Three countries in one day (again)

05.11.2019 - 27.08.2024
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I have a Slovenian colleague. A couple of years ago he gave me a small travel guide – a miniature coffee table book, really – called This Is Slovenia, presumably published by the Slovenian national tourism authority or some similar body. This tiny book that could easily fit in a breast pocket was packed full of colourful photographs of Slovenian scenery, dishes, animals, costumes and buildings, accompanied by clumsy English text that was probably translated from Slovene by a Year 9 work experience student of no particular academic ability.

Until I flicked through This Is Slovenia, I had no special interest in the country. I knew about as much about Slovenia as someone who loves geography would be expected to. I knew that it used to be part of Yugoslavia. I remember that there was a war of independence when I was a kid, I recall watching Yugoslav tanks rolling down a motorway towards Slovenia on National Nine News one evening. I knew that Slovenia was the most economically advanced and socially progressive of the former Eastern Bloc countries. I knew that Slovenia is mountainous. I knew that a prominent politician from the Australian Labor Party, Tanya Plibersek, is of Slovenian heritage, as is the notable philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I knew that the capital city was Ljubljana. I knew that Slovenia became a member of the European Union a few years ago. I remember reading an article in National Geographic about how the Slovenian government built special bridges with forests on them over motorways so bears could move from forest to forest without getting run over. And seriously, that is all I knew.

Reading This Is Slovenia aroused a little more interest in the country, along with further conversations I had during my lunch breaks with my colleague about his home country. If it weren’t for my colleague, I would never have come to Slovenia. And that would have been a pity because I fell in love with Slovenia. I shall sing the country’s praises for the rest of my life to everyone I meet. Random people sitting next to me on the train, drunken fools in the local pub, stakeholders in meetings at work, everyone. I am serious.

I have been to countries that have jaw-droppingly beautiful scenery. I have been to countries that have friendly, helpful, law-abiding, honest people. I have been to countries that have amazing food. But I have only been to two countries that have all three – Taiwan and Slovenia. Take a bow, Slovenia. You are a special country that shall forever stake a claim to a parcel in my heart.

It was with sadness and with trepidation that I left Slovenia on Tuesday 5 November 2019. Sadness because I didn’t want to leave and trepidation because I had heard too many horror stories about Italy from Slovenians and other travellers and to be perfectly honest, on that day I really didn’t want to go to Italy. If it wasn’t for having to fly home from Rome I would have stayed in Slovenia for the rest of my holiday.

But leave Slovenia I must. I got up early, I had a quick breakfast of leftover pastries from the bakery the day before, I showered, I finished my packing, I sent a message to Natalija and Jure that I was leaving, and walked across the road shortly before eight o’clock to catch a bus a short distance to the village of Podhom a few kilometres north of Lake Bled. At the bus stop I met a young Australian woman, my second Aussie of the trip. She was from Brisbane and was travelling around Europe with her Italian boyfriend. They were waiting for a bus to Ljubljana to go to the airport to fly to their next destination. Her boyfriend taught me a few words of Italian before they boarded their bus.

My bus arrived a few minutes after eight and I boarded. I was the only passenger. The bus terminated at Podhom a short walk from the railway station. Mind you, the word “station” might be a bit too generous. There was a station building, a solid two-storey building of rough-hewn stone but it was now used as the village café. The platform was a low-slung thing surfaced with gravel and ragged weeds. Grass was growing between the rusty rails and warped timber sleepers of the single railway track. If I didn’t know any better I’d have said that this was a railway that closed forty years ago.

I had about half an hour before my train to Nova Gorica along the famous Bohinj Railway. It was an overcast morning and it started to drizzle. I sought shelter in the station building café and ordered a coffee. The café was full of village men aged fifty to seventy smoking and sipping coffee and gossiping. As I entered they all fell silent and looked at me. They started talking again but every time I stole a glance at them I could see that they were looking at me with resentment and suspicion. Rural villages are the same everywhere in the world.

I lingered in the café although I felt far from welcome, it was starting to rain rather heavily outside. A few minutes before the train was due I went back out onto the unkempt gravelly platform. Soon enough a tiny little two-car diesel train appeared on time at 08:39. It was covered in graffiti except for the driver’s windows. It chugged into the station and squealed to a halt as the concertina doors like those on an old-fashioned bus folded open. The only other passengers to board at Podhom were a grandfather and his very young grandson. There was hardly anybody on board either.

