel, and because the dorm had a TV, I turned it on and started flicking channels, thinking I might find a sitcom that I could make up a storyline to in the absence of subtitles. Instead I discovered the TV had Netflix! A fellow named Peter was logged in, and his account now shows that he binge-watched about eight episodes of House of Cards until the other dorm mates turned up. I hope Peter enjoyed it as much as I did.
The bonfire below my knees had finally cooled enough the next day to gingerly wander about and check out the town before boarding a bus to Zagreb. The first thing I noticed was this statue of a man who clearly can't believe what he's reading:
Like everywhere else, the Catholics were quick to repurpose the former Roman buildings as churches, but there was a personal element to it in Split. Diocletian was the most enthusiastic and persistent persecutor of Christians of any Roman emperor. So the Church took over his mausoleum - kicked him out of his own grave - and turned it into the town's cathedral, pointedly dedicated to a local Saint that had been martyred when Diocletian was in charge.
I accidentally paid to go into another church. You've got to be careful with churches: I'm not above freeloading by wandering around the free ones, but they often don't say that they charge an admission fee until you're already inside, and then you're reduced to avoiding eye contact as you slink back out. Not possible here. It was the smallest chapel I've ever seen - built inside the wall of the old palace, it's about a metre wide and has seating for two people. From the entrance you could see - you could almost touch - the whole thing:
I wasn't going to pay for this, I thought - but then an elderly nun came out of nowhere. Cutting off my retreat in the narrow space, she unleashed a torrent of Croatian she knew I didn't understand, apart from the final two words: five kuna. Before I could object, she said 'five kuna' a second time, and just in case I didn't get the message she pointed at my pocket, and then at her open palm. 'Five!'
Alright, Sister. You win. I paid the five kuna, received what I assume was a blessing for my trouble and then fled as she started pointing down a corridor that apparently led to some other chapel, before I got harangued into paying for that as well. This nun may think she already answered her calling, but I'm afraid she missed it. She was born for door to door sales.
From Split I went on to Zagreb, where I only had one day but managed to pack in a decent amount anyway, after an annoying start. I try to ask for a lower bunk wherever beds are assigned, rather than being first in, best dressed, and Zagreb had obliged: I was told at reception I'd been allocated not only a lower bunk, but a standalone bed. So I was pretty pissed off when I got into the room to find the bed had clearly been slept in, and the squatter's stuff - her name was Francesca - was all over it.
After debating with myself whether I wanted the fight I decided to let it slide, but remarked to another guest, Sam - a self-confessed maths genius from Bristol, about to start wasting his talents at an investment bank - that I was tempted to buy a razor and shave the bed-thief's eyebrows during the night. Sam had a better suggestion: he claimed he knew how to cut into the legs of the bed in such a way that they would collapse halfway through the night, bringing Francesca down with them. The plan only foundered on the basis that neither of us knew where to buy a hacksaw at 11PM in Zagreb. Don't mess with British maths geniuses.
I set out in the morning for a walk through what seemed like an eerily deserted town centre, and kept following signs to bizarre-sounding museums - the Mushroom Museum and Croatian School Museum both sounded interesting, in at least one sense of the word - only to find them closed. I eventually discovered when trying the Croatian History Museum (also closed) that I was there on a public holiday.
Thankfully, Zagreb's bizarre-museum-in-chief, the Museum of Broken Relationships, was open as normal. The formula for this place is simple: people donate an item that represents a broken relationship - a ratted-on spouse, an abandoned child, a forgotten summer lover - and write an account of what it meant and what went wrong. That's the whole museum: symbols and stories of heartbreak. It's funny, sad, uplifting, depressing, poignant and silly - and just a touch voyeuristic. I'm not quite sure what I made of it.
And on that somewhat ambivalent note, Croatia and I broke it off ourselves. I was left wanting more, wishing it wasn't over after only eight days and 21 hours. Croatia, I suspect, was mostly indifferent.
I keep losing things. I've already mentioned the blood testing kit and described the devastating few hours without my insulin. Less importantly, I'm down one umbrella and one pair of sunglasses, but that's not surprising: they're disposable items, they inevitably either break or disappear. I lost a jumper in Lisbon, and its replacement later fell in the line of duty in Romania. My camera case lasted until Greece, and is being replaced in the interim by a sock, the pair of which didn't make it out of Avignon.
I needed to replace my eye mask - for a second time - in Bulgaria. If there are travel shops in Sofia I couldn't find them, but there's no shortage of sex shops so, after looking both ways to make certain there was nobody from the hostel around I darted inside one, avoiding eye contact, and bought a rather fetching blindfold with gold floral motifs.
The insulin aside, by far the most upsetting casualty of the trip was a 2012 Swans premiership polo shirt, one of only three I own. Apart from work and other obligatory semi-formal settings I am rarely spotted wearing anything else, and given the way the Swans are going this year I am less than hopeful of being able to replace them with updated models any time soon. Losing one was a bitter blow.
Its absence was actually discovered on the same day my insulin briefly went AWOL, but I didn't mention it then as negotiations were at a delicate stage, and I didn't want to tempt fate. See, I wasn't leaving this one behind. It's too precious. After contacting three hostels I was finally able to track it down in Florence and, after some back and forth arranged for it to be couriered back to me in Rome. The Florentine hostel understood its importance because they had washed and ironed it for me. They even put it in bubble wrap.
I don't seem to learn, however. I lost my pants in the Vatican.
*
I've written before about my egocentric notion that you might 'know' some places to be real, but not quite *believe* they are real until you've verified their existence personally. Rome's ancient Forum is one of those places. A pile of stone foundations and the occasional surviving column is all it might be now, but when I suddenly realised in October 2013 that this trip was on - that enough stars had aligned that I could make it happen - it was in the Forum that I imagined myself walking.
I'm fascinated by Ancient Rome, and have been since I first read Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series, a sprawling (fictionalised) epic that tells the story of the fall of the Roman Republic over 80 years, seven books and about 6,000 pages. I've mostly wriggled loose from McCullough's influence over the years - I no longer share her unwavering admiration for Julius Caesar, who might just have been the love of her life - but it's a story I keep coming back to.
Let me recap events in 300 words or less. Roman politics was split into two factions: the conservative, oligarchic Optimates and the reformist, albeit rabble-rousing Populares. The respective leaders of the factions in around 90BCE, Gaius Marius, who was Julius Caesar's uncle, and Sulla, who was posthumously Caesar's grandfather-in-law, fought a war, which was continued after Marius's death by his ally Cinna, who was Caesar's first father-in-law, before he married Sulla's granddaughter.
Caesar himself rose to lead the Populares, despite having the bluest of blue, blue patrician blood himself. After Pompey, his former ally and son-in-law (detecting a theme here?), married into the Optimates the two fought another war, which Caesar won. A brief dalliance with Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, followed, but not long after Caesar had achieved absolute power he was assassinated by a group that included his cousin, Decimus Brutus (a rather disloyal bastard who was even named in Caesar's will, they were so close), and another Brutus - Marcus - who was the son of Caesar's former mistress, Servilia.
