Travel impossible: or the road to nowhere
Dobro veče, my dear America-centric pals who are fascinated about the broad bright world! While you're all bickering about such insignificant issues like health-care (duh), media pundits (yawn) and the global crisis (Zzzzz), I'm going to divert your attention to a place which few people give a damn about - 'cept when there are a couple of hundred thousand tons of cluster bombs that are supposed to be wasted (and fast, please). A place whose name, however, is often evoked whenever we're talking in terms of political fragmentation, the Divide-And-Conquer/Rule principle, and about backward, 19-century mentality. Yes, I'm talking about the Balkans, this oh so pleasant place which is both supposed to be part of the modern world, part of Europe, and a connecting section between the East and West. And truly, it does possess features of both the East and West, as you will see.
Let's take transportation for example. My examples are always anecdotal, but when you pile a thousand anecdotal examples, I think we're already talking of a trend. See, the Balkans are said to be strolling fast toward Europe (really!). At least their eastern part already is considered part of it, as Bulgaria and Romania entered the EU (the fact they're kind of Division Two of the EU is another story - or maybe it ain't - I'll let you make the judgment).
My point is, what could be a more eloquent sign of the lack of real European integration than the fact that there's hardly any other corner of the supposedly "developed" world, and particularly Europe, where it is so hard to get your ass from one country to the neighboring one?
First, in order to make this authentic, you gotta play this:
(I'm sure you know who Goran Bregović is)
Now. In this part of the continent, highways seldom cross beyond state borders, even between current EU member states; railways sometimes reach a dead-end just like that, or they're never used although they're still there and are officially on the map; and planes almost never connect neighboring capital cities directly. The border crossings are very few, and one often has to make huge detours in order to actually cross the fucking border. This reality is still very much present even in the 21st century, and is inherited through volumes of history full of rows, contradictions, conflicts, unsettled disputes and outright animosity between the countries in the south-eastern corner of the Old Continent. And, despite all promises which the politicians in the region have put on their election record through all these years, practically no-one is doing anything significant toward improving the situation. But people are still voting for the same old circus monkeys. Typically Balkan-style tolerance. Meanwhile, unlike the politicians, the ordinary people of the Balkans are growing ever more curious about having a peek into the neighbor's yard, and even staying there for a while. But they're bound to meet a pile of absurd obstacles on their way, turning such a trip into a real Indiana Jones sort of adventure.
The roads, which are virtually non-existent (I'm of course over-dramatizing here). That's the perfect symbol of the eternally super-complicated relations in this region, where neighboring politicians often struggle to find a common language between themselves.
Only the one who has never taken the train from Sofia to Belgrade would remain blissfully unaware how terribly long those 400 kilometers could turn out to be. The most typical thing for that train is that it always "arrives when it decides to arrive" (kind of the Insha'Allah thing). So, the train timetable is just a wishful thing, and only serves to get a general idea of the actual distance between stations. Nothing more. In the shabby coupes smelling of socialist-realism, time seems to be frozen in the 1980's. And time crawls like a snail while you travel to your destination, slower than the saddest Macedonian folk ballad. The impression that you're on an express train is only vague - after crossing into Serbia, the train stops at every village and shack along the line, and between stations it pants like an ancient Trabi. It constantly fills with characters as if taken from an Emir Kusturica movie. And thus, for a whole day on the road. If you're lucky, it'd take you the standard 8 hours. If you're not (in 90% of the cases), that could be 12 and beyond. I remember a Polish girl I met on the seaside (long story, don't ask) who was telling me the story of her disastrous trip to Belgrade. She said taking the night train could be a decent offer as you'd spend most of the trip sleeping, but the day version was like a trip to Hell.
And if you're thinking the train absurds are valid only for the former Yugoslav republics, you'd be terribly wrong. Even the famous express train from Vienna to Istanbul could be full of such surprises. That's what happened to two friends of mine, a Bulgarian-German couple who live in Sofia and who attempted using this train two years ago. As they were passing by the coaches on the station, first they went past the Austrian one, which looked pretty normal (by Western standards anyway). Then they saw the Serbian coach which was more or less decent; and then they reached the Bulgarian one, out of which a huge wall of smoke was spewing. After boarding the train, the first thing they had to pass was a heap of charcoal which, it appears, was being used to heat the coach (!) which otherwise was relatively clean, but it awfully smelled of old style socialism anyway. Part of the attraction was to throw a few spades of charcoal into the oven yourself. Such an exotic trip wouldn't have been so bad if it had been on an exhibition train, but unfortunately Orient Express is not affordable to the average person. And normal speed trains are unavailable on these latitudes.