It is not surprising that not many people use the Bohinj Railway. It goes from nowhere to nowhere via nowhere through the most inhospitable mountain terrain. Jesenice and Nova Gorica at each end of the line are hardly what you would call thriving metropolises. Its construction only makes sense when you realise that this railway line wasn’t built with passenger or freight revenue in mind. Rather, it is a “strategic railway”. The Bohinj Railway was built by the Austrian-Hungarian government in 1906 with the sole purpose of defence. The Habsburg regime was absolutely obsessed with maintaining access to Austria-Hungary’s ports on the Adriatic Sea. With good reason – these ports, outside the German-speaking heartland of modern Austria and populated by potentially rebellious and separatist Italians, Slovenes and Croats, were the sole way in which Austria-Hungary could conduct maritime trade and project naval power in the Mediterranean Sea and beyond. The Bohinj Railway was built as an alternative route from Austria to the Adriatic ports. If the Ottoman Army or Croatian nationalists, for instance, swept northwards up the Balkan peninsula and captured the Budapest-Rijeka main line or the Vienna-Trieste main line, the Bohinj Railway could maintain access between Vienna and the Adriatic.

So it should not be surprising that the Bohinj Railway is distinguished by its lack of patronage. Still, it is a shame, because it is one of the most beautiful railways I have been on. Slovenske železnice have chosen to keep the line open as it forms the sole public transport link in a string of remote mountain villages on both sides of the Julian Alps. Services are infrequent, seven trains a day run south from Jesenice to Nova Gorica.

The very bored conductor collected my fare soon after leaving Podhom. He spent much of the journey yawning, tapping his feet, dawdling back and forth, checking his watch, and presumably longing to be allocated a busier line on the next roster.

The scenery was great – what I could see of it through the driving rain, at least. I found it very difficult to take photographs because of the raindrops on the train’s windows, so you will have to take my word for it when I say that the Bohinj Railway is one of the five most beautiful railway lines I have had the honour to travel along.

First, the train headed southwest skirting around to the west of Lake Bled and then went up the Bohinj valley which I had travelled through on Sunday, a verdant dale lined with soaring cliffs punctuated by cascades. Even the torrential rain couldn’t efface the valley’s beauty.

The train stopped at the valley’s main town, Bohinjska Bistrica, and then continued south through a tunnel under the southern flank of the Julian Alps. The train was crawling through the tunnel at walking pace, the diesel engine gurgling softly. I had no idea why the train was going so slowly until I looked out the window. The tunnel was flooded. I turned my mobile phone’s torch on and pointed it down through the raindrops clinging to the glass. The raging torrent flowing north back to Bohinjska Bistrica was almost as high as the train’s floor. I couldn’t believe it – the driver was authorised to proceed through this? Every few hundred metres or so there was a sluice in the wall of the tunnel with a veritable cascade of rainwater thundering into the tunnel, making the torrent even more swollen.

After suddenly finding religion and praying that there wasn’t a flash flood coming down the tunnel from further south, the train finally emerged from the portal and turned west down the valley of the Bača river. In places the Bača was so full that it seemed mere minutes from bursting its banks. All along the Bača and the larger river it flows into, the Soča, were tiny little mountain villages of ramshackle, neglected cottages. This is by far the poorest part of Slovenia I have seen. The Bača and Soča valleys are remote, mountainous and far from any major trade route with barely a square inch of land flat enough for agriculture. I have no idea how the people in these impoverished hamlets make a living.

South of the flooded railway tunnel, the Bohinj Railway has some interesting features. There are lengthy “avalanche galleries”, long arcaded stone shelters along mountainsides which prevent avalanches from blocking the railway potentially causing major accidents. There are more tunnels than I could care to count as the track curves in and out of the steep slopes lining the valley. A few kilometres north of the line’s southern terminus at Nova Gorica, there is a very high arched bridge where the railway crosses the canyon formed by the Soča river.

The train arrived at Nova Gorica about twenty minutes late at around half past ten. This is an unusual station – an international border runs through the forecourt. I stepped out of the train, walked out through the booking hall, opened the door, walked a few metres across a large circular monument in the pavement, and thus did I enter Country No. 26 I have been in, Italy.

