| Behind the Iron Curtain |
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Confronting the dubious travel moment on a train ride through communist Europe  The month was September. The year was 1989. And the plan called for three friends and me to celebrate the start of our final year at Oxford University (classes wouldn’t begin until October) by venturing behind the Iron Curtain for a train journey through the Soviet bloc. What we were after was the Totalitarianism Sampler Tour: good vodka, bad Stalinist architecture, and maybe the chance to meet a few Warsaw Pact girls. What we got was a front-row seat as the entire edifice of Eastern European Communism came crashing to the ground.Despite the fact that our trip put us smack in the middle of the most momentous upheavals to shake the region since the end of the Second World War, neither Nick, Tim, John, nor I had the faintest capacity to recognize or appreciate any of it. This stemmed from being young and clueless and, worst of all, American—an affliction that then, now, and always seems to confer an especially artless and unforgivable kind of traveler’s naiveté. Eighteen years later, having schlepped through Africa, the Himalayas, and the Arctic as a professional travel writer, I’m still staggered by how much we didn’t know. We didn’t know, for example, even after we’d moved on to another town, that the street demonstrations we had witnessed in Krakow were among the first in a sequence of public protests that would swiftly spread from the Baltic to the Black Sea. We had no idea that within just a few months, these revolutions would begin toppling regimes in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Hungary. Nor did we know that by mid-November, euphoric citizens would be pouring champagne over the rubble of the Berlin Wall, and that within two years the USSR itself would collapse. And finally, as we prepared to leave Poland and head south to the Hungarian capital of Budapest, we had no inkling of the ordeal for which I had inadvertently—and stupidly—set myself up. Our plan called for boarding a night train that would carry us to Budapest. It would take about 12 hours, and sometime between midnight and 3 A.M., the train would pass through a thin sliver of Czechoslovakia. To cover that part of the journey, Nick, Tim, and John—the responsible division of our traveling party—had taken the precaution of obtaining Czech transit visas in London. I, on the other hand, had elected to blow off this “bogusness.” Since it would be the middle of the night, I had reasoned, who would care about a silly passport stamp anyhow? Just after midnight, proof of the flaws in my logic presented itself in the form of several heavily armed customs officials, who muscled into the sleepy train compartment, jostled passengers awake, and meticulously began searching everyone’s papers. When they got to me and demanded my visa, I knew it was futile to try talking my way out—but I gave it my best shot anyway. When that failed to work, I tried bribery, begging, and, finally, tears. Just as I was about to seize the leg of the elderly woman sharing our compartment and start calling for my mommy, they tossed me out the door. I landed in a gravel-bedded railroad siding. My backpack followed. And five minutes later, I had a terrific view of Nick, Tim, and John waving disconsolately as the train chugged southward into the darkness and disappeared. This, I would later come to learn, is what the experts refer to as a Dubious Travel Moment. Before I could fall into total despair, I heard a noise, turned, and discovered that another train was waiting on the neighboring siding. A metal door clattered open. Three sets of hands reached down. And before I knew it, I’d been yanked up into the compartment. The train was heading north, but where we were bound, I had no idea. Unlike the posh Tourist Special I’d just been tossed out of, my new transport was a cattle-car-style supply train stuffed with Polish laborers. It was horribly hot and impossibly crowded in that rolling metal box—discomforts mitigated only by the quiet decency of the men with the dirty clothing and scarred hands who had become my traveling companions. For the remainder of that night, the ragged Poles shared their vodka, their cigarettes, and their humor with a lost American who had never bothered to learn a single word of their language. I couldn’t understand any of the jokes, but the laughter and the occasional backslap made it clear that, being no strangers to misfortune themselves, these were people who instinctively greeted the misfortune of others with empathy. And that, as they say, was everything. It took me three days to sort through the mess I’d created. By the time I’d finally located a Czech consulate, gotten the visa, and caught another train to Budapest to rejoin my friends, my involuntary detour had marked me in a way that no other trip ever has. It’s important to note here that on the international scale of Dubious Travel Moments, a midnight railroad ejection is so benign that it scarcely even rates. Two decades on, I now know a bit about what it’s like when things really go wrong. (In the last year alone, I’ve been trapped by a snowstorm in the Caucasus, narrowly missed being killed by an avalanche in Nepal, and been deported from Djibouti, the most wretched country in East Africa.) But I’ll always treasure the experience of being thrown off the train in Czechoslovakia because it was my very first travel disaster. It was the one that taught me that the truly worthwhile experiences—those that reveal not only something of the texture of a place and the character of the people who inhabit it, but also something about the traveler himself—almost always involve adversity. Sure, any experienced globetrotter will tell you that Dubious Travel Moments are par for the course—when you leave home, things invariably go wrong. But any good traveler will also tell you that DTMs are a gift. Because it’s only when things go totally off the rails that a vacation ends and a journey begins. |
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