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| Route of my flight from Istanbul to Belgrade |
I had planned to travel by train from Istanbul all the way across southern Europe to Lisbon before flying back to the US. However, some unwelcome complications threw a damper on the first part of my European journey. I learned that the Balkan Express from Istanbul to the Bulgarian border had been temporarily suspended because the Turks were upgrading the track. So, one had to leave Istanbul at 10PM by bus, then connect with a train at the Bulgarian border in the middle of the night arriving in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, around 11AM the next day. Furthermore, the day train from Sofia to Belgrade had been cancelled due to a shortage of diesel locomotives in Serbia. The only option was to take the night train. It all sounded too complicated, too uncomfortable, and too much night travel meaning I wouldn’t see much of the country that I would be travelling through. Turkish Airlines had a cheap flight to Belgrade from Istanbul so I opted for speed and convenience.
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| Serbian flag |
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| Field patterns near Belgrade |
I was arriving in Belgrade, Serbia about 12 days prior to the start of the World Association of Soil and Water Conservation (WASWAC) Conference which was to be held in Đerdap National Park on the Serbia-Romania border. I had been in contact with Dr. Miodrag Zlatic, a Professor of Forestry at Belgrade University, who was in charge of organizing the conference. Miodrag had put me in touch with colleagues in the neighboring countries of Montenegro and Hungary, and I had made arrangements with them for visits before the conference. He had also offered to send a university student out to the Belgrade airport to pick me up. Unfortunately, I had mistakenly put a September 3 arrival date in one of my emails to Miodrag, and so the student came out a day early. The next morning Miodrag looked at my most recent email and realized that I was arriving on the 4th. He drove out to the airport on the evening of the 4th, and I was very delighted to meet him while feeling very guilty about the poor student who had made the trip the previous evening for nothing.
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Miodrag Zlotic, an affable forestry professor
at Belgrade University, met me at the airport. |
After we dropped off my bags where I would be staying, Miodrag suggested that we go out for a “glass of conversation” as he put it in his delightfully accented, but very good, English. He drove us to a lively part of Belgrade with outdoor cafes and we each had two “glasses of conversation” exposing me to a couple of tasty Serbian beers (including Jelen, which means “deer” in English and has a picture of a stag on the label). We talked about our mutual interest in increased cooperation between the International Erosion Control Association (IECA) and WASWAC. Eventually we touched on politics and Miodrag spoke wistfully about missing the old Yugoslavia when Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo were all united under one flag. He noted that former Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito was a masterful politician who had managed to hold the federation together while thumbing his nose at Stalin and the Soviets. I speculated that after Tito’s death in 1980, his successor Slobodan Milosovic, lacked Tito’s skill and charisma to keep the country from fragmenting and descending into civil war. Beyond that, I treaded carefully around the subject of Balkan politics, recalling to myself an unfortunate incident at a Denver dinner party some 15 years earlier. I was talking with a young Yugoslav couple seated across from me at dinner that night and asked them why Serbs and Croats seemed to be unable to get along with each other. They took offense at my question and the mood turned a bit somber for the rest of the evening.
My accommodations were conveniently located right across a wide boulevard from the main Belgrade train station. I was staying at a youth hostel, not in a dorm room but in a nice little apartment managed by the hostel and costing me only US$34/night. I had also booked it for two additional nights when I would be passing through Belgrade later in the month.
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My cozy apartment at the Downtown Belgrade Hostel
was conveniently located across the street from the train station. |
The following morning, I arrived early at the train station to pick up the ticket I had reserved by internet for my train that day to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. I also bought tickets for the September 12 morning train to Budapest, Hungary and the September 22 morning train to Zagreb, Croatia. The ticket and reservations agents spoke little English but we had no communication problems. I neatly printed out what I needed on slips of paper (e.g., Belgrade > Budapest, 12 September, 2nd class) and they wrote down the prices in Serbian dinar and handed the slips back to me.
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Belgrade train station. The Serbian name for Belgrade is Beograd, and here it is written in Cyrillic letters: ƂEOΓPAΔ. Many signs in Serbia are written in both Roman and Cyrillic letters which helped me learn the Cyrillic alphabet.