In some important hubs, the railway is even non-existent, and connections between some of the countries are impossible via train. Like the case between Bulgaria and Macedonia, a connection which has somehow been started over a dozen times for the last 20 years, and is still not completely constructed. It's one of the most eloquent examples of the bad heritage of the communist past which still leaves its scars on the present: former Yugoslavia was purposefully pursuing a policy of keeping Bulgarians and Macedonians apart and cutting the ethno-cultural link between them (by means of rewriting history, school and media brainwashing, and yes, logistical obstacles like the above mentioned). Those problems remain today - nowadays, both Sofia and Skopje are unintentionally maintaining the symbolic transport "Iron Wall" between themselves. If you want to reach Skopje via train, you'd still have to pass through the entire Serbia. And you'd have a day-long trip. You'd realize the absurdity of this by just having a brief look at the map. And don't even get me started on Zagreb, Sarajevo or Ljubljana... such a trip requires HUGE stoicism. My boss wanted to attend a U2 gig in Zagreb, and she eventually decided to get rid of her ticket when she realized what a logistical adventure that would've been.
And if you're still willing to say: "OK then, get the bus", you should think again! That could be an even bigger adventure. For instance, direct links between Sofia and the capitals of the former Yugo republics (except Skopje) are virtually non-existent. You'll have to catch a bus to Western Europe and it'll drop you at some gas station some 20 km from the city center, where you'd find yourself in the exciting company of Gypsy pimps, hookers, cigarette smugglers and drug dealers. Trying to reach any of those capitals means you'd have to get closely acquainted with such sights of interest like the bus station in Niš with its exotic inhabitants. There, you'd probably have to wait from 3 hours to half a day, and after your connection to Belgrade finally arrives, it'll turn out your supposedly "reserved" seat is not valid at all (because such a seat number does not exist), and you'll have to travel upright for 8 hours, or sitting on the floor at the crammed back of the bus, next to some weird looking Albanian with a funny white hat and huge moustache sitting on a wooden crate full of tomatoes or worse, chickens, under his ass. Still doesn't smell of Emir Kusturica, eh?
Despite all the hopes of the locals that most capital cities in the region would be linked by direct bus connections, that's still not happening. Probably the bus companies think it's not profitable, due to the small number of travelers. And the politicians seem to consider this a non-issue. Probably because they never use a train or a bus themselves. They travel in huge escorts of limos and SUVs. And it's a dead circle: the number of travelers is nil exactly because of the lack of proper connections. And the organizational nightmare... If you go to the bus station and attempt to reserve a ticket, they'll probably decide you need to see a shrink, "because there always are tickets available" (and yet you might end up standing upright in the bus). The local Serbian buses themselves are antiques and you'd often get the feeling you might not make the whole trip. A Canadian client of mine once told me of the day she was stupid enough to take such a bus in Southern Serbia. She said that at one point in the mountain, the bus struggled so hard to climb that she could clearly notice a herd of sheep outrunning it!
I can almost hear you scream already. "So, take the plane, fool!!!" Great idea! But not so fast, okay? It could sound very convenient. But again, it's a Mission Impossible. Remember, we're talking Balkans here. And here, nothing is as simple as it seems. In this case, mostly because you can't fly directly from one capital city to the neighboring one. In some cases, such a flight is comparable to a cruise-ship voyage across the Big Pond. A family friend reported that when he wanted to reach Zagreb, he had to change in Frankfurt (!) It may not sound that bad though, but you're still traveling a whole day. To Germany and then back. An ex class-mate of mine told me that he was trying to get to Sarajevo, and he had to make a connection in Milan (!!) So, as he was flying over Sarajevo, he could clearly see the airport where he was supposed to land, but first he had to make the trip to Italy, then back to Bosnia! Absurd! The same guy was later sent to Sarajevo again, he chose the option of a bus trip to Belgrade, and then plane to Sarajevo (are you following? use a map!) But because it was November, and there are always fogs over Sarajevo in the November evenings, the Belgrade-Sarajevo flight had to be postponed for nearly half a day, so he missed the entire event that he was going there for. And that's utterly stupid - the Serbian airline knew perfectly well that there are fogs on virtually every November evening in Sarajevo, and they could've easily moved the flight to noon time, when the fogs usually disperse.