Caesar's nephew-turned-adopted-son, Octavian, and Caesar's cousin, Marc Antony, who was also later Octavian's brother-in-law, allied to despatch the Brutes and co. But they later fell out themselves, and Antony humiliated his wife, Octavia, by himself taking up with Cleopatra along the way. When Octavian defeated them - murdering Cleopatra and Caesar's son, his adoptive-half-brother, into the bargain - he was the last one left standing, and the Republic was finished.
How could you not be fascinated? It's House of Cards meets Game of Thrones meets Days Of Our Lives.
This was the period of history I was in Rome to bring to life. Unlike most cities, where I set out for an aimless wander, this time I had a plan. I was staying near the train station (on land that I think was once the barracks of the Praetorian Guard. I cross-referenced modern and ancient maps to find out. Yes, I'm obsessed). My first day (and second) were always going to revolve around ancient sites, but I wanted to build up towards the Forum, which had the most significance to me, so I made an enormous loop that took me north - to the Ara Pacis museum, via the obligatory (but not ancient) Trevi Fountain, and on to the Pantheon. I had braced myself for crushing crowds everywhere, but it was only at the Trevi and the Vatican that I felt claustrophobic. It's a pretty fountain though.
The Pantheon was one of my most anticipated sites. Originally a pagan temple built by the emperor Hadrian way back in 126CE (on the site of a former, damaged version), and later co-opted by the Catholic Church (they're good at that), it's remarkably well preserved for a building that age. The re-purposing undoubtedly helped save it: the Romans were such good builders that most of their great public buildings weren't destroyed by the ravages of time but by deliberate vandalism, either during wars or, frustratingly, to scavenge the building materials.
What makes the Pantheon unique among Roman architecture is its enormous circular dome ceiling, with a light well in the middle that causes the sun to shine on different shrines inside at different times of the day:
From the Pantheon I gradually made my way south towards the Circus Maximus, skirting around the ancient core of the city by sticking close to the River Tiber. The Circus was once a racecourse that could seat 250,000 people: it's now a grassy car park that was being set up to host the Catholic Church "Golden Jubilee of Charismatic Renewal", which sounded mysterious but probably not my sort of thing at all. The Pope was due to be in attendance, and the city was already noticeably full of pilgrims, so I made a mental note to avoid the area on the coming Saturday and moved on, approaching the Colosseum from the south.
The Colosseum is the most prominent and famous symbol of Ancient Rome, but it's one of my least favourite. Animals slaughtered by the thousand, slaves forced to fight to the death and gruesome, public executions of criminals: this was not a nice place, and I didn't linger too long. But it has an interesting exhibition about the afterlife of the arena after the fall of Rome: as a fortress, as a church (of course), and as a ruin, overgrown with vegetation, that inspired artists during the Romantic period. After the empire collapsed the population of Rome fell from over a million to perhaps as low as 10,000. It must have been an eerie, empty, post-apocalyptic sort of place when the people were gone but the great buildings were still standing. You could have had your choice of derelict villa.
By the time I was done at the Colosseum it was much too late in the day to tackle the Forum and Palatine hill, which have a combined entry. So I settled for a first glimpse, from outside the gates, of the once-centre of the Western world and came back the next day. The moment I was inside I had to stop, sit down and collect myself. I guess my reaction to being there was a combination of the purely personal importance of having arrived - making it to that place where, as I said earlier, my imagination of this trip had first taken me - and the significance of the Forum itself. The emotional response I should have had but didn't get during my blighted trip to the Athenian Agora - Europe's other, even older birthplace of modern politics - came here in full force.
The republican-era forum is almost entirely gone, built over first by Caesar, then Augustus, with various other construction - and then deconstruction - projects in the following centuries. There is very little left standing even of the imperial-era site:
But it didn't matter to me. I found the spot where the Curia - the Senate chamber - had stood: where Cato the Elder pestered the state into declaring war against Carthage, where the radical reformist Saturninus was murdered by conservatives who climbed on the roof and dropped tiles down upon his head inside, where Caesar declared that his wife must be above suspicion, and where the radical Clodius (also murdered, very few of them died of natural causes) was cremated by the mob, who burnt the building down around him. The site of another funeral pyre - Caesar's - is in the centre of the Forum and, bizarrely, people still lay flowers there.
Later in the stay I went back to the Forum after dark, when they light up the best preserved of the ruins:
I'd planned to go to the Colosseum at night, too, but I got lost on the Capitoline Hill (the centre of the ancient Roman religion, it directly overlooks the Forum) and by the time I found my way it was too late for the diversion.
I was largely done with the major ancient Roman sites after the first two days, but I went to the Baths of Diocletian - a truly enormous public baths complex, think spas the size of Olympic swimming pools - on the Sunday. It's now one of the sites of the National Museum of Rome, and as it was the first Sunday of the month it was free. More interesting than the exhibits was a mini music festival with a string quartet, a jazz quartet, a trio with an accordion being entirely drowned out by two tenors, and an Italian folk band (read: middle aged men in tights with flutes and a tambourine). Not bad for a lazy Sunday.
My visit to another National Museum site - the Palazzo Terme - was blighted by an encounter with another patron. There were a group of four Americans trying to buy tickets when I arrived, led by a tall, rippling fellow who was on holiday from his day job as an entitled, obnoxious, bullying prick. The Italian man at the desk was explaining how the ticket options worked - you could either buy tickets for one or multiple museum sites - in perfectly clear English. I suspect, though, that the last time Frat Boy actually listened to something was a recording of himself crooning to his own reflection in the shower. Instead of processing a straightforward equation - he could pay €7 for this one museum, or €12 for a ticket that got him into five - he kept turning to his posse and saying "what? WHAT?!", before turning back to the hapless cashier and demanding he explain it to him again.
I had priceless Roman frescoes and busts to see, so I tried to help squeeze the stupid through the gates and explained to his insufficiently embarrassed friends how the tickets worked, and jumped in and bought my own while they huddled to determine whether they wanted to be uncultured boors in one museum or five. Shortly afterwards, though, we crossed paths again when I walked into a gallery to find Frat Boy gripping onto, and trying to move, a large vase from the House of Livia. No. No, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. Just don't do that.
There were security cameras in the room, so I swallowed my horror and hoped the cameras were being monitored live. But sure enough, in the very next gallery I see his paws all over a 2200 year old marble republican bust. My gag reflex kicked in. I couldn't swallow any more horror.
"Hey, mate", I said. "You can't touch those."
"What?" Frat Boy turned around, facing perhaps the first person to impose any sort of censure on his behaviour since he was in pre-school. "What did you say?"
"You can't touch those. They're 2200 years old. Conservators would never handle them without without gloves, and you're an over-energised anthropomorphic slime ball, so who knows what damage your gooey hands are doing".
(It is possible that this is no longer a literal account of the conversation, but you're getting the gist.)