I took a few nerdy photos and videos of me crossing back and forth over the border. This nondescript station square was once the boundary between the capitalist and socialist worlds. For five decades after World War II this plaza, Trg Evrope (Square of Europe), was bristling with fences and razor wire and armed guards. Now I danced on the border, one step in Slovenia, two step in Italy, Slovenia, Italy, Slovenia, Italy …

I come from a country which has no international land borders, so I could have gladly spent all day enjoying the pure novelty of being able to jump to and fro from one country to another. But I had to continue on. Slovenia has excellent rail connections to Austria, Hungary and Croatia, but this cannot be said for trains from Slovenia to Italy. There aren’t many. There is a limited service between Ljubljana and Trieste which, coming from Lake Bled, would have required a tortuous detour via the southwest of Slovenia. Coming from the northwest of Slovenia, the only realistic way to get to Italy is to catch a train to Nova Gorica, take a local bus from Trg Evrope to Gorizia Centrale railway station several kilometres inside Italy, and catch an Italian train from there. After boarding a local Italian bus at Trg Evrope – it was unusual that you couldn’t buy tickets on board, rather, each stop has a ticket vending machine – I arrived about ten minutes later at Gorizia Centrale station. My first impression of Italy was – shutters! So many shutters! Every single window has shutters.

I bought a ticket with my credit card at the ticket machine at Gorizia Centrale. I clicked on the Union Jack on the language selection screen. I was greeted with a cheerful recorded message. “Beware of peek-pockets. In case of need, ask only Trenitalia staff for more eenformation.” Welcome to Italy!

I had about ninety minutes to kill in Gorizia, the twin town of Nova Gorica. One of the first things I do when I arrive in a new country is to buy a local SIM card. I use a lot of mobile data in order to view maps, look up public transport timetables, search for accommodation and tickets to venues, and most importantly, post metric truckloads of photos and videos to social media. TIM (formerly Telecom Italia), Italy’s largest mobile phone network, had a shop a few blocks north of the station. So I walked up there in the rain to buy a TIM SIM. I had already found the one I wanted online – there was a prepaid SIM card called TIM Tourist that seemed good value for money.

I went into the shop, waited for one of the two staff members to become available – they were arguing volubly with some customer whose increasing indignance was met with increasing aggression on the staff members’ part – and when the argument finally ended, I asked for a TIM Tourist SIM card in my very basic Duolingo Italian.

The TIM employee sat me down at a service desk, asked for my passport, photocopied it, then photocopied it again, then photocopied it even more. I was bamboozled with paperwork, huge sheets of paper with densely typeset microscopic font in impenetrable Italian. I was terrified that they were trying to sign me up for a contract.

“No, I don’t want a contract! I don’t want a plan. I only want a prepaid tourist SIM.”

“Ees no plan. Ees prepaid!”

“So why do I need to sign all these contracts?”

“Dees contract, issa for licence for foreigner to own SEEM card. Dees contract, issa for permission to use telephone in Eetaly.”

“Well, OK, I guess.”

Then they asked for ID that showed my address. They photographed my New South Wales driver’s licence a dozen times. I had a closer look at the things I was being asked to sign, not that I could make sense of the dense Italian legalese. I noticed that the price was different to that of the TIM Tourist SIM pack advertised on their website. The contract I was reading said it was nineteen euros.

“No, ees not TIM Tourist. Dees SEEM card I sell you ees cheaper. Only nineteen euro. More data. More meenutes.”

“But I said I want the TIM Tourist SIM, not some other SIM."

“No, dees SIM ees better for you.”

“All right, whatever you say.”

The two staff members were photocopying the photocopies of my ID, typing furiously into their computer terminals, calling some remote bureaucracy to set up my account.

“Listen! I have bought many SIM cards in many countries, it is not supposed to be this hard.”

“No! Dees is special SEEM, just for you. Best SEEM for you.”

“Listen. Can I just have the TIM Tourist SIM card, please?”

“No. Ees not available here.”

“But you didn’t say that before. You just said that this SIM card is a better deal.”

“No speaka da English good.”

