Slovenia

Going to Slovenia I would finally get a train. The now-fading romance of a long train journey, with its sleeping compartments, dining cars, and bow-tied porters was one of this trip's prospects that I most looked forward to. Up til now the lack of infrastructure in the areas I was traveling and the relative cheapness of flying had kept me off the rails. But now I'd have my chance. From Zadar I took a bus to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where after a layover of a few hours I would catch my train to Ljubljana Slovenia.

My train to Ljubljana was not crowded and I shared my six-person compartment with an elderly couple returning home from visiting a relative. Soon we were on our way and into the countryside. It had been hot weather my entire trip so far and even in the middle of the night I was never cold in shorts and a t-shirt. But now a chill was descending which provoked mists from the wooded country the train traversed. I fished out my jacket and zipped it up and folded my arms against the cool damp.

The train trip was lovely and so was Ljubljana. It is a small town of cobblestone streets and baroque buildings with pastel facades and much sculpture and ornament at the accents. A river cuts through the town and the tall, narrow houses flush against the water foreshadowed Amsterdam.

I checked in at my hostel and walked into my dorm room to find a girl changing clothes. I turned around and waited outside the room while she finished. She was from England and had just met a group of English guys staying in another room. They were going out for dinner and would I like to come?

I had planned on walking around Ljubljana by myself and taking some pictures but I said yes. Dinner was fine and afterwards we were off to a bar with strange, macabre decor. It was basically the cryptkeeper's pad, full of skulls and bones and skeletons climbing at you out of coffins. Here we joined up with another group of young people from England and with a 2-for-1 drink special the cocktails were flowing.

I looked around the table choked with plastic cups containing Mai Tai's, Mojitos, other dyed concoctions of sugar and booze. I was the only person sitting there who was not from the UK. They were all nice people; friendly, welcoming, not insular. But I felt like I was at a Uni bar in Leeds that had been transported to Slovenia. This wasn't what I came for. I got up from the table and walked out into the night alone.

I got down to the wandering that I'd earlier denied myself. Following any sound of life, no matter how faint. Going down any darkened street, as long as it might lead somewhere.

By and by I came to some kind of outdoor music hall. I could hear the production going on inside but couldn't see anything for the whole place was surrounded by a high stone wall. I walked to the rear where the wall ran along a leafy street and sat down on a bench. A man with long hair and a beard walked past and we regarded each other with the respectful wariness that people in cities employ when their paths cross in dark places in the night. He sat down a couple benches over and lit a cigarette.

I listened to the music and the scattered applause and I wanted to see what was going on. I looked at the wall. It was uneven, with the building stones jutting out from the masonry here and there. It was climbable.

I had just propped my arms up on the top of the wall and was pushing my head up when the man smoking on the bench noticed what I was doing and started shouting at me in Slovenian. I lifted my head up and saw nothing, just more dark. I jumped down from the wall and asked him what was wrong.

He responded in English saying that there's nothing to see, it's just another wall. He was waiting for his friends to get out of the concert so they could go to a bar. I told him why I was in Ljubljana and we talked about traveling. I was waiting for him to invite me to go out with him and his friends but he did not. I said goodbye and we parted ways.

I walked on and the street I took led under an arch of a building straddling the roadway. I went through and came out in the middle of a curving street that looked something like this:


I could go either left or right. I started left and then stopped in my tracks. I smelled marijuana.

I turned around and saw two men passing a hand-rolled cigarette in the otherwise deserted street. I approached them and asked to smoke. One of them passed me the joint and the other one addressed me.

"You are a tourist?"
"Yes"
"Where you from?"
"America."
"America," he said, repeating the word as if my answer was unexpected but still vaguely displeased him.

After hitting it a couple times I offered the joint back to the man who'd given it to me but he waved it off. "It's our second one," he said. Then they walked away.

The joint had tobacco in it which I don't use and it gave me a wicked head buzz that I had to sit down to let pass. After a minute it did and I got up and continued wandering. The night was ending now and I watched the groups of locals who'd been drinking together come out of the bars and split up, saying Great Night and See You Later, I imagined. I watched the couples walking arm-in-arm home to their flats, to make love in their warm beds.