Anthropomorphic Slime Ball denied touching anything, but when I named the two specific artefacts I'd seen him grappling with, and warned I'd go to security if there were a third, he recognised something he might have had no direct prior experience with in his life: accountability. He started glaring, and nodding, and he glared and nodded for a while. Remember Tony Abbott's "you're not saying anything Tony?" interview? It was like that, but with more muscles to tense (sorry Tony). "Yeah", he eventually spat. "I got it".
"Good, I'm glad", I said, and turned and walked away. I wasn't entirely confident that I wouldn't be king-hit, but I suspect he enjoys intimidating people and I wasn't inclined to oblige. He was the very prototype of an 'ugly American', right down to struggling to comprehend instructions given to him in English, but I don't think it's a fair stereotype. I met some wonderful Americans in Rome - a medical student named Will, with whom I shared pasta and ideas for boosting Democratic turnout in the midterms - and Erica and Delaney, a pair of art students who showed up on my last night and who, to my utter delight, swallowed my story about drop bears in full. I've met one Anthropomorphic Slime Ball, and dozens of friendly, easy-going Americans along the course of this trip. They get to define my expectations. Not him.
I had left the Vatican to my last day, as months earlier I'd booked an excavations tour and been allocated the Monday. The tour would take me through the excavated Roman-era cemetery they'd found when they started digging underneath St Peter's Basilica, which includes the tomb of the Pearly Gatekeeper himself. I had to be there at 9AM - God only knows how I'm going to go back to work because this seemed impossibly early - so I caught a bus for the only time during my stay in Rome. Along the way I chatted to a high school student who had done an exchange in Sydney and loved it so much she had the city's coordinates tattooed on her wrist. I assured her that Melbourne is better in all respects except harbours and football teams.
I had been skeptical about them having found St Peter's tomb, but I wasn't aware that having the tomb at its centre is the entire point of the Basilica being where it is. Christian shrines have been on the site for 1800 years or so, so it's certainly plausible that the burial site was known at the time. When they excavated the tomb itself they found bones inside, and took a few small pieces that are now in a box in the Papal Apartments before re-interring the rest. So there you go.
The tour finished in the Papal Grottoes under the Basilica, where more recent Popes are buried, and from there I could also access the Basilica itself without having to line up. I went through briefly, but I'd been unable to buy tickets to the Vatican Museums online, and I wanted to line up ASAP to at least see if the queues were tolerable enough to hang around for. It wasn't *too* bad - an hour and forty minutes, about half a Versailles - and I was able to pass the time by chatting to a young Romanian couple, whose naked envy as I described my trip itinerary, which they couldn't possibly save the money for back at home, was a good reminder of just how much of a privilege all this is. I don't feel guilty: I worked hard to make it happen. But sometimes people who work hard forget that their work builds on foundations laid by others.
To be perfectly honest, once inside the Museums are a bit hit-and-miss. I was unlucky in that the Egyptian Room - one of the most interesting parts - was closed, and the classical collections were so choked with people, and indeed with sculptures, that it was a bit too overwhelming. They have statues poked everywhere, crowding each other out: it's not a good display technique. But the highlights here aren't the 'collections' per se, but the paintings on the walls themselves. The Sistine Chapel, though crowded, was astonishing: I was surprised to discover that the vaguely homoerotic scene of Adam reaching out to God is only one small part of the ceiling. Perhaps my favourite, though, was the Gallery of Maps, an epic long hall with maps of each part of Italy painted along each wall, with a cool little touch: historical events, such as Hannibal invading Italy with his elephants, are painted into the spots where they happened:
I loved Rome, perhaps more for what it was than what it is. But that's ok. I've walked in the footsteps of Cicero and Caesar. And I still find that remarkable just to write about.
Sometimes things don't go to plan, and it sucks. Things didn't go to plan in Athens, and it sucked. Not a whole lot went to plan in Sorrento, either: a couple of planned excursions that didn't proceed, privatisation taken way too far, a somewhat disappointing hostel and I ended up in hospital. But it was mostly good fun anyway.
The vertigo incident in Athens had rattled me enough to consult Dr Google, but Dr Google only ever has one theory - cancer, it's always cancer - so I sought a second opinion from my doctor friend David (who very kindly tolerated the imposition), on whether it could be something to warrant proper medical attention. It sounded like I might have an upper respiratory infection, apparently, that probably went on a little day trip to my inner ear. I didn't know respiratory infections could do that.
This was my first time on a boat in waters more exposed than Sydney Harbour, and I thought the combination of dizziness and inexperienced sea legs was a recipe for misery. However, there was little I could do about it - I didn't even have any real window to find a doctor before leaving Greece - so I put it out of my mind while enjoying the room to myself in Patra (and not enjoying the footy). Thankfully, my fears were misplaced. Boats are great. I spent an hour standing out on the helipad, watching Greece slip away. And I slept better than I had in weeks. The boat felt more stable than trains do, and not even my inner ear could leave me feeling all at sea.
From Bari, where the boat reached Italy and could take me no further, I had to catch a bus to Naples and then a local train - the wonderfully named Circumvesuviana, literally 'around Vesuvius' - before getting to Sorrento, so it wasn't until about 4PM that I arrived at the hostel. After checking in and taking my stuff up to the room, I once again counted eight beds where there should have been six. Apparently there was a maintenance problem with the dorm I should have been in, and there were no more six-bed rooms available.
I had let this slide in Bucharest, mostly because I lacked the energy for the fight, but I wasn't copping it again and I marched back to reception, pointed out that they had knowingly over-charged for what they were providing and made clear that I wouldn't budge until I was moved to a properly sized room: how they did it was their problem. So I sat, and waited, as they called the manager and I was finally able to extract a pledge that no more than six people would be in that dorm for as long as I was there. Victory.
As if to prove the rule that the squeaky wheel gets the most grease, they were very eager to keep me happy for the rest of my stay. When I asked if there was anywhere in the building where the wifi wasn't terrible they gave me access to the much better staff one instead, on condition that I told no one else. Unfortunately both networks only worked in the common areas, so what would usually be a space where people gather to talk to others instead became a space where everybody sat silently checking Facebook. A very sterile hostel.
Having finally sorted the hostel drama, I didn't have time for much more than a leisurely walk around town to find dinner. The hostel was actually in the next commune over from Sorrento, so it was a good half hour walk to the main part of town. Along the way I found a little beach and marina at the bottom of a 50m cliff, which you need to use an elevator to access:
The area is a charming little streetscape of narrow, winding roads, suited only to scooter and small cars, so you're constantly dodging out of the way and, if locals want to take anything in or out by truck they need to improvise. That's where these things come in:
After eating a disappointing dinner - you can either eat cheap or well in Sorrento, never both - I was immediately compensated by finding a West-facing lookout, across to the Isle of Capri, and settled in for the sunset. Good decision:
I'd thought about going out to Capri for a day, to see the remains of the Emperor Tiberius's villa and the Blue Grotto - a cave beneath the island where the water is bright blue at certain times of the day for reasons I don't really understand. But a ferry there was going to cost a minimum €32 return, then I'd need to negotiate a boat into the cave, and then find my way up the hill to the villa. It was going to be at minimum a €60 day trip, and I thought I could find more affordable fun closer to home.