I smelled a rat. I was also looking at the clock – I only had about twenty minutes until my train. I had hoped to buy a SIM card and then grab lunch somewhere. I was starting to get a tad hungry eating only a few leftover pastries at seven o’clock. I was debating with myself whether to just cancel my purchase and leave – but I was desperate to get a SIM card, it would be my only chance today.

Finally – finally! – it was time to pay. The amount appeared on the PIN pad. Thirty-nine euros.

“Listen! The contract said it was only nineteen euros. You told me it was only nineteen euros. Why am I now being charged thirty-nine euros?”

“Issa nineteen for the SEEM, and issa twenty for the SEEM.”

“Sorry?”

“I said, issa nineteen for the SEEM, and issa twenty for the SEEM.”

“That makes absolutely no sense!” Still, I needed a SIM card, time was flying away, so I inserted my credit card and entered my PIN. Transaction declined.

I tried again. Transaction declined. I tried with my two other bank cards. All times, transaction declined. It turns out that the EFTPOS line was down. And a lucky stroke it was that the EFTPOS line was down. Two days later when I arrived in Florence, I told my Airbnb host about what happened at the TIM shop in Gorizia. She told her boyfriend who works as a technician for a telephone company. He told me that it was obvious to him that they were trying to sign me up for a twenty-four-month contract, prepaid SIM cards do not require that much paperwork. If the EFTPOS lines had worked, nineteen euros a month plus an initial twenty euro SIM card purchase fee would have been billed to my credit card every month for two years. He said it’s common knowledge in Italy that mobile phone companies are notorious for this fraudulent behaviour and that I was right to be suspicious. May the employees at the Gorizia TIM shop forever be subject to the righteous scorn and anger they so richly deserve. Absolute bottom-feeding pond scum.

I had to leave the TIM shop in any case, though the employees kept imploring me to stay to wait for the EFTPOS line to be restored. I just pointed at my watch and shouted “Train! Train!” They were angry at me for leaving, but I had a train to catch. There was a café a bit down the street towards the station, I went in there to buy a quick lunch from the sandwich display, a tramezzino – tuna and tapenade between two half-slices of white bread with the crusts removed. I ordered the tramezzino to go, the girl took the tramezzino, and promptly disappeared back into the kitchen with it. “Oi! Train! Train soon! Scusi? Train! Train dieci minuti! Need food now!” But she ignored me.

Finally she reappeared with my sandwich which I wolfed down in about twenty seconds – a snack rather than a lunch. I then ran to the station. I had a few minutes to spare and so went to buy a packet of chips from the station vending machine. Which, of course, promptly swallowed my money and dropped my purchase into the collection chute below – but the chute wouldn’t open.

I lost it. I kicked and banged the vending machine like a toddler having a tantrum. “Does anything in this blasted country ever f#$%ing work!” I shouted. Thankfully the owner of an adjacent news kiosk had a key to the vending machine and graciously opened the vending machine and gave me my purchase. But my goodness, how I hated Italy already.

I looked up at the next train display in the booking hall. The train to Venice was leaving in a few minutes on platform 1. I walked onto platform 1 but the displays on the platform were saying the next train was to Trieste while the displays on platform 2 were showing Venice. How does that work? I went back into the station hall – the display definitely said platform 1. So which platform did I have to take?

I took a risk and went to platform 2. I went right along the platform asking waiting passengers if they spoke English, and of course none of them did. So I just ended up shouting at random people “Venezia? Venezia?”

“Si, si, Venezia,” they reassured me. It turns out that I was looking at the wrong display in the booking hall. One display was for arrivals, the other for departures. Showing both departures and arrivals common in Europe, but in most European countries arrivals are shown in white and departures are shown in yellow. There were no such colours to distinguish them in Italian railway stations. Lesson learned!

The Regionale train arrived on time at about twenty to one, an extremely long train of white, green and blue carriages hauled by green electric locomotives at each end. I settled into my seat and looked at the scenery. Gorizia is where the Slovenian Alps meet the vast pancake-flat plains of northern Italy and soon the train was rocketing through the scratchy, yellowish countryside of Friuli Venezia Giulia with scrubby little villages, ochre farmhouses, threadbare poplars along country lanes and enormous wide gravelly rivers consisting of dozens of rapid channels of gurgling grey water braided through the gravel banks like a girl’s pigtails. Off to the right, the Alps loomed ominously on the northern horizon.