On one street I heard someone calling 'American, American' and saw it was a group of Slovenians I had talked to for a minute back at the skeleton bar. They asked about a girl from Northern Ireland I was talking to there, asked where she was. I told them I had left them and when they asked why I said I just wanted to be alone. I don't think it translated because they just waved and said goodnight and kept walking. The town was pretty much asleep at that point and I walked on home myself.

It ended up being what I'd call a great night. I'd had some run-ins with locals, seen the city in its pretty dark, gotten high. It sure beat staying in that bar. With that crowd I had been a tourist. Without them, I was a traveler again. I knew that to the locals there wasn't any difference, but that wasn't the point. A sage advises about traveling, "see, do not be seen". It's the first part of this advice that's the more important. And you simply see more alone.

On to Venice. A few more picture of Ljubljana below.

Croatia

I don't know whether the differences a traveler perceives when crossing a border are real or merely a product of his desire to see differences, but Croatia looked different to me. It was nicer than Montenegro. It had the same white or off-white colored houses and the same orange-tiled roofs, but the homes were larger and had more land. Many featured tidy walled gardens in front and rows of fruit trees or other plantings banking down the sides from the high ground of the house. Green spires of cypress trees dotted the rolling fields of long gold grass that flattened when the breeze blew and righted when it passed.

I would end up kind of fucking up this country. Apparently the place to be in Croatia are the islands that run up the whole coastline. But I never made it to them. I didn't have a set itinerary and by the time I decided to go to Hvar, one of the main attraction islands, all the good hostels were booked up. Same thing for the second island I was shooting for, Pag. This time I didn't procrastinate - there was a music festival I didn't know about and all the accommodation was booked solid. I'd also never planned on going to Montenegro at all and ended up staying five days, and that time was Croatia time. All these factors conspired to keep me on the mainland.

My first stop was Dubrovnik, the 'pearl of the Adriatic' as Byron dubbed it. Dubrovnik had been an independent city-state made wealthy by maritime trade, in the vein of Venice and Genoa. With its walled, medieval Old Town it was like a larger, more touristy version of Kotor, but admittedly more beautiful. It was like an outdoor museum. Pristine churches and palaces in the Venetian style and promenades of white stone polished by centuries of walkers to the smoothness of marble. You could slide down the street as over ice with just your socks on.

It was a lovely place, but it was expensive and crowded, and after a day and a night I was ready to move on. My next stop was Split, the site of the summer palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian. As a Classics major I was keen to see it and it proved cool enough. The people of Split have built their town into the actual ruins of the palace. This was novel, but the place would be better off as a museum. The halls and sanctums were full of cheap souvenir shops and I felt the Roman ghosts had been long ago expelled.

With the islands no longer a possibility I had one stop left: Zadar. Zadar was supposedly the least built up of the major coastal towns. I lucked out with a good hostel and my stay in this place ended up being the highlight of my visit to Croatia.

The music festival on Pag island I mentioned was called Hideout. It was a dance/house/electronic festival and apparently the partying was really hard. I'd been meeting refugees from it for a few days now on my way up the coast and my second night in Zadar I went with four of them who were at my hostel into the old town for drinks. We had a fine time and one of them, a kid from London of Mauritian descent, suggested an expedition to these famous lakes they have at Krka National Park. We all agreed to go and would leave early the next morning.

Our first bus left Zadar at 8 AM and two hours and two buses later we were at the park. The natural phenomenon contained there is called a karst, which is a formation of limestone ravines through which a river descends via a series of sinks and waterfalls. We hiked down a steep trail to the pools at the bottom where we could go swimming. Our crew was the people I'd gone out with the night before - two guys and one girl from England plus an Australian guy - along with a Belgian girl my age who'd been a tennis prodigy and had played in college in Alabama and with the most incredible long body for it.