It was a warm day - 29 and sunny (every single day in Italy was between 27 and 31 and sunny, by the way. Not sure how that compares to back home?) so I figured I'd go to the beach. There aren't any proper beaches on this side of the Bay of Naples, though: just a couple of corners with a little bit of volcanic black sand. And, outrageously, they've all been privatised.
Every beach supposedly has to have a 'free' portion in addition to a paid section where you cough up €10, €15 or sometimes even €20 for the right to sit in a deck chair, use a changing room and paddle in the water. But at the one I went to there was no free 'beach' at all: there was about five metres of jetty at the far end of the cove where you could stretch a towel out on the wooden planks and enjoy the 'free' beach. Not quite what I had in mind, so I parted with €14: approximately €14 more than I should have spent. Nice weather though. Not sure if I mentioned the weather earlier.
The only day of the four I spent in and around Sorrento where I actually did something I'd planned to was a day trip to Pompeii, a guaranteed highlight for any Romanophile. I've been to Roman sites before, but nothing on this scale: the town is huge and, while most of the good stuff has been moved to the archaeology museum in Naples (which I missed out on, alas), there are still plenty of frescoes to see. One of the highlights, and one of the few pieces of furniture actually displayed at Pompeii rather than in the museum is the base of a writing desk owned by a certain Publius Servilius Casca. He was nobody of great historical significance. Only one of the assassins of Julius Caesar.
It's not really about the artefacts on display, though. Getting lost in the maze of streets, walking in and out of houses, temples, shops and bathhouses (almost) brings an extinct society back to life. The suddenness, the shock, of the calamity is still evident 1,938 years later. There are casts of victims in a couple of places - including a child who appears unannounced near the forum - and somehow the human tragedy is still raw. The guilty party - Mt Vesuvius - looms in the background as you explore the scene of the crime.
It all makes it just a little unsettling when you're wandering about a city destroyed by a volcano and, oh, yes, that's one erupting right over there:
"That can't get us here, could it?" a British school kid asked.
"I'm sure they have an evacuation plan in place if it were something to worry about", I replied.
"I bet that's what they said in Pompeii", came the response. Touché.
When I got back to the hostel I met a lovely American woman from Detroit named Lauren, who is about to start a course in occupational therapy for autistic children. An important job, I remarked, speaking from direct experience. Lauren and I chatted for a while, were joined by a Belgian guy and, inevitably, the conversation turned to American politics. Lauren mentioned the "riots" (she meant 'constitutionally-protected civil protests' I think) and I remarked that I hoped all of those people protesting had voted for Hillary Clinton. Lauren said nothing.
Later I commented that I'm going to Russia, as long as Trump and Putin don't blow the world up before that. "Oh", Lauren grumbled. "Do people really believe that? He's not going to do something like that!" An optimist, then. But on she went. "He's trying! He went into politics to help, he didn't have to!"
Oh fuck. Lauren's a Trump voter. Worse. She's a Trump voter from Michigan. It's her fault.
Breathe, Charlie.
"He might be trying", I said, drawing on all the reserves of patience I've built up from going three months without a work meeting. "But he's not doing a very good job, is he?" That was the Democrats' fault. They were blocking everything he was trying to do. "He's done more in his first 100 days than Obama!" Are you fucking kidding me, Lauren? You're from Detroit. You were just saying how everybody should buy American cars. Obama bailed out your car industry in his first hundred days.
And so it went. Lauren's big into guns. Having her gun in the house makes her feel safe at night, because if there's an intruder she can shoot him. He is also more likely to have a gun, we said. He could shoot you instead. All the more reason why Lauren needed a gun! And besides, guns don't kill people. People kill people. Yep, that old chestnut. I asked if being in Italy without her gun had made Lauren feel unsafe. Apparently an impertinent question: there was no answer.
I swallowed my bile, and kept my cool. It was good practice: I have every intention of being in the US in 2020, because friends help friends fight fascism and the US needs all the friends it can get right now. I will meet and talk to and attempt to win over more Laurens. And by the way, she's a genuinely nice woman. That's partly what's so upsetting.
I'd planned to use my last day in Campania to double up on doomed Roman towns and go to Herculaneum, and with that in mind I'd bought a combined ticket with Pompeii. Unfortunately I didn't get to use it, because I had reached the point where I had to reluctantly accept that the cough and fever weren't going away on their own and were actually getting worse. I needed antibiotics, and I could have gotten them over the counter if I had a regular type I always get and knew I wasn't allergic to, but because I haven't taken them in ages the pharmacist sent me to the hospital for a prescription.
Joy. At least I didn't need to clear this with the travel insurer because there's a reciprocal arrangement with Australia, so it would have been covered by Medicare (thank you Gough, thank you Bob). But it never even came to that. After arriving I presented myself to the translator on duty and described my symptoms. Sorry to waste the ER's time on something so trivial, I said, but I'm leaving town today, so I can't wait for a GP appointment, and I'm diabetic, so -
The translator told me to come inside and sit down. Five minutes later I was shown through to the ER. Italian hospitals have a four colour-coded triage system - code red is more or less unconscious and not breathing, then it's down through yellow, green and white. Code white is presumably all the annoying time-wasting stuff, because they charge €25 for it. Anything above that and it's free. Italian, Australian, it doesn't matter: they waved away my Medicare card. I was a code yellow.
I was shown into a room that had a senior doctor sitting behind a desk. She asked a series of questions about symptoms in rapid staccato fashion before passing me onto a more junior doctor. The translator stuck by my side. Junior doc approached with a small sword and said he was going to use it to test my blood sugar, but there was no way I was letting him near me with that thing, and I managed to hold him off while I extracted my own lancet from my bag.
My blood sugar level was 19, approximately three times what it should be, and the balance of power shifted entirely. I was marched to a bed and instructed to lie down. The doctor approached to my left with another small sword - no argument possible this time, he was taking blood tests for pathology - and a nurse appeared on my right with clamps for an ECG.
ECG?
While I was busy protesting that there was no need for the clamps and that I just needed antibiotics, the blood test was finished and before I had turned around to defend my left flank a drip had appeared in my arm. This was all getting out of hand. The doctor said he was going to inject me with some insulin. Sure, I said, just let me grab it from my bag and tell me how much to inject -
"No", the translator interrupted. "You have come to hospital and while you are in the hospital you will only use the hospital's medicine".
Right. ECG complete, drip in, insulin injected, pathology tests pending, I had no idea what the plan was from here but I hoped it involved getting a prescription and being sent on my way. When I asked when I might be able to leave I was told I wasn't going anywhere, not until the blood sugar was down, and then they'd need to wait for x-rays.
X-rays?
