Another quick side trip on my way back to the USA from the UK. I flew from Gatwick on Tuesday morning, 8 May, first to Amsterdam and then on to Belgrade in Serbia. I arrived in the mid-afternoon and took a taxi into the city and my hotel, the Belgrade City Hotel. Since this was a quick trip and I was leaving the next day I immediately set off to explore the city, or at least that part of the city I could walk to from my hotel.
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| Belgrade |
The city is a little shabby, there are some quite modern buildings but there are a lot of older buildings some quite grand but some of them are in a state of disrepair. Also the graffiti taggers have been at work and the town is peppered tags, most of them quite crude. I do appreciate and seek out good graffiti but this stuff is just a blight on the city.
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| Tesla's High Voltage Discharge |
The Nikola Tesla Museum was close by so I went in and joined a tour. It is not a particularly good museum and the exhibits are rather poor but the Serbs are obviously quite proud of their most famous scientist even though he did most of his work in the USA. Apparently he only spent 31 hours in Belgrade during his life. There were some fun demonstrations of high voltage spark discharges and the illumination of neon bulbs. His suit and hat and other artifacts were on show too but not too impressive. I didn’t know but he was quite obsessive about germs and didn’t like to shake hands without gloves. He was also obsessive about the number three - he liked to walk around buildings three times, he counted steps and liked to finish on a multiple of three, he only took hotel rooms that were a factor of three.
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| Orthodox Church |
Continuing on there as a nice park with a statue of some unknown past hero and a nice Orthodox Church. Shame I didn't have a guide book at this point. What was quite noticeable was the number of people in the parks. Parks were full of parents with their children. You would never see such a thing in the US or even the UK.
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| Joe Strummer Mural |
I continued my walk around Skadarlija, the so-called Bohemian district. It was a little funky with lots of bars and restaurants perhaps Bohemian. There were a few better quality grafitis or wall art. A fine portrait of Joe Strummer and similar ones of people I do not know.
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| Sava River (left), Danube (top and right) |
Continuing further on I reached the medieval fort area of Kalamegdanska. The extensive walls and fortifications to the fort sit in a park area above the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers. Again there were lots of people sitting around enjoying the evening and of course lots of children playing in the parks. There was a collection of armaments in the grounds all the way from early cannons, to WWI and WWII field guns, up to SAM missiles. The latter really looked scary and out of place in such an old historical area.
I headed back towards my hotel and the nearby train station. I had to pick up my train ticket at the station’s Western Union office. As promised the lady in the office had an envelope with my ticket and the schedule for the next morning’s train. As I walked through the quite dilapidated station I recognized it immediately. I had been there in 1971 on my way to Istanbul. It hardly looked any different. I think perhaps I spent the night on a bench there. What a tremendous feeling of nostalgia. I was traveling with two ladies from Edinburgh University - I can’t even remember their names.
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| Belgrade Train Station |
The next morning my train to Podgorica was scheduled to leave at 09:10. It was the only train on the station, a shabby and graffiti plastered thing. An old electric locomotive and 5 coaches one of which was a restaurant car. My coach was quite comfortable and I selected a seat with the cleanest windows though really all the windows were pretty filthy. My seat had a top window that was one so at least I could get a clear view from that. The train left a couple of minutes early and we were on our way with only about 10 other folks in my carriage. Not a money maker for Serbian Railways.
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| The Belgrade to Bar Train |
The train passed through the suburbs of Belgrade along a disheveled track - overgrown and every concrete surface emblazoned with graffiti. A few miles out of the city we passed the train shed for what was Tito’s personal train. The three engines looked impressive but even they were covered in graffiti.
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| Tito's Private Train |
The line was started in the 1950’s but it wasn’t completed all the way to Bar on the coast until 1976. It is 296 miles long and has 254 tunnels and 435 bridges. In the early days it took 7 hours for the trip but now because of speed safety restrictions on the track it takes 11 hours. Various parts of the track were bombed by NATO during the war.
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| Serbian Countryside |
As we passed into more rural areas the landscape changed to grassy agricultural land and lush forested areas. Somewhere on the way we cut across a corner of Bosnia-Herzegovina but there was no recognition of it and the train does not stop there. As we left Serbia customs officers passed through the train to check documents and stamp passports. Similarly Montenegran officials checked us on arriving in Bijelo Polje the first Montenegran town. A pretty straightforward border and efficient border crossing.
