Low-cost midlife crisis

The hold up at the border created a small problem with our schedule. But to explain that, and the eventual consequences, I have to go into the difference between interrailing then and now. Back then interrailers relied on a large red book called the Thomas Cook European Timetable, an amazing tome which somehow contained train timetables from all over Europe

This, coupled with a vast rail map of the continent, allowed people to plan their trips. Well, the nerdy ones like, well, me, for whom a timetable and a map made the days just fly by.

I’m sorry to tell you that we modern day interrailers no longer use Thomas Cook and his wonderful volume, but instead use, what else? – an app. The link to the imaginatively named “Rail Planner” app is sent to you when you buy your tickets and off you go. I may bemoan the loss of the big red book, but the app is (so far) proving pretty good. But like all apps it has a learning curve and it has quirks that you learn about the hard way. Oh, and just as an aside the “how to use” starter instructions come in the form of a video. What is this obsession with videos? You can’t skim read a video, looking for the information you want, you have to sit through the whole bloody thing. I’m glad that people who like to get their information from videos are catered to, and maybe we textpeople had things our way for too long, but in our defence we had no idea that there was a whole bunch of videopeople out there feeling marginalised.

Anyway, I digress. Within the app you select your starting point and destination, the app gives you some options, you choose one, and the app generates a qr code which you can show to the ticket collector. That’s basically it. So, for our first journey we had chosen Miercurea Ciuc to Budapest – a journey we had done by train many times before and which we knew well. At the end of that journey, we would meet the last of our group (my older daughter, who lives there) and then almost immediately begin another leg of the trip. This turned out to be a poor way of using the app.

It was faster, we discovered, to get to Budapest by getting off this train in Debrecen and getting on a different one, which despite leaving Debrecen half an hour after our train, arrived in Budapest half an hour earlier (I think by taking a different line). So that was our cunning plan, as it would make the connection time to our next train a bit less tight. The delay meant that this wasn’t possible as it had already left. So we stayed on the Korona, resigning ourselves to the impossibility of getting the onward train we wanted to from Budapest.

Like many capital cities Budapest has a number of train terminals. The Korona was taking us to Keleti station. The Debrecen train would have taken us to Nyugati station. But neither of these facts were relevant as we had to leave from Kelenföld station. So whatever happened we had to get from one side of the city to the other. Literally, as Kelenföld is in Buda, west of the Danube, and the other two are in Pest.

We told B, my daughter, not to rush and to meet us at Kelenföld about an hour later than planned and we would catch a later train. (I’d actually made reservations online for the train we were supposed to catch, which was money that I suspected we’d now lose (the reservation document said that we could get a refund if we presented them at the departure station more than 15 minutes before the departure time on the reservation. Which obviously was, let’s just say, an annoying stipulation). But no matter, they hadn’t been expensive so, meh.

The Korona picked up speed and rather than an hour late we ended up arriving only about 20 minutes late. It still felt like an unpleasant rush to make the connection, and anyway by this time, B wouldn’t be able to make it. So we took it easy getting ourselves sorted, off the train and onto the metro.

Eventually we got to Kelenföld, were reunited as a family, and waited for the next train to Vienna, our next stop. It arrived bang on time (Austrian train, natch) and we boarded. It was somewhat chaotic and there were far fewer seats than people, so I spent about the first hour standing up, but slowly the numbers thinned out and by about Győr more or less everyone was seated.

But here is where we learned of our error and one of the app’s curiosities. Because I had decided these were two trips (in my mind they were) the second trip (Budapest to Prague) had begun from Kelenföld. But the train actually started in Keleti. Where we had just come from by metro. If I had planned a single trip from Miercurea Ciuc to Prague the app would have told us this. Also if had used the old way with the book. So it turned out that we had arrived in Keleti just over 10 minutes before the train we were supposed to catch had left there – plenty of time to get it, especially as we had reservations. None of this was a terrible hassle, but the ultimate impact was that we arrived two hours later than expected in Prague, which was a minor irritation.

Anyway, we got to Vienna, had some lunch as we now had a bit of time, and caught the 17.10 train to Prague. I have to say that this last train seemed interminable. We found a free Austrian newspaper and tried to amuse ourselves with the horoscopes. “Krebs!” (unnecessarily long bursts of laughter) “Wasserman”! (even longer) . Truly that’s how low we had sunk. The Czech countryside was nice, but I think we were all a bit trained out

We finally got to Prague Station at about 10pm more or less exactly 26 hours after we had boarded in Romania. Happily we had no plans to get on a train on Day 3

I’m not entirely sure where day 2 began. Midnight was one of the few times I was actually asleep. Somewhere in the beautiful (but invisible at that time) Transylvanian countryside on a painfully slow train. It was not that this specific train is painfully slow, but pretty much all trains in Romania are. Romania has preserved much of its network which is great, but every part of the railway system is in desperate need of upgrading. By 1am I was awake, though, and that was pretty much how things would stay until the morning.