The wait took about an hour, during which time my blood sugar was checked twice - it was coming down rapidly - and the drip was replaced with a second bag, despite my protestations that I had a perfectly good bottle of water in my bag. Eventually the x-ray studio was available, and an orderly came into the room with a wheelchair.
Wheelchair!?
This was too much. I had walked nearly 3km from my hostel, I said, I can walk to the lifts. But no, I had come to hospital and hospital patients get pushed around by orderlies in wheelchairs. Resistance was futile. I was at least allowed to walk when I got into the studio, but despite demonstrating that I was fully ambulant I was ordered back into the chair to return to the ER. There we waited for a few minutes - I was begrudgingly permitted to stand - until the x-rays came down and showed that I had a chest infection (Dr David has elite remote diagnosis skills), and I was prescribed antibiotics.
"You can leave now, if you want", the translator told me, "but do you prefer to be hospitalised?"
No, thank you.
Surreal though the whole thing was, I don't want anybody to mistake my humour for ingratitude or, worse, criticism. I fronted to hospital and in the space of two hours I was triaged, given insulin, had pathology tests taken, an ECG, an x-ray and two drips. I was looked after by two doctors, a nurse, a translator and an orderly. If I hadn't been confident in managing my condition I could have been admitted at my own request. And despite not being Italian I wasn't asked to pay a cent, and I headed off to the pharmacy to buy drugs that were even more subsidised than they are on the PBS at home.
Bravo e grazie, Italia.
If you're reading these blog posts in search of vicarious fun, skip this one and return next time. Nothing drastic happened: nobody died, went to jail or got robbed of all their valuables. Each setback was in itself minor and manageable, but tie them together and it was pretty miserable. I'm writing this because skipping an entire country would be weird, but also because it would be dishonest to filter out all the bad experiences and simply pretend that this trip is an endless procession of perfect days. Some of them are bad.
The trouble started back in Bulgaria. My hostel in Sofia was great: on the first night I had an entire apartment - next door to the main building - to myself, there were eggs for breakfast each morning, the wifi worked, the bathrooms were spotless and the ukulele-playing was minimal and easily escaped. It even had nightly vegetarian dinners, which weren't very good but were free and convenient. And it all cost only €13. Oh, and it had bed bugs.
I had no problems until I was en route to Plovdiv, so they must have turned up on the last night. At first I thought they were mosquito bites, prompting me to hurriedly research whether Sofia has malaria or dengue fever (it doesn't). I was pretty itchy that evening in Plovdiv, but that was nothing compared to when I woke up the next morning with at least 30 bites, including several up and down my back, where I'd been wearing a shirt. Not mosquitoes, then. Bed bugs. Horrifying, but also somewhat inevitable. I've now racked up well over 100 nights in hostels over the past three years, and they are a known risk. Just not what you want on your 15 hour commute to Athens.
The first leg was a seven hour bus ride from Plovdiv to Thessaloniki, and it was comfortable enough (itching aside) but had some very warped priorities. The bus had wifi access and TVs in the back of the seats, and in addition to the driver there was a second staff member on board, whose job it was to occasionally walk up and down the bus offering people croissants or soft drink. The only thing this bus didn't have was a working toilet, but who wants one of those when you can have croissants and Bulgarian soap operas instead? Besides, the bus made regular stops for bathroom breaks, and I knew everything was going to be great when we pulled up on the side of the road, shortly before the Greek border, and the toilets were free:
Maybe paid toilets aren't such a terrible thing after all.
Strangeness aside, the bus got me safely to Thessaloniki, where I had a three hour layover before a train to Athens, and where graffiti outside the station declared it to be Antifa territory. Welcome to Greece. While I waited I chatted to a German fellow, Christian, who works for the German opposition leader - so the German equivalent of the ALP - and was on a quick holiday before descending into election season hell. I wished him all the best: they'll be up against it.
The second leg started well enough. I began talking to Dimitras, an elderly Greek man who saw my discomfort and offered me cortisone cream to treat it, after calling his wife - a professor of medicine - to find out if it would drastically affect my diabetes. That was the high point of the ride, as we quite rapidly segued to a screed against immigration and the EU. My visit was fine, apparently, because I wasn't there looking for work, but with such high unemployment why should there be 'Pakistani boys' and 'Bangladeshi boys' in Greece? His legitimate concern about jobs doesn't mean he supports the EU, however, or the access it provides Greeks to opportunities across the continent. Young Greeks should be living in Greece, regardless of whether they can make more money elsewhere.
The EU was solely responsible for Greece's financial woes, apparently, because they have always taken money out of Greece and given it to Germans. Not quite how it works - in fact, the opposite of how it works - but I kept my mouth shut. I tried to pay him for the cream, as he had said he only earns €600 a month, before he clarified that that's what he tells the tax department and the true figure is €4000. The EU hasn't helped matters in Greece recently, to be sure, but if Dimitras wants to find the original source of their problems I could have told him where to look. He said that he used to vote for the conservative New Democracy Party, but has switched away from them, and I avoided asking who to out of fear that it could be Golden Dawn, a fascist party. The cortisone cream helped a lot, and yet still my skin was crawling. At least I only had five hours on the train.
Then the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and the lights went out. Welcome to Greece. Dimitras disappeared to have a smoke outside (despite rain so torrential that I wonder how he lit the cigarette) and while he was gone they made an announcement over the PA system (apparently still working, despite the darkness). I had no idea what they said until Dimitras arrived, and told me that the locomotive had broken down and they were sending a new one. How long, I asked? Maybe an hour. Maybe more. I had already been due to get to the hostel around midnight. Excellent.
I had to switch off my devices to save battery - who knew how long I'd be stranded somewhere in the middle of Greece - and sitting in the darkness I might as well try to go to sleep. Waking up three hours later, we still weren't in Athens, but Dmitras had disappeared so we had to be close. We arrived at 2:40AM, in pouring rain, and I jumped in the first taxi I saw without remembering to check that it had a meter or that it displayed its prices. Thankfully I got away with it for only €10, perhaps twice what it should have been.
I had another solid three hours of sleep at the hostel - enough either side of a very anxious taxi ride to get me through the next day without falling over - and decided I'd start at the National Archeology Museum (apart from a surprisingly good zoo, my entire time in Athens ended up revolving around the classical period). As I walked to the museum I felt as if I'd seen Athens before, just not in Europe. It reminded me of Bali, with its chaotic scooter and car traffic, and open fronted shops that mostly sell tourist trinkets or whatever other odds'n'sods they can get their hands on. Like Bali, there are potholes in the streets, songbirds in small cages and touts everywhere. Athens isn't Southeast Europe. It's Southeast Asia.
It was also en route to the museum that I met this snappy dresser, who works as a doorman for a pet shop:
I didn't catch his name but he's one of the very few things that made me crack a smile in Athens, so I'll call him Aristophanes.
The museum is, of course, exceptional. It would be impossible for a national archaeological museum in Greece not to be, and the treasures here include some of the most famous artefacts ever found. The Antikythera mechanism - a device used for astronomy that is essentially the world's first computer - is here. So is the golden death mask found by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae: I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon (except it isn't Agamemnon).