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| Montenegro |
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| Montenegro |
The final stretch of the line in Montenegro was the most spectacular section. We crossed the Mala Rijeka viaduct, the highest and longest on the line, just after Bijelo Polje. Then the track followed a steep 25% downgrade from high up on the side of the valley. What an amazing construction feat this must have been. We started way up high on the side of a deep valley cut into the limestone mountains and descended with squeaking brakes through a series of tunnels and bridges down to the same level as the road as it entered Podgorica.
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| Station in Podgorica |
We were some 5 minutes late which is not bad for an 11 hour trip. At the station in Podgorica most of the passengers left the train. On the platform, exactly as expected, was my driver holding a sign with my name. I had pre-arranged a car to take me to Tirana that evening. As we left Podgorica darkness was falling and it started to rain.
I didn’t notice much about the drive other than the driver was very careful to observe the speed limit. Perhaps the police were really strict in that area. The other noticeable thing was the frequency of roundabouts, it was continuous, one after the other, it seemed like there was not a continuous stretch of road for more than a mile. We arrived at the border with Albania in the rain. There was a short wait and a brief check on the passports on the Montenegran side, then another short wait to enter Albania. The once closed country is now quite open and welcoming.
The road into the capital, Tirana, was not particularly impressive - not a major highway. My driver used his GPS to deliver me to my hotel - the Hotel Austria. A modern hotel in a backstreet area near the center of town. We arrived around 11:00 and I was tired after 11 hours in the train and 3 hours in the car.
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| Skanderbeg Square, Tirana |
Next morning I was up reasonably early and set off to explore the city. It isn’t a very big city and the major sites in the center can be walked quite easily. There was the Skanderbeg Square with its statue of Skanderbeg the Albanian national hero on horseback, the National Museum facing the square, the oldest mosque in town - Et-hem Bey Mosque, a clock tower, a Catholic Church, a huge modern Orthodox Church, an even larger mosque in the process of being built and then the infamous pyramid of Tirana. The latter is a monument to the now much despised dictator Enver Hoxha designed by his daughter and which was once the most expensive building project in Tirana. It is now in disrepair and is covered with ugly graffiti. Apparently they can’t decide what to do with it - destroy it or keep it as a reminder of those desperate days.
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| Skanderbeg Statue |
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| The Tirana Pyramid |
I covered all those sites in a couple of hours before breakfast. After breakfast I took a taxi out to the Bunk’Art museum. This is an old bunker complex out of town built in the 1970’s as a site to protect Hoxha and his government if someone attacked Albania with nuclear weapons. It is an immense complex with hundreds of rooms, an auditorium, protective air locks, explosion proof doors. While in the 70’s, we, in the rest of the world, were not thinking much about that nuclear attacks, in Albania they were preparing for the worst. I had the the place to myself - there aren’t many tourists here. Nevertheless the museum provided a most informative history of what happened during the period from just before WWII up to the end of the Communist era. And fortunately there was an English translation for most of the displays. The best museum
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| Bunk'Art entrance |
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| Bunk'Art Bunker Corridor |
Walking back towards town I got another taxi to the second Bunk’Art museum which is close to the main square. This one Bunk’Art 2 deals with the police and security forces, the Sigurimi, in Albania from WWI up to the terrifying period of the Hoxha regime. The Sigurimi were not a force to be trifled with. This museum is also housed in a bunker complex below the city streets.
At that point it was nearing 1:00 pm and I was feeling like I had walked enough. My flight was at 3:30 so I took a taxi to the airport, Mother Theresa Airport (she was Albanian). Taxis do seem quite reasonable here. At the airport all was smooth for my WizzAir departure for Budapest. Interestingly my ticket for the flight was 27 Euros. If I hadn’t have printed my boarding pass at the hotel that morning, I would have been charged 35 Euros to get a boarding pass at the airport.
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| Mother Theresa Airport |
EasyJet from Budapest to Gatwick and an overnight stay at the very fine Bloc Hotel before my Norwegian flight to Oakland and home.
There are more photos of the trip here.
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