We reached the bottom and changed into our swim clothes and scrambled down the roots of trees and the dirt banks (there was no beach) into the water. The lagoon was fed by a shelf of waterfalls twenty feet high and a hundred feet wide. The day was warm with the sun shining and the forested hills rose up above us and let me tell you it was quite a setting. After we swam for a while we made a picnic in a nearby park and then I laid down on my back to read while my new friends slept.

Where we transferred at some random town to get our bus back to Zadar we took leave of the guy who'd come up with the whole idea. He was going to Dubrovnik where he had a flight back home to London. It was a sad parting because we'd all gotten along well and had a fun couple of days together. The bus station was even playing some melancholy song - Everybody Hurts by REM I think it was - which was hilarious but also poignant. Croatia was ending.

That night the girls went to the local market and made fried sausages and boiled potatoes and salad for dinner. We ate this meal and drank wine at a picnic table in the front yard of the hostel in the gathering twilight of the day we'd made together. After dinner I made my plan to leave the country the next morning.

Slovenia was next, a stopover before I went to Venice to visit the old friend I had managed to get through to. I was leaving the coast - Central Europe lay ahead.

Kotor

I'd been promised by other travelers that the Adriatic coast only got better as you went north. My final stop in Montenegro, the town of Kotor, kept their word.

Budva had been nice, but it was my hostel that really made my time there. It was quiet, laid back and uncrowded - just what I needed after frantic Istanbul. An Italian from Venice named Giacomo ran the place along with his girl who was from Mexico City. They'd met when he checked her into a hostel he was working at in London. The night I arrived she and the other Mexican girl from Elgin made quesadillas and all the guests ate together in the garden.

36 hours after this dinner I was on my way to Kotor. I'd heard rave reviews about this town but when I got off the bus it looked unassuming. I followed the main road down into the old town and immediately grew happy. It was what I dreamt of when I pictured Europe. Narrow streets cutting through ancient buildings, locals outside cafes nursing little porcelain cups of espresso, and not a car in sight - there was no room for them. I saw what that Aussie in Istanbul meant when he said that Montenegro remained unpillaged, if not undiscovered.

Kotor is situated at the end of a bay carved 5 miles inland from the broader Adriatic. As protection against hostiles its medieval occupants had raised a fortress high into the mountains that define this coast, the ruins of which you can still climb up. After settling in at my accommodation (I had another great hostel in Kotor, in a building dating from the 14th century. Heavy wooden doors with handles and braces of black iron and candlelanterns and stone vaulting for a ceiling), I set out to storm these ramparts. It was a thousand steps and I was winded as hell by the time I reached the top, but I'd say it was worth it. This was what I saw:




After that climb and a debauch my last night in Budva I was ready to chill. I dined alone and went to bed early. I slept in the next day and then found a shaded seat at a cafe in a white-floored plaza. I spent the day drinking 7Up from green glass bottles, reading my book and making translations from the Spanish of Pablo Neruda's poems.

At the end of my last day in Kotor I decided to walk out along the bay as the sun was going down. At the last point where I could see the town before the continuing path put it out of sight I found a little pier. I sat down. I looked back at the town. The fortress walls crisscrossing the mountain whose sepia-colored brush was turning gold in the draining light. Above the ridge huge clouds billowed high into the sky, colored cream and pink by the light of the setting sun, like flower blossoms of outrageous scale. Like the chemistry experiment of some adolescent god gone terribly and beautifully awry.

On the pier I had noticed a towel and a pair of flip flops seemingly unattended. Sure enough there then rose from the surface of the water a tall, beautiful girl - a mermaid, the fantastical creature that was the final missing piece to this fairy-tale place.

So far in this blog I've basically written only about the good stuff. I've left out the shitty sleep from sharing a dorm with seven other people; the exhaustion of traveling too quickly, trying to squeeze too much in and knowing you're shortchanging a place; the disappointment in finding that not every other traveler is fun and warm and eager to be friends - that traveling is not some magic filter that sifts through only amazing people. But in moments like I had sitting on that pier, beholding that scene with the only sound the light splashing of the beautiful swimmer, I experienced that special kind of euphoria that travel promises, that only travel can provide. A few more pictures below.