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After scoring all my tickets, I ran off to several food stalls in the station area; loaded up on spinach and cheese pastries, Schweppes Bitter Lemon sodas, chips, and candy bars; and found the train to Montenegro which promptly departed at 9:10AM. I had been looking forward to this long train ride having read on the internet about the scenic route through the mountains. I was not disappointed. The cars were somewhat dirty and dilapidated but the photo ops were wonderful. The windows went down just enough for me to get my camera through the opening.
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| Train 431 prepares to depart Belgrade for Bar, Montenegro on the Adriatic coast. |
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| Route from Belgrade to Podgorica |
The line was completed in 1976 to provide rail access from Belgrade (the Yugoslav capital and an industrial center) to the Montenegrin port of Bar on the Adriatic Sea. About an hour out of Belgrade, it reaches a rugged mountain range which poses a formidable barrier to railroad construction almost all the way to Podgorica. Rather than following river valleys, the engineers chose a more direct route right through and over the mountains. Over 200 tunnels had to be bored, a couple of which are four miles long. In between the tunnels, the line frequently crosses deep gorges spanned by bridges. There are also stretches of track built along cliffs with high concrete walls on the inside and sheer drop-offs into oblivion on the outside.
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Before reaching “serious” mountains, the rail line
passes small farms and forested hills.
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Tunnel-bridge-tunnel-bridge-tunnel-bridge. Yugoslav
engineers must have derived great satisfaction from
designing this remarkable rail line, and construction workers
must have had a helluva time building the sonofabitch!
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View of the Belgrade-Bar rail line high above the highway north of Podgorica.
Note arrow pointing to a bridge where the line emerges from a tunnel.
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The straight line distance from Belgrade to Podgorica is less than 200 miles. Despite the tunnels and bridges, the rail line is not a straight shot and winds through the mountains in order to reach some of the larger towns along the way. There are 16 station stops between Belgrade and Podgorica including customs and immigration stops on either side of the Serbia-Montenegro border. Since it’s a single track line, there are also frequent stops on sidings to wait for oncoming trains to pass. Furthermore, speeds are typically slow and given the terrain, you probably wouldn’t want to be going 100 miles per hour unless they enclosed the route in a heavy steel tube! Furthermore, maintenance of the line has not kept up with deterioration. As a result the trip takes more than 12 hours (and an extra hour to go all the way to Bar).
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| The train passes through Užice, a small city in western Serbia. |
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| At some of the smaller stations, the “waiting rooms” are rather basic. |
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| We often had to hang out on sidings to allow approaching trains to pass. |
It made for a tiring day but not nearly as tiring as being cooped up in a tiny airline seat for a comparable amount of time. You can get up and walk through the cars whenever you want, hang out in the corridors, or stroll down to the café car for a beer. No need to get to the train station two hours early, no need to show your ID umpteen times, no TSA-types giving you pat downs, no need to take off your shoes or empty your pockets, no slow single-file line to get from the boarding area to your seat, no keeping your seat belt fastened until the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign, no returning your tray tables to the full upright locked position, no having to turn off your portable electronic devices, no stowing all carry-ons completely under the seat in front of you, no having to return to your seat because of turbulence (just when you are about to open the door to the jon and really have to pee bad!), no restrictions on bringing booze onto the train, etc., etc.
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Our route took us through both dense forests
and rocky, nearly barren mountainsides. |
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Severely eroded landscape between Užice and Branešci.
The culprit? – overgrazing (see photo below) |
For most of the day I was too busy watching the unfamiliar, dramatic landscape and activity along the rail line to get bored. Just after darkness fell, we arrived in Podgorica about ½ hour late. As I walked down the platform, I immediately recognized Dr. Velibor Spalevic from the photo on his g-mail emails. He was accompanied by Klaas Annys, a geography graduate student from Ghent University in Belgium. Velibor whisked us off to his high rise condo in central Podgorica where I spent the night. Over the next three days, the three of us visited four countries – the subject of my upcoming posts.
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