The Balkans, especially the Western Balkans, are like a transport black hole, which one has to leap over in order to reach the West. And I mean both literally and metaphorically. There are even scarier travel examples - like the 10-hour trip from Sofia to Pristina in Kosovo, which is just 50 km away from our border. Or the bus trip from Istanbul to Bucharest via Varna along the western Black Sea coast, where you change two buses and one minibus across the Balkan Mountain passes. Or the brothel that is the Skopje bus station. The only ray of light in this area being the highway from Tirana to Skopje. All the remaining roads within both Albania and Macedonia being a quagmire. Granted, Albania is hectically building roads and tunnels into Kosovo (the latest one being opened in July 2009, a 8-km tunnel under the towering Šar mountain, which spares 3 hours of the Tirana-Pristina trip, and thus cuts the entire duration of the trip between "the two Albanian capitals" to just under 3 hrs.)
All that said, it's understandable why car travel remains the number one (and possibly, the only sensible) way on the Balkans. But even that is not too fast and comfortable, as there's almost no single highway on the Balkans which reaches and enters a neighboring country. Even the most strategic Pan-European Corridor IV does not fully consist of highways. In this case, the silent policy of reserved attitude toward the neighbors has again defeated commercial logic, because this is exactly the place where all the key transport corridors from the Middle East to West Europe meet with those from North and Central Europe to the Mediterranean. And there's a huge flow of goods and customers. And though every next government in the region comes to power with generous promises that the missing connections would be built, that's always election bullshit. And when sometimes, someone really decides to move a finger and do something on the issue, the ones at the other side of the border would shit on the whole plan and show some lack of interest for one reason or another (mostly political). For instance, when Serbia announced it'd start building the highway from Niš to our border, a panel of Sofia experts responded with the weird argument that "building our part of the highway to the border could only be on our agenda once Serbia enters the EU" (!) But even this sort of BS cannot possibly explain why building a second bridge across the Danube has been in the planning for more than two decades, and still nothing. Currently, there's only one land connection across this enormous river (between Bulgaria and Romania) - for its entire section from Belgrade until the very Black Sea coast. And that's more than 500 km!
So, seen from aside, the Balkan states probably look like a bunch of closed-minded grumblers who only occasionally look at each other, out of compulsion. As that same Polish girl told me, "When you travel around the Balkans, you have the feeling those countries have no desire to communicate whatsoever". One could say that, indeed. And, despite all the politicians' promises about new roads, new plane flights et al, the people of the Balkans, despite sharing so much common things, will still not be able to meet each other without having to endure a round-trip via the whole Europe, or a day-long torture on the shitty trains, buses and roads. And that, in itself, is pretty damn symbolic, IMO.
But yeah, you're still welcome to visit the beautiful Balkans, if you want to see what real adventure means. ;)
Let's take transportation for example. My examples are always anecdotal, but when you pile a thousand anecdotal examples, I think we're already talking of a trend. See, the Balkans are said to be strolling fast toward Europe (really!). At least their eastern part already is considered part of it, as Bulgaria and Romania entered the EU (the fact they're kind of Division Two of the EU is another story - or maybe it ain't - I'll let you make the judgment).
My point is, what could be a more eloquent sign of the lack of real European integration than the fact that there's hardly any other corner of the supposedly "developed" world, and particularly Europe, where it is so hard to get your ass from one country to the neighboring one?
First, in order to make this authentic, you gotta play this:
(I'm sure you know who Goran Bregović is)
Now. In this part of the continent, highways seldom cross beyond state borders, even between current EU member states; railways sometimes reach a dead-end just like that, or they're never used although they're still there and are officially on the map; and planes almost never connect neighboring capital cities directly. The border crossings are very few, and one often has to make huge detours in order to actually cross the fucking border. This reality is still very much present even in the 21st century, and is inherited through volumes of history full of rows, contradictions, conflicts, unsettled disputes and outright animosity between the countries in the south-eastern corner of the Old Continent. And, despite all promises which the politicians in the region have put on their election record through all these years, practically no-one is doing anything significant toward improving the situation. But people are still voting for the same old circus monkeys. Typically Balkan-style tolerance. Meanwhile, unlike the politicians, the ordinary people of the Balkans are growing ever more curious about having a peek into the neighbor's yard, and even staying there for a while. But they're bound to meet a pile of absurd obstacles on their way, turning such a trip into a real Indiana Jones sort of adventure.
The roads, which are virtually non-existent (I'm of course over-dramatizing here). That's the perfect symbol of the eternally super-complicated relations in this region, where neighboring politicians often struggle to find a common language between themselves.