I only had one dorm mate: I had disclosed the Bulgarian bed bugs to management, who were having a bit each way by not putting any new people in the dorm, but not moving out existing guests either. But this one dorm mate was one too many. She woke up at around 5AM and starting packing her bags. I knew she was checking out and assumed she was leaving for an early flight or train, so I tolerated the disruption. She started to annoy me when, after about 10 minutes of flashing her mobile phone torch in every direction (but mostly at my eyes) she refused to turn the main light on in order to do whatever she was doing faster. And then she made me downright furious by turning off the phone light and getting back into bed.
She wasn't checking out early. She had merely woken up, so decided she might as well pack. At 5AM, when she was checking out at 10. I'd been woken up, and kept awake long enough that I would struggle to get back to sleep, for no reason at all. I gave her both barrels, asking why she had done it then - she had no answer - and whether she was concerned that she had disturbed me: again, no answer. So I gave a lecture about how dorms only work if people show mutual respect and mutual courtesy, before she put her eye mask back on without an answer.
I was well and truly awake so there was no reason not to start my day, but the shower was directly on the other side of the wall to her pillow and I was worried I might prevent her from getting back to sleep. But as I said, mutual respect and mutual courtesy. Instead I gave her 10 minutes to make sure of it, and *then* ran the shower. I hope I gave her bed bugs too.
The day had gotten off to a stressful and premature start, but I wanted to make the best of it, and so I headed back in time to the heart of classical Athens: the Agora. This *should* have been a profound experience: these couple of hectares are where democracy started, where for the first time in civilised history people came together in their thousands to share in decision-making for their community. It wasn't what we recognise as an inclusive democracy today - women, slaves and immigrants had no voting rights - but it was truly revolutionary for its time and one of the most important achievements in the human story.
I didn't get to enjoy being in this very special place for all that long, though, because I was suddenly having a lot of trouble standing up. I was halfway up a steep set of stone steps when Athens began rocking back and forth beneath my feet. I've never been prone to vertigo, and this was one of the scariest things I had experienced. I climbed - staggered, crawled - back down the steps, holding onto whatever I could find, and sat down on the first available bench. I didn't know what was happening, and even as common sense told me it was probably heat stroke, my mind kept zeroing in on that second word - stroke - until Athens eventually stopped rocking back and forth. I retreated back to the hostel, shaken but relieved it was apparently over.
For the first time on this trip I felt like going home, but that wasn't an option. And a couple of hours rest was enough for me to assume it really was heat stroke and to tackle the second, more prominent half of Athens' ancient core: the Acropolis. With plenty of water, to be safe. In the end I got up there and back alright, minus a brief showdown with an Acropolis employee who wanted to stop me drinking some juice to deal with low blood sugar. I explained it to her, but she didn't care. I finished drinking the juice: I didn't care either. After descending I went up to the roof of the hostel, which has a rather enviable view of the Acropolis at night:
The next day I woke up with more cold symptoms, which felt a little unfair given I'd last been sick only two weeks earlier. The vertigo was back too, though only as I got in and out of bed. Ready to call time on a miserable few days, I decided to make a quick visit to the Acropolis Museum and then catch an earlier bus out of town. The Museum is fantastic, but it's let down by something out of its control, that what should be its centrepiece exhibit - the Parthenon Marbles - are in the British Museum, not here. It has plaster casts in the niches where the real Marbles would be exhibited. I understand the British are concerned about the precedent if they repatriate artefacts, and I wouldn't want museums to end up stripped of everything but their own national history. But the marbles are as significant to Greek history as the crown jewels are to England's. Send them home.
There hasn't been a country so far where I had a less enjoyable time than Greece. It wasn't Greece's fault (ok, maybe the train was. Don't know what happened there): bad luck can happen anywhere. And I already knew before arriving that I was massively short-changing Greece by only going to Athens: I'd love to come back soon and go to Mycenae, to Meteora, to Delphi and island hop through Santorini, Rhodes and Crete. There's a budget airline now that flies from Australia to Athens, so it might not be so far off into the future
Declaring myself well and truly done with Athens, then, I headed to Patra, where I was going to stay the night before getting a ferry to Italy the next day. It's a city untouched by the hostel industry, so there was nothing for it but to stay in a hotel. For €36 I had a double bed. I had a balcony that looked out over the bay. I got little soaps and shampoo bottles. It had a bath. IT HAD A BATH. I lay in the bath, listening to a torrential rain storm outside (between that and the vertigo I didn't have high hopes for the ferry). I had a 12PM check-out so when I woke up I had another bath. The stresses - if not the symptoms - of the past week washed away. Bliss.
Of course, this was my time in Greece, so it couldn't possibly end that well. The Swans and They Who Must Not Be Named saw to that the next day, but within minutes of the game ending I was out of the hotel, on my way out of Greece, on my way out of the worst part of the trip, and on my way onto this thing:
I like big boats and I cannot lie.
Manchester note: though I'm obviously publishing this some days after the mass murder in Manchester, the intro to this was written beforehand and I've decided to leave it as is. The few days in Istanbul that I lost to paranoia are, self-evidently, as nothing to the crime committed against young people - mostly women, this was an assault aimed directly at women and girls, as a friend rightly helped me recognise - that stole lives, physical and mental wellbeing - from so many people. I'm keeping the intro out of fidelity to what I'm trying to do with this blog, which is to tell a story for those who are interested, but also for me to look back on in 40 years and think 'yes, I really did this, and this is how I did it, and why I did it that way', and I'm not sure I should be retrospectively re-editing that sort of thing. It's just so profoundly unfair that those kids will never get to write and look back on their own self-indulgent travel blogs. So unfair.
*
There's a hole in my bucket list. The plan for this trip always included Istanbul, right from its earliest sketches through to early this year. Along with Athens and Rome, it's one of the cities that founded Europe, that turned a peninsular at one end of the world into a continent - not geographically, perhaps, but certainly culturally. To do this trip and not include it feels incomplete. It wasn't going to be just Istanbul, either: I wanted to go to Ephesus and perhaps Pamukkale, and I'd resolved that a balloon ride over Cappadocia was going to be one of two outrageously expensive special events along the journey.
I tried to ignore the buzzing sound in my ear - that perhaps I'd missed my window to visit, that discretion is the better part of valour - for a long time. Each time there was a new incident I'd pull out a calculator and rationalise that even if there was an attack every couple of months, on average, that the odds of being in a terrible place at a terrible time were still minuscule. Last year's coup attempt came and went and still I refused to accept that it wasn't going to happen. Discretion as the better part of valour felt a lot like letting fear win. Fear isn't supposed to win.
