Name: Neil
Age: 30
Travel Resume: Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Taiwan, Nigeria, Turkey, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, France, England, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Greece, Belgium.

One of my favorite traveling experiences, though definitely not the easiest or least painful, was my train ride from Budapest to Istanbul. I met a couple American students in Prague (they were studying in France and had decided to travel a bit) and they coaxed me away from my itinerary to trek along with them a ways. We went from Prague to Vienna to Budapest and then on to Istanbul.

Budapest to Istanbul by train is a thirty-six hour ride. Accustomed to the posh trains of Western Europe, we prepared ourselves for roomy couchettes, a full-service dining coach, and mingling with all the other trekkers.

We had mildly over-estimated the amenities of Eastern European mass-transit and, instead, found ourselves to be three fifths of the total population of our battlefield-relic train coach, locked in to keep us from meandering into other cars, positioned ever–so-strategically as the caboose. We soon figured out why. Every now and again, the train would approach a station and we would be cut free from the rest of the train. As the train continued on, we would roll to a slow stop and wait for the next train. One pit stop in Romania took three hours.

A particularly important overestimation was that of the dining coach. We’d made sure we had enough beer and cookies, but had assumed that our nutritional requirements would be met in full on the train. How wrong we were.

So, what was fun, you might ask? Well, when we got on the train in Budapest, the Hungarian conductor (who spoke very little English) approached to check our tickets.

“Is two days to Istanbul,” he said. “Drink. Sleep. Drink. Sleep. Istanbul.”

We thought we could handle that.

He joined us hours later as the train pushed into the night bringing along the Bulgarian who was the only other passenger in our coach. He brought a bottle of the finest blush wine and we proceeded to get hammered beyond recognition. As the spirits moved through us, I began to speak in Spanish, one of the other Americans spoke in French, the other in Latin, the Bulgarian in Turkish, the Hungarian in, well, German, I suppose.

I’m not entirely sure why we thought speaking in other broken tongues would help, but we understood one another. Booze – the great communicator. Of course, we drank all the liquids we brought in the first 8-hour binge and were left dehydrated and hungover. The few bottles of water we had turned out to be sparkling water that the Hungarians had allowed to go flat; they know how Americans loathe water with gas. Our only liquids tasted of old piss.

Delirium set in soon thereafter and only lifted thanks to the sudden shock of adrenaline caused by the middle-of-the-night call to get off the train and produce $120 for Turkish visas. We’d assumed that the Bulgarian/Turkish border would be a bustling place where we could hit an ATM or pay with a check card. Again, not the case. It was 3 a.m. and we had $30 between the three of us. After a rather exhausting half hour of arguing and guessing the manner of our imminent execution, our trusty little drunken conductor stepped down in his pink bathrobe and slippers and broke out New Orleans pimp-sized wad of greenbacks. He paid our visa tab and hurried us back on the train.

When we arrived in Istanbul (much later), we sprinted to an ATM, withdrew however many millions in Turkish Lira and handed it to him.

“Turkish lira, no,” he said. “American dollar, yes.”

We sprinted then to the exchange house, were robbed blind by those bastards, and found our conductor smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee while having his shoes shined. He was a man of few discernible words, but he saved our asses.

If you’re going to Istanbul, might I suggest flying?

Monday, March 10, 2008 | stories