These were the words that, when exiting the frothing mouth of a rabid train conductor this morning, woke us from our slumber and ushered in the new day…

October 23rd 2003, Croatia

Background…

After a haphazard attempt to get into Eastern Europe as quickly as possible, which involved a detour through the budget travellers’ dream cities Paris, Lausanne and Venice, we finally made our sluggish way from Trieste in eastern Italy into Slovenia. With our passports freshly stamped and exuding that pleasant odour that only a newly acquired passport stamp can give, we breathed a sigh of relief…we had made it into Eastern Europe and the trip had finally (truly) begun.

First stop Ljubljana to get to the capital and make it our base camp. We booked into a new hostel called “Celica” which had been recently renovated from a foreboding, dilapidated military prison into a chic art gallery and hostel. So much for roughing it out east. Whether sipping capuccinos, meditating, relaxing on futons or merely admiring the artistically rendered cells/rooms, the inhabitants and ambience of the place were far removed from my last memories of Eastern Europe; namely snow, cold and the alluring drabness of the lingering communist architecture and decore.

We explored the pleasant city and later ventured off into the mountains and beautiful autumn foliage (It is funny how all of my memories in regards to “that” autumn feeling and “those” autumn colours are inextricably linked to trips to Armidale and the old teachers’ college ground despite being all of half the world away).

Anyway, I did manage to lose Steph for 4 hours, hopping onto a train which I thought already carried her only to realise (just before the quaint little town of Borovnica) that she was indeed not on board and I was carrying no foreign currency. I managed to pass 4 hours in this quaint little “Slovenian Wauchope”, home of the greatest Viaduct in Central Europe (1856-1944) of which only one slender pillar remained; silent homage to the kind of magnificent architecture that can only be worn down by the slow sands of time (and a few thousand pounds of the Allied arsenal dropped during WWII). Back in the hostel, I was reunited with a fretting Steph who was already thinking of how to compose the email to my parents – “Dear Mr and Mrs Mc….I’ve lost your son”…

So we topped off Slovenia with a trip to Bled, nestled by a pristine mountain lake with a hilltop castle dominating the scene, and Skoèjan Caves (a Unesco world heritage site) which satisfied my “Stalacticious desire” for the trip. We found it harder to get into neighbouring Croatia than we had anticipated and finally settled for a bus trip to Pula, site of one of the best preserved Roman Amphitheatres around (I am studying ancient history afterall). The bus trip was easily the worst of my life, the bus felt unbalanced the whole way… a sensation exacerbated by my hangups from the Moroccan car accident, the rain, bald tires and bad roads, and the kamikaze bus driver who thought that two hands on a steering wheel would be far too easy and who instead preoccupied himself with chain smoking and his mobile phone… Ironically, the straight stretches were the worst, for the bus would get the equivalent of the “death wobbles” and imitated the motions of a road-cone obstacle course. Ok I may be slightly exaggerating but it strengthened my resolve to turn this into a RAIL trip…

We arrived in Pula in rain, and left it in a similar manner…heading down the coast to Rijeka along some of the most beautiful coastline, with rugged limestone cliffs, quaint secluded coves and an offshore archipelago. A little more disconcerting were the rusting remnants of cars and occupants that remained at the bottom of the steep cliffs around every second or third corner. After a brief stop, we continued on (in a bus) to Zadar, along more amazing coastline and winding roads finally arriving at 8:45pm… what next?

I was determined to take the train and we trduged off to the adjacent train station, a fittingly run down communist leftover with a total of 6 trains departing daily. Asking the jolly Papa Guiseppe-esque gentleman if there were any trains that would take us to Split he pointed to the track. As my eyes followed the arc of his gesture I saw nothing…except a single carriage on the tracks. And then it clicked. This seemingly inconspicous carriage was indeed the train and it was leaving soon… (Steph later informed me she was thinking “dodge” all the way but was caught up in my childish enthusiasm about catching a one carriage train). So we clamoured aboard with destination Knin (rough translation Mount Isa meets Bansko), a ‘slight’ detour but better than a bus in my opinion.

The translation became all too apparent as we pulled into the station (11:27pm) in the pouring rain – it was subtle at first and then overpowering…that sulfurous stench that took me straight back to the Mount Isa smelter stacks, mmm-mmm. We hopped off and asked a not so Jolly Papa Guiseppe-esque character if there was a continuing train… sure…at 4am. Ah the joyous memories of that cosy Romanian border post came flooding back (through sulfurous stagnant marshlands mind you) and Steph looked at me with one of those “why?” looks. Shocking 80′s music (so tragically typical of Eastern Europe) emanated from the lone bar as a wretched man came and asked us for some coins before coughing up the better part of his spleen onto the floor. I readily acknowledged my mistake.

We trudged down the street in search of who knows what, a bed, a cafe, a cliff, and settled by the damp roadside some 20 minutes from the station. Surely enough, 2 self proclaimed “drunkies” came past and plonked down beside us…past experience had told me that when potentially dodgy people seek you out there is only one remedy… Football. Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester united, football makes the world a safer place. They happily jabbered on for 1/2 hr about everything related to football in their Serbian-Ingleski dialect; hooligans, Mark Viduka, David Beckham, Victoria Beckham giving fellatio…not so threatening after all… when the conversation switched to drugs and how “if we gave money they give cocaine or heroine”,I knew our hearty conversation had come to an end. We politely made our excuses and headed back (through the rain) to the train station.

The ‘Papa Knin’ appeared to have changed his tune and said in German “Zug nach Split dort…” once again the familiar arcing gesture took my gaze to a familiar single carriage sitting lonesomely in the middle of the tracks. “Dort Schlafen…4 Uhr nach Split”… ok cool, we would have a bed afterall. We settled into one of the compartments and tried to sleep, surely enough at 4:20 we pulled out of the station and we were on our way. Had to switch trains at some random station at some un-godly hour and the friendly conductor kindly helped us out…unfortunately he did not board the continuing train and (under the gaze of a not so friendly conductor), we once again settled into another compartment scattering our belongings everywhere so as to deter any other passengers from entering and disturbing us and our sleep. We awoke at 6:50am thinking we had arrived but quickly dismissed that as a crazy notion and drifted off again. Then at 7:29am on the dot, exactly 19 and a half hours after setting out from Pula, we arrived at our destination; Split, home of Roman Emperor Diocletian’s Palace and its beautiful surrounds.

But of course, the happy conclusion of our journey was completely unknown to us, given that we were fast asleep and drooling at the time… and we would have to wait another 7 minutes for the news of our arrival…delivered in the charismatic manner that constitutes the title of this email.

P.S. As we booked into our private room and plonked onto our bed, I managed to relax enough to release a certain emission, not in itself a rare occurrence, but frightening in the sense that the odour that escaped activated our olfactory-memory sinapses and took us straight back to that sulfurous stagnant stench of Knin…hopefully that was the last remnant of that lovely town to make its way through my system… but who knows?