The train entered Venice’s suburbs and soon enough at a quarter to three I disembarked at Venezia Mestre station, an important interchange station on Venice’s suburban mainland. I had originally intended to visit Venice for two nights, but I decided to ditch Venice and instead spend a couple of extra nights in Slovenia.

I had about twenty minutes until my next train. I entered the enormous station building, a dizzying mess of rushing passengers and retail outlets. I spied a large shop that sold sandwiches and pizza slices and salads and the like. I went up to the counter and ordered a sandwich.

“No, you can’t order here. You have to order at the cash register over there.” The serving girl pointed to an unattended counter across the hall with no employee at the till and a massive queue stretching a mile.

“But you have a cash register right there in front of you,” I said as I pointed at the machine right before her eyes.

“Sorry. But you can’t order food here. You have to order over there.”

The minutes were ticking away and I was still starving. It was now shortly before three o’clock. Eating only leftover half-eaten pastries for breakfast at seven o’clock, and half a sandwich and a tiny bag of chips at half past twelve would leave anybody famished by mid-afternoon. I was running around Venezia Mestre station – no mean feat with fourteen kilograms on my back – desperately trying to find a food outlet that looked like it would serve something quick, that was actually attended by staff and didn’t have a lengthy queue. Finally I found a place that sold bagels and the like. I ordered a bagel with cream cheese and bresaola (air-cured beef) from the display on top of the counter. The guy behind the counter took the bagel and then put it into a toaster oven.

“No, no, no! Non tostato!”

“Si, si, devere tostato,” or something like it that translated to “yes, yes, it must be toasted”, the bagel guy replied. So I waited and waited and waited for my bagel to be toasted. When it was finally finished, the man took the bagel tenderly out of the toaster oven, delicately removed the top half of the bagel, and oh-so-gently sprinkled olive oil on the fillings, and carefully dusted some herbs and then ever so lovingly tapped some sesame seeds from a bottle. I am sure this would have been a lovely touch at a sit-down restaurant, but for f$%*ing Christ’s sake, you are just a f$%*ing sandwich shop in a busy railway station where everyone is in a hurry and just wants food to go as quickly as possible and there are only eight minutes until my next train God damn you so just give me my f$%*ing bagel or else you frigging moron!

I couldn’t snatch my bagel from the guy quick enough – I hope he felt the fear of God as I gave him the stink eye while doing so – then I glanced at the next train display in the main station hall and ran down the subway to platform 8. I got to the platform and the displays on the platform were blank. Surely that couldn’t be right? So I ran back down the subway to the station hall and checked the main display. Yes, I had the right platform. Yes, I was definitely looking at the departures screen, not the arrivals screen. So why were the displays on platform 8 blank? Because the Italian railways only show the next train on the platform displays several minutes before the train is due! Genius stuff.

My train arrived on time at 15:07, the Frecciabianca high-speed train. The Frecciabianca is the slowest of Trenitalia’s three classes of high-speed trains, typically running on ordinary tracks and reaching a maximum speed of two hundred kilometres an hour. I boarded the sleek, long white train and it took me forever to take my seat because Italians, God bless their cotton socks, would have to be the most unruly, disorganised people I have ever encountered. The aisle along the carriage was a jumble of suitcases owned by people arguing noisily with each other over who should move out of whose way and neither yielding to the other. God, how I wished that this train was going the other way back to Slovenia.

The Frecciabianca headed southwest through Padua, Rovigo, Ferrara, across more scratchy, vaguely unkempt yellow fields, past villages that all looked exactly the same – the same bland blocky churches, the same two-storey ochre houses with the same curved roof tiles, the same rows of poplar trees on the residential streets. The only interesting sight was of the Euganean Hills, a series of abrupt jagged peaks emerging from the dreary flatlands that reminded me a lot of the Glass House Mountains in Queensland. Around sunset the train reached Bologna, a bustling city of even more bright red terracotta roof tiles.