Only the one who has never taken the train from Sofia to Belgrade would remain blissfully unaware how terribly long those 400 kilometers could turn out to be. The most typical thing for that train is that it always "arrives when it decides to arrive" (kind of the Insha'Allah thing). So, the train timetable is just a wishful thing, and only serves to get a general idea of the actual distance between stations. Nothing more. In the shabby coupes smelling of socialist-realism, time seems to be frozen in the 1980's. And time crawls like a snail while you travel to your destination, slower than the saddest Macedonian folk ballad. The impression that you're on an express train is only vague - after crossing into Serbia, the train stops at every village and shack along the line, and between stations it pants like an ancient Trabi. It constantly fills with characters as if taken from an Emir Kusturica movie. And thus, for a whole day on the road. If you're lucky, it'd take you the standard 8 hours. If you're not (in 90% of the cases), that could be 12 and beyond. I remember a Polish girl I met on the seaside (long story, don't ask) who was telling me the story of her disastrous trip to Belgrade. She said taking the night train could be a decent offer as you'd spend most of the trip sleeping, but the day version was like a trip to Hell.
And if you're thinking the train absurds are valid only for the former Yugoslav republics, you'd be terribly wrong. Even the famous express train from Vienna to Istanbul could be full of such surprises. That's what happened to two friends of mine, a Bulgarian-German couple who live in Sofia and who attempted using this train two years ago. As they were passing by the coaches on the station, first they went past the Austrian one, which looked pretty normal (by Western standards anyway). Then they saw the Serbian coach which was more or less decent; and then they reached the Bulgarian one, out of which a huge wall of smoke was spewing. After boarding the train, the first thing they had to pass was a heap of charcoal which, it appears, was being used to heat the coach (!) which otherwise was relatively clean, but it awfully smelled of old style socialism anyway. Part of the attraction was to throw a few spades of charcoal into the oven yourself. Such an exotic trip wouldn't have been so bad if it had been on an exhibition train, but unfortunately Orient Express is not affordable to the average person. And normal speed trains are unavailable on these latitudes.
In some important hubs, the railway is even non-existent, and connections between some of the countries are impossible via train. Like the case between Bulgaria and Macedonia, a connection which has somehow been started over a dozen times for the last 20 years, and is still not completely constructed. It's one of the most eloquent examples of the bad heritage of the communist past which still leaves its scars on the present: former Yugoslavia was purposefully pursuing a policy of keeping Bulgarians and Macedonians apart and cutting the ethno-cultural link between them (by means of rewriting history, school and media brainwashing, and yes, logistical obstacles like the above mentioned). Those problems remain today - nowadays, both Sofia and Skopje are unintentionally maintaining the symbolic transport "Iron Wall" between themselves. If you want to reach Skopje via train, you'd still have to pass through the entire Serbia. And you'd have a day-long trip. You'd realize the absurdity of this by just having a brief look at the map. And don't even get me started on Zagreb, Sarajevo or Ljubljana... such a trip requires HUGE stoicism. My boss wanted to attend a U2 gig in Zagreb, and she eventually decided to get rid of her ticket when she realized what a logistical adventure that would've been.
And if you're still willing to say: "OK then, get the bus", you should think again! That could be an even bigger adventure. For instance, direct links between Sofia and the capitals of the former Yugo republics (except Skopje) are virtually non-existent. You'll have to catch a bus to Western Europe and it'll drop you at some gas station some 20 km from the city center, where you'd find yourself in the exciting company of Gypsy pimps, hookers, cigarette smugglers and drug dealers. Trying to reach any of those capitals means you'd have to get closely acquainted with such sights of interest like the bus station in Niš with its exotic inhabitants. There, you'd probably have to wait from 3 hours to half a day, and after your connection to Belgrade finally arrives, it'll turn out your supposedly "reserved" seat is not valid at all (because such a seat number does not exist), and you'll have to travel upright for 8 hours, or sitting on the floor at the crammed back of the bus, next to some weird looking Albanian with a funny white hat and huge moustache sitting on a wooden crate full of tomatoes or worse, chickens, under his ass. Still doesn't smell of Emir Kusturica, eh?
Despite all the hopes of the locals that most capital cities in the region would be linked by direct bus connections, that's still not happening. Probably the bus companies think it's not profitable, due to the small number of travelers. And the politicians seem to consider this a non-issue. Probably because they never use a train or a bus themselves. They travel in huge escorts of limos and SUVs. And it's a dead circle: the number of travelers is nil exactly because of the lack of proper connections. And the organizational nightmare... If you go to the bus station and attempt to reserve a ticket, they'll probably decide you need to see a shrink, "because there always are tickets available" (and yet you might end up standing upright in the bus). The local Serbian buses themselves are antiques and you'd often get the feeling you might not make the whole trip. A Canadian client of mine once told me of the day she was stupid enough to take such a bus in Southern Serbia. She said that at one point in the mountain, the bus struggled so hard to climb that she could clearly notice a herd of sheep outrunning it!