The first dent in my resistance came when DFAT downgraded Istanbul to 'reconsider your need to travel'. My preferred travel insurer would no longer cover me, but still I reasoned that I could always buy a second policy to cover me if I still decided to go. After yet another incident around New Years, somebody I trust, who's in a position to make informed judgments about these things, told me it was time to call it. Even then I partly demurred, but rearranged the planned timetable: I'd strip back the time I'd allocated for Turkey, surrender Cappadocia and park a few extra days in Sofia, pending any changes in Istanbul. From Bulgaria it would be easy enough to sneak across the border for a couple of days, even if just to see the Hagia Sophia, if the situation seemed calm.
It didn't happen. Partly that's a function of the fatigue that set in back in Florence and hasn't yet fully subsided (and probably won't). Partly it's that I enjoyed Transylvania a lot and ultimately added a couple of days there, shaving some of the hypothetical Istanbul days back from Sofia. And partly it's because I knew I wouldn't enjoy myself if I spent the whole time jumping at shadows. The maths was on my side - it always was - but understanding that the odds are low and acting as if the odds are low are different things. Thankfully the days where I might have been in Istanbul have come and gone without any further horrors there, as they were always likely to. I can only hope the city's luck, such as it is, continues to hold. Maybe the window will open again one day.
If you can't be with the one you love, then, love the one you're with. Admittedly I didn't love either of Bucharest or Sofia, but we got along well enough. They were both relatively small cities, by European standards, until only 150 years ago and their adolescence was scourged by the wars and Communism. They haven't had the charmed run of it that Melbourne has, and it shows.
Bucharest is the most car-heavy city I've encountered since way back in Dubai. It's still walkable, but parts of it are choked with traffic, something that I'm increasingly not used to and that will feel positively alien by the time I'm back home. Strangely, though, drivers here are more respectful of pedestrians than anywhere else I've been in Europe. It took me far too long to understand the first rule of zebra crossings in Europe, which is that there's really no such thing as zebra crossings, and whoever gets there first has right of way. It's a confidence game. Drivers in Romania actually stop to let you cross, unprompted by your daring them to run you over. A pleasant change. It's not all fun and games for pedestrians, though: there's something about finding exposed wires lying on the footpath - twice - that encourages you to watch your step.
The hostel was an improvement on Brasov, insofar as the bathrooms didn't need sandbagging, but at least the one in Brasov was honest. I booked a six bed dorm, but upon arrival found myself in a room with eight beds. Correction: I found myself in an annex to a room with eight beds: one end didn't have a wall, only a curtain between the room and the main hall. Hmm. I questioned the extra beds - six is the maximum I'll book - and was given an improvised explanation that they'd had a big group the previous week and two of the beds were temporary, and not in use. A few hours later, sure enough, all eight beds were occupied. I considered remonstrating but couldn't be bothered: I'd paid my money, so was unlikely to get anywhere, and I didn't have the energy to find somewhere else even if I could.
My forbearance was at least rewarded by having the entire space to myself on the third night, and before that I got to enjoy the company of a quartet of Romanian guys, in Bucharest for a Deep Purple concert (did anybody know these guys were still around? Turns out they are 80% alive and 60% still touring). They were obviously heavily into music and I asked if they were a band, because they looked the part. This got me into trouble because one of them pointedly asked which of them I thought was the drummer. Luckily only three of the four were in the room, so I said it was clearly the other guy. They seemed happy with that assessment, but then I'm unsure if they told the other guy.
Although I had two and a half days here, there was really only one significant item on the agenda. The Palace of Parliament was the pet white elephant of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in the 1980s. It's the second largest administrative building in the world, coming in behind the Pentagon: I can only assume nobody told Nicolae until too late, because it's hard to imagine his megalomania could accomodate being bested by the US military, of all institutions.
The building is a grotesque, but admittedly awe-inspiring monument to unbridled hubris. It's a Communist-era Palace of Versailles, built not for an absolute monarch but an absolute dictator. Indeed, Elena saw Versailles on a state visit to France - I bet she didn't have to line up for three hours - and was entranced by the chandeliers. Thanks to that visit the Parliament now has 8200 chandeliers: more than Versailles. Some are so big that maintaining them requires climbing inside from the floor above. The electricity bill is so enormous that less than half of the lights are turned on, and so the interior exists in a permanent state of gloomy twilight. Because of that and the fact I was allowed to take mobile phone pictures for free, but had to pay $12 to use my proper camera, my photos are even worse than usual. But hopefully these give an idea of the sheer absurdity of it all:
There are over 40 major meeting rooms, each decorated in their own sumptuous style. There are curtains that are six stories high and weigh 450kg. There are chambers for the Senate and Council of Deputies, and then there's a near identical replica chamber of the latter that was intended to become a theatre for Communist party grandees. Monumental halls lead only to more monumental halls: at one point four of them converge in a central atrium, and the doors of each can retract away so that, the guide told me, a semi-trailer can be driven through the building. I suspect they might have had tanks, rather than trucks, in mind though.
Building this Potemkin palace must have chewed up an enormous proportion of what was an already small economy in the 1980s, and I couldn't help but think back to the single room shacks in rural Transylvania. It still wasn't finished when the Ceausescus were literally taken out the back and shot during the 1989 Revolution, and the new government was faced with the question of what to do with the damn thing. Some wanted to knock it down as a symbol of dictatorship: wiser heads pointed to the unfortunate truth that too much money had been wasted on it to tear it down unused.
It now serves as the Parliament, and, though it'll never earn its keep, they raise some extra cash by hosting conferences in what was the theatre for the apparatchiki. I was quite taken by one of the proposals from the 1990s, though: apparently Donald Trump tried to buy it and turn it into a casino. I suggested they give it to him in return for resigning as President and moving to Romania to run it personally. My tour guide just gave me a look.
I'd given myself an extra day in Bucharest so I could watch the Swans play the next morning and WE WON ANOTHER ONE! The Swans have never lost a match while I have been in Romania. If only the visa waiver period was long enough I might well have settled in for the duration, forgoing such cities as Rome, Prague, Moscow, Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam and London for the cause. We've now beaten Brisbane and North Melbourne and I can say with confidence that we are at least the 16th best team in the competition.
Now. You may have noticed that I am starting to fall behind on this blog somewhat. I've always warned that I struggle mightily with writer's block, and after receiving quite too many overly generous comments about the blog my inner perfectionist screams at me to go back, to re-write, to tinker, to second guess. But that's not been the biggest problem so far. No, my problem has been that whenever I set aside time to write I meet people to talk to instead.
I had a nine hour train journey from Bucharest to Sofia, which had been assigned to finishing off my Transylvania piece and writing the first half of this one. Then I met a fellow Australian named Ash, who was at Melbourne Uni at the same time I was and lived about 50m from my old home (though he left just before I arrived). We hit it off immediately and my nine hours of writing became nine hours of talking. So if there's any hint of staleness in this post - as if I'm writing while looking in a rear view mirror - blame Ash, not me. He's an enabler. Hopefully we'll see each other again when we're both home.