I stayed on the train for a short while after Bologna and disembarked at the coastal resort city of Rimini at 17:41. By now the sun had disappeared. It had also begun to rain heavily. I lugged my backpack out of the station and entered traffic hell. The street outside Rimini station was a jumble of cars, taxis and buses with drivers blaring their horns. I have no idea why anybody would use their horn. I mean, I always thought that horns were used to let other motorists know that you are there. Blind Freddie could see that you are there, along with a million other vehicles, each one unable to move because the cars were positioned across the lanes at every conceivable angle. It was geometrically impossible for any car to move, like a collapsed heap of Jenga blocks.

The bus to San Marino left from a stop opposite the station, not that it was easy to find; I had to hunt for the stop by checking the timetables at each individual stop. It was only about twenty minutes waiting in the rain for the bus, the shelter was too full. My Macpac rain jacket came in rather handy.

The bus to San Marino arrived on time at 18:10, a miracle considering the traffic. The fare was five euros paid to the driver. The driver took my five-euro note and put it in his pocket without giving me a ticket. Ah, that famous Italian corruption! How lovely.

The bus departed and got promptly stuck in all the traffic. It went for block after block. After an eternity we finally got out of Rimini’s city centre and onto the main road heading southwest into the hills towards San Marino. Eventually we passed under an ornamental footbridge festooned with a message. “BENVENUTI NELL’ANTICA TERRA DELLA LIBERTÀ”. Welcome to the Ancient Land of Liberty. And so I entered Country No. 27 I have been in, the Most Serene Republic of San Marino, and the second time that I have visited three countries in one day.

The road kept going up and up, through an unattractive urban ribbon of casinos, private investment banks, insurance offices, duty-free shops and all the other paraphernalia you find in microstates. The bus swerved around hairpin bends, roundabouts, switchbacks and blind corners. It was exciting in the same way that aircraft turbulence is exciting.

Due to the traffic in Rimini the bus arrived at the terminus in the City of San Marino quite late, it was approaching eight o’clock. I had looked up my hotel on Google Maps when I still had mobile data in Slovenia, I clearly recalled that the Hotel Joli was immediately north of the bus interchange, so I walked north and got lost in some neighbourhood. It was completely silent except for the wind howling through the steep narrow streets. The City of San Marino – city is probably too generous a word for a town of four thousand people – is located on the crest of a ridge seven hundred metres above sea level. It is exposed from all directions and the winds are brutal, as was the rain. The rain was horizontal. My rain jacket was no use, I got soaked trying to find my hotel.

There was nobody who could help me, the streets were dead. A car passed on the streets only occasionally. Not a shop or restaurant was to be seen. I know that San Marino is a very small country but I still would have thought that there would be some life in a national capital. I had no mobile data, my prepaid Slovenian SIM card didn’t work in Italy, so I couldn’t check Google Maps. My Lonely Planet’s guide to Italy devoted one whole page to San Marino with no map included. I was seriously lost, hungry , freezing and sopping wet.

I kept heading north to no avail, it was just a rabbit warren of residential streets that ended at the terminus of the ridge. I walked back to the bus station. I looked for a map, there was nothing. I desperately looked for a public telephone so I could call the hotel for directions, I saw none. All the while I was getting more and more saturated, the wind chilling me to the bone.

Finally I saw a person. He was walking his dog – in this weather! He couldn’t speak English so I asked him where the Hotel Joli was in Italian, and he answered in Italian clear enough for me to understand. The hotel was about one kilometre to the south, next to the roundabout.

I had to restrain myself from prostrating on the ground before him in adulation as I worshipped the very ground he walked on. He saved my life! I walked along the street south from the bus station and he wasn’t lying, the Hotel Joli soon appeared, its maroon and white illuminated sign beckoning me into its dry, warm, generous bosom.

So what happened? Well, there are two bus stations in the San Marino city centre. One is for tourist coaches, the other is for public buses. The bus interchange beside the hotel is for tourist coaches. All this could have been avoided if the dishonest scoundrels at the TIM shop in Gorizia had sold me a prepaid TIM Tourist SIM like I had bloody well asked, but no. I hope they burn in hell.

I checked into my hotel, dried myself off, and had a late dinner at a nearby restaurant that was still open, Agli Antichi Orti. The food was good - a hearty main course of tagliatelle with a tomato-based ragù, a hearty second course of grilled vegetables, a hearty bowl of crusty bread and a hearty carafe of rich red wine. The service from the elderly proprietor was excellent. It was just what I needed after what was a very long and rather difficult day.

Podhom station