I can almost hear you scream already. "So, take the plane, fool!!!" Great idea! But not so fast, okay? It could sound very convenient. But again, it's a Mission Impossible. Remember, we're talking Balkans here. And here, nothing is as simple as it seems. In this case, mostly because you can't fly directly from one capital city to the neighboring one. In some cases, such a flight is comparable to a cruise-ship voyage across the Big Pond. A family friend reported that when he wanted to reach Zagreb, he had to change in Frankfurt (!) It may not sound that bad though, but you're still traveling a whole day. To Germany and then back. An ex class-mate of mine told me that he was trying to get to Sarajevo, and he had to make a connection in Milan (!!) So, as he was flying over Sarajevo, he could clearly see the airport where he was supposed to land, but first he had to make the trip to Italy, then back to Bosnia! Absurd! The same guy was later sent to Sarajevo again, he chose the option of a bus trip to Belgrade, and then plane to Sarajevo (are you following? use a map!) But because it was November, and there are always fogs over Sarajevo in the November evenings, the Belgrade-Sarajevo flight had to be postponed for nearly half a day, so he missed the entire event that he was going there for. And that's utterly stupid - the Serbian airline knew perfectly well that there are fogs on virtually every November evening in Sarajevo, and they could've easily moved the flight to noon time, when the fogs usually disperse.
The Balkans, especially the Western Balkans, are like a transport black hole, which one has to leap over in order to reach the West. And I mean both literally and metaphorically. There are even scarier travel examples - like the 10-hour trip from Sofia to Pristina in Kosovo, which is just 50 km away from our border. Or the bus trip from Istanbul to Bucharest via Varna along the western Black Sea coast, where you change two buses and one minibus across the Balkan Mountain passes. Or the brothel that is the Skopje bus station. The only ray of light in this area being the highway from Tirana to Skopje. All the remaining roads within both Albania and Macedonia being a quagmire. Granted, Albania is hectically building roads and tunnels into Kosovo (the latest one being opened in July 2009, a 8-km tunnel under the towering Šar mountain, which spares 3 hours of the Tirana-Pristina trip, and thus cuts the entire duration of the trip between "the two Albanian capitals" to just under 3 hrs.)
All that said, it's understandable why car travel remains the number one (and possibly, the only sensible) way on the Balkans. But even that is not too fast and comfortable, as there's almost no single highway on the Balkans which reaches and enters a neighboring country. Even the most strategic Pan-European Corridor IV does not fully consist of highways. In this case, the silent policy of reserved attitude toward the neighbors has again defeated commercial logic, because this is exactly the place where all the key transport corridors from the Middle East to West Europe meet with those from North and Central Europe to the Mediterranean. And there's a huge flow of goods and customers. And though every next government in the region comes to power with generous promises that the missing connections would be built, that's always election bullshit. And when sometimes, someone really decides to move a finger and do something on the issue, the ones at the other side of the border would shit on the whole plan and show some lack of interest for one reason or another (mostly political). For instance, when Serbia announced it'd start building the highway from Niš to our border, a panel of Sofia experts responded with the weird argument that "building our part of the highway to the border could only be on our agenda once Serbia enters the EU" (!) But even this sort of BS cannot possibly explain why building a second bridge across the Danube has been in the planning for more than two decades, and still nothing. Currently, there's only one land connection across this enormous river (between Bulgaria and Romania) - for its entire section from Belgrade until the very Black Sea coast. And that's more than 500 km!
So, seen from aside, the Balkan states probably look like a bunch of closed-minded grumblers who only occasionally look at each other, out of compulsion. As that same Polish girl told me, "When you travel around the Balkans, you have the feeling those countries have no desire to communicate whatsoever". One could say that, indeed. And, despite all the politicians' promises about new roads, new plane flights et al, the people of the Balkans, despite sharing so much common things, will still not be able to meet each other without having to endure a round-trip via the whole Europe, or a day-long torture on the shitty trains, buses and roads. And that, in itself, is pretty damn symbolic, IMO.
But yeah, you're still welcome to visit the beautiful Balkans, if you want to see what real adventure means. ;)