Usually, the overnight train to Budapest, though slow, takes a fairly direct route – through Cluj and Oradea and then straight into Hungary and west to the capital. At the moment however, there is some kind of major engineering work going on (I wish in Romania, but I strongly suspect in Hungary) and after Oradea the train no longer goes straight over the border but turns north and trundles up to a place called Valea lui Mihai.

This is the Romanian side of the border (and because the EU consistently finds reasons not to let Romania be part of Schengen, it’s an actual border) – so, when we arrived the border police got on and headed through the carriages. One advantage of the diversion north is that rather than being woken at 5 by the border guards you are woken up at something like 6.30. Well, you are if you were managing to sleep in the first place.

The system here is that the policeperson asks for your passport, checks your face against the photo and then takes the pile of passports they have obtained out to the office. I remember once being told that you should never let your passport out of your sight. Good luck with that. About 10 minutes later they return with the passports, and in some cases questions. In our case that was to check that the adults with our 16 year old daughter were actually her parents. These are not questions you get asked everywhere in the world, but tragically people trafficking is very much a concern over this end of the continent. I did get a stamp from Valea lui Mihai though, which seems a bit of a collector’s item.

At this point I feel like I also should add that contrary to type the border police all were friendly and in a good mood. Normally uniformed Romanian officialdom do not have a good reputation for, let’s call it their bedside manner, and deservedly so. “This uniform is one proof of my power over you and to ram it home I’m going to be unfailingly miserable and unfriendly”. Maybe the small town of Valea lui Mihai is some kind of utopia. Even the police are nice.

It became apparent that there was some problem somewhere on the train though, and sure enough, after a while, two girls with backpacks were led off the train and taken over to the station. I watched as they started looking at the timetable on the wall, presumably for trains back into Romania, as they were clearly not being allowed over the border. I felt for them. I didn’t imagine there were many trains in and out of Valea lui Mihai. Again the border police surprised me with their obvious sympathy with the two. The guy who was obviously in charge was clearly trying to find a way out of whatever the problem was. I wondered where they were from – I’d guess they were European (I suspect, perhaps unfairly, that if their skin were darker they would be getting less help at this stage), clearly not EU citizens, as if they were this problem wouldn’t exist, possibly British, but probably not I felt, which left my first guess, Ukrainian. The chief border bloke made a long phone call, lots of discussion, and then went over to them and gestured for them to get back on the train. They fist pumped, picked up their packs, and came back on board. Whoever he talked to was either from the other side of the border or was themselves talking with someone there, as there would be no point getting back on only to be thrown off ten minutes later.

Finally then, we were ready to leave. Now about an hour behind schedule, something which would turn out to be a bit of an issue down the line. We trundled along the rarely used line crossing the border to the Hungarian side and went through the whole process again. This time, the Hungarian guard came to our carriage, and bearing a fancy passport scanning machine as if to demonstrate their technical superiority. My travelling companions all had EU passports and were approved in quick order. I on the other hand had a passport that looks like an EU one, but no longer is. So, my approval took a lot longer, and involved my Romanian residency card as supporting documentation and some questions.

At this point in the blog (not to the passport inspector) I was thinking of launching into a spittle-flecked, obscenity-rich rant about Brexit and its facilitators, but instead, quite calmly but with no less emotion, I will simply say this: you people who voted for Brexit and especially the politicians who used that vote to push through this vile xenophobic insular oppositional hate-driven “hard” brexit – I hate you. I hate you with the fire of a thousand suns. I will never ever ever forgive you. You disgust me. (Trust me, that really is the calm considered restrained version)

Anyway, we got through. An hour or so late, but we had entered the Schengen zone

The stereotypical way for a middle aged man to attempt to recapture his lost youth is to buy a fast car or motorbike, or fall in love with a young woman. These seemed rather expensive, so instead I’ve come interrailing with my family.

I have gone interrailing twice before. Once as a student with a group of friends, and once, when I was between jobs, on my own to visit post revolution Eastern Europe in 1990. After the first day of this trip, some of those memories are flooding back

We set off at just before 9pm on August 1st from Csíkszereda railway station, deepest Transylvania, on the daily overnight train to Budapest. Luckily this train has recently been upgraded and it’s a modern Hungarian train with new rolling stock and even a restaurant car. Since two of us are in our 50s, we went for a sleeping car. Back in my youth, everybody piled on, tried to grab a seat and hoped it was one of those that you could pull out and get a reasonable sleep. Usually, one failed. More on that later.

The modern carriage was nice, but actually kind of cramped – if we’d been 6 it would have been really uncomfortable.

Soon, however, we realised we were on holiday and we needed to act accordingly. Hence our first stop was….

I recommend the bar on a Hungarian train. They have a very wide selection of booze and at reasonable prices. There was some food too, but I skipped that part.

Already this trip was a big upgrade on my previous interrail adventures. Sleeping carriages. Visits to the train bar (rather than buying some cans at the station). Day 1, all 3 hours of it, had been a good start.