I kept taking it easy in Sofia, a city where I had very few plans and several days in which to plan them. I set out on my first day for a walk, and with little idea of what I wanted to see I grabbed a map from the hostel reception with a suggested sight-seeing route. It lasted about 15 minutes and half a dozen wrong turns before I gave up. I can't explain it - it's not as if the city has a particularly complicated layout - but every time I'd set out in the direction indicated by the map, and a few minutes later I'd cross-reference on Google Maps and find I'd gone in the opposite direction. So I returned to my tried and true method of aimless wandering until I found something interesting.
The first thing you notice is the footpaths - or at least, they'd better be the first thing you notice. Cobblestones have been trying to kill me ever since Lisbon, and have almost succeeded a number of times (forming an alliance with the snow in Madrid was particularly sneaky), but cobblestones have nothing on Sofia's footpaths. Potholes, broken concrete, raised tram tracks, crumbling phone wire pits, rocks and twisted roots: if you can think of it, Sofia is trying to break your ankles with it. Never mind sight-seeing: I was fully pre-occupied just scouting out the ground in front of me. There are so many broken tiles that in the early evening the entire city chimes to the beat of peak hour. It's quite musical.
Eventually I found my way to the main subway station, where I spotted some oddly Russian-flavoured souvenirs, considering Sofia is in Bulgaria, not Russia:
I may have been tempted, if I were not expecting to have my bags searched on the Russian border in a few weeks.
From there I stumbled across the Sofia History Museum, and given how little I know about Sofia I paid eight leva (about $6) to check it out. They wanted another $12 on top of that to take pictures, though, so I politely declined. The museum isn't very good, unfortunately, consisting mainly of old dresses and furniture, and it somehow completely ignores World War II or Communism. They have staff standing guard in every room, which is normal, but here they get up out of their chairs and follow you from exhibit to exhibit, which is not normal.
Mostly they were just silent, vaguely intimidating presences looming behind me, but one was very eager to show me their new, prized exhibit. It's a tram, and the most exciting part is that you can climb inside and sit in the tram. I told her that where I live we have trams too, and she nodded and told me again that I could sit in the tram. I said it reminded me of home, where I catch trams to go to work each day. She nodded and repeated that I could sit in the tram. I gave up and sat in the tram.
After being washed out the next day, I eventually made it to the most interesting museum in Sofia: the Museum of Socialist Art. I'd been expecting a bunch of Socialist realist paintings, propaganda posters and statues. There were plenty of the latter, at least, and my old mate Vladimir was looking a little hot out there in the sun so I offered him a drink. He didn't seem impressed by the choice:
Inside, though, I found a surprisingly fascinating museum. Rather than endless heroic farmers and foundry workers, the art was quite modern and sneakily subversive. A favourite topic of the regime was the Communists' struggle against the fascist government during World War II, and so there was plenty of scope for artists to depict interrogations, government brutality and executions that ostensibly represented what the regime thought they did, but that could just as easily be read as commentary on what the artists themselves lived through.
I hadn't planned to go to the Sofia Zoo, anticipating that it wouldn't be any good. But I had time after the art gallery, and it was within walking distance so curiosity got the better of me. It is, indeed, no good and, and then when I turned to leave I realised I didn't know any of the bus routes. So I just went to the stop and hoped I'd be able to communicate to the driver that I wanted to get to the centre of town. The driver of the first bus I boarded - the 93 - simply grunted at the words 'city centre', said a loud 'NO' and used his thumb to indicate I should get the hell off his bus. Fair enough.
The next bus - the 65 - arrived mere seconds later. 'Centre?', I asked. 'Town'? The driver grunted, said 'NO', but this time was helpful enough to give me the bus route I needed. '93!'.
"Oh!", I complained, and pointed at the 93 that was still only 50m up the road. "He said no!"
65 grunted again, shrugging his shoulders, suggesting there was nothing he could do. But then he looked ahead and seemingly reconsidered our options. Pointing with his thumb at the nearest available seat, he closed the doors and the bus took off, waving away my wallet when I attempted to buy a ticket. I had no idea what was happening. If this was a kidnap attempt it was poorly thought out: I knew the bus number and the time it was at Sofia Zoo, so we could rule that out. But where was he taking me? I didn't know what the plan was, but from the way we stuck on 93's tail, barreling through a couple of stops in the process, my best guess was that he was trying to overtake our quarry and get me one stop ahead so I could catch the 93 after all.
This continued for a good ten minutes, the driver grunting and muttering to himself every time a car got between us and 93. This was all very exciting - if a touch baffling - but I still didn't know whether 93 was the bus I needed to get into town. We could very well reel in 93, only for me to board the bus, shrug my shoulders at the confused driver who'd told me to go away back at the zoo... and then end up somewhere out in the suburbs. So when I spotted a subway station out the window - subway stations have maps of subway networks, and I could find my way home - I started madly gesticulating for my driver to let me out. He was enjoying the chase, I think, and so he was a bit reluctant but he eventually opened the doors.
That was the high point in Bulgaria. I'd been planning to use the next day for a bush walk: there is allegedly a nice waterfall somewhere on the Vitosha mountain, on the outskirts of Sofia. I'd been battling inexplicably low blood sugar all week, though - on one night I had 1.5 litres of soft drink in the space of 12 hours - and I reluctantly concluded that it was a bad idea to go traipsing around the forest in a foreign country with no rescue service and a limit to how much sugar I could carry. So as much as I'd like to say diabetes doesn't stop me from doing anything, it's not strictly true.
Instead I just bounced around Sofia, hanging out at the hostel until a fellow guest started murdering a ukulele, and then fled to a hipster vegetarian cafe (which are everywhere here, by the way: an unexpected bonus). The power went out just after my meal arrived. If you want a perfect metaphor for an unequal society, look no further than a restaurant where the stoves aren't working, and those who arrived first are happily eating away while everybody else watches on, hungry but literally powerless.
I wasn't able to book my hostel for the last night in Bulgaria - not unless I wanted to shift to an 18 bed dorm - so I decamped to Plovdiv, a small city a couple of hours away. It was billed, quite rightly, as having a lovely old town and an impressive Roman theatre:
There's now a road tunnel directly underneath that theatre, which I'm sure the conservators were just thrilled about. I wandered about the old town for a while, including finding my way to a lookout on a site that is apparently a contender for the oldest settlement in Europe. But frankly my heart wasn't in it. Tired, and with an exceptionally long commute due the next day, I wish I'd just changed hostels in Sofia and kept lazing about there.
I needed to eat, so I tried the only restaurant near the hostel with vegetarian options. Upon asking for a table I was told there weren't any by the waiter. Then I found one anyway and spent 20 minutes being ignored before I managed to obtain a menu. Then another 30 minutes of being ignored before managing to order. A Bulgarian man on the next table eventually interceded on my behalf when a waiter spoke to him, but also told me my treatment was "normal". I don't subscribe to the offensive notion that the customer is always right, but surely we can agree that the customer is always at least present?
That meal felt like a tone setter. Plovdiv, nice though it was, was the jumping off point for the worst week of the entire trip.
