Bulletholes, Bosnians and Backpackers

The complexity of the Balkans is hypnotising. The cruel whimsy of history, the pliable borders, the peoples so different and so similar – it’s really hard to take it all in. Especially when you have a nine-foot Bosnian or Serb man barking the minutiae of some 14^th Century internecine battle and who expects you to be fully conversant in the ethnic chessboard of the time.

And being here and meeting the people really brings home the fundamental evil of communism. It’s so easy to be seduced by ivory tower academic apologists who argue that it’s not the system but its implementation which was evil – and who fail to question whether the two things are actually one and the same. Like many deluded undergraduates before me and surely many after, I remember spouting sympathetic nonsense over café lattes. But spending time in the former Soviet states and Yugoslavia, you see, smell, feel, you taste the awful decay of the system, the all-pervading mediocrity of everything associated with communist rule. I’m in Sofia now, and the first person I met here described it as the second worst place in the world after Romania. Leaving aside the fact that he has barely travelled more than a few hundred kilometres in any direction, it was an astonishing welcome from someone who’s taking a degree in (wait for it) hospitality and PR and who manages a hostel.

But as always, I’m getting ahead of myself. So I’ll recap a little before musing on the second worst country in the world, the grey, crumbling ugliness the Soviets left behind, and the desperation the Bulgarians feel to be anywhere – and perhaps anyone – else.

Wikitravel - the free and fabulously helpful sister site to Wikipedia and surely a genuine threat to Lonely Planet’s dominance of the travel advice market – describes travelling from Belgrade to Sofia by train:

“Allow up to three hours delay while the Serbian and Bulgarian customs officers ransack the trains due to cigarette smuggling. However, the cigarette smuggling is worth experiencing once.”

I must’ve read this sentence weeks ago, smiled, and promptly forgot it. Because yesterday morning I was clinging miserably to the least comfortable sleep of my life in a 60s-era urine-smelling train compartment full of Bulgarian farm workers who travel to Serbia to earn their fortune (which should really give some pause for thought in itself), when I was woken by six Bulgarian border police. One of whom was rapping my leg with some instrument which wouldn’t look out of place in a blacksmith’s foundry.

Through the lavatorial and back-aching 5am fog, I follow my co-travellers out of the compartment and stand lined up in the corridor. One of the guards – a frightening-looking and pallorless behemoth of a man with machete scars on his face – produces a battery-operated electric drill from a pocket the size of a three man tent and begins unscrewing the whitewashed chipboard panels which line our compartment. His colleagues climb on the seats, crumpling my half-read copy of Pussy Westerner Weekly, and start banging on the walls with cocked ears.

The ceiling panel falls open with a thud. Suddenly, ten thousand cigarettes in cellophane cartons pour out. My Bulgarian farm workers shrug and with the sort of lethargic insouciance I've been working on unsuccessfully for years, promptly light their own cigarettes. All of which were of the same indecipherable brand as those plummeting from the heavens.

One of the uniformed wall-bangers stops. He pulls off the panel directly behind my backpack to reveal yet another smuggled bounty and the guards – with their own expressions of bored resignation – form a chain as hundreds of cartons are passed to their colleagues waiting on the tracks outside. My chest (and something else) tightens as I imagine myself being fingered for this failed enterprise by my treacherous peasant companions (to whom I had earlier given chocolate and wine, the bastards). I picture a freezing, faecal-smeared cell the size of a cupboard, me naked, sobbing and hugging my knees. I imagine my captors’ interrogation: “You will NEVER use Facebook ever again, do you understand? You will rot in this jail and never again feel the cathartic feel of thumb on iPod trackwheel unless you confess!”

Anyway, before I can even stutter “habeus corpus” or subtly nudge-nudge cough-cough in the direction of the peasants, the guards are satisfied and – astonishingly – smile at the workers, hand them one of the cartons back, and promptly disembark to collect their wares below. My criminal companions calmly return to their seats, the train shudders back into life, and they all fall happily asleep. Except me. I sit in the darkness contemplating murder.

The days before were spent mostly in Sarajevo, a place I had approached – like all visitors, I suppose – with wonder and some unease. The Bosnian countryside is among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen – mountains and valleys and lakes and cliffs and fields, undulating with a breathtaking greenness and smattered with tiny hamlets of poor farmers still using equipment from a pre-industrial age.

Sarajevo itself is a remarkable place – everyone who goes is struck by its uniqueness. Quite apart from the fact that the name itself has become synonymous with Serbian aggression, ethnic cleansing, the 1992-95 siege and the inability or unwillingness of the West to wake itself from its self-congratulatory post-cold war triumphalism and actually DO something – it's the European Jerusalem. It’s a wondrously cosmopolitan alpine town of Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, Jews, Turks and countless other peoples.

The first thing you notice is the mortar and bullet holes. I don’t exaggerate at all when I say that 99 per cent of all buildings are pepperedwith holes of varying sizes like an Ottoman/Italian/Austrian/Yugoslav diorama made from Swiss cheese. Every wall and alley and apartment block and government building looks like it’s only the holes which are keeping it together, and the lack of meaningful post-war capital has meant only the bare minimum has been repaired. You see communist-era apartment buildings where, after a galaxy of tiny rifle holes, suddenly there is a blackened crater the size of an umbrella, half covering someone’s window; the only window in the entire block which is new. One morning not too long ago a middle-aged housewife was probably cooking on the stove when a Serbian shell blew her and her kitchen into smithereens. Somehow, through the grief and hatred, someone got around to calling someone else to come and install a gleaming new window, the only one among the other three hundred rotting Communist frames in that building. Keeping up with the Joneses is a bit different here.

It’s sobering. As are the various “Sarajevo roses” on the pavements - flat crimson monuments to where more than 11 people died in one explosion. There are quite a lot of them to see.

There's so much to describe and to experience in Sarajevo that I can never do justice here. The Arabness of the bazaar, the Europeanness of the rattling trams, the Asianness of the food smells in the Turkish quarter, the mosques (with this sign at the entrance), the synagogues and orthodox churches, the juxtaposition of the eclectic skyline with the mountains behind. These are the same mountains that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. In the reception of the hostel where I was staying, a yellowing and faded poster for those games included a map for the athletes and spectators to get from one event to another. Like architects’ drawings of commercial buildings before they’re built, it depicted smiling and energetic people walking as in a solarised, landscaped dream. You wonder if they would be quite so smiley and energetic if they knew what was in the pipeline.

It was in that very reception that I passed a very revealing few hours. One of the local men who work there is called Sunny, and my subsequent research supports his rather self-effacing claim to be the most popular tour guide in Europe. He runs the only War Tour of Sarajevo, and demand exceeds supply by quite some way. As a fluent English speaking native Muslim who has travelled overseas but lived his entire life in Sarajevo (including, obviously, the duration of the war) and who’s met literally tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of travellers through his work with the hostel and the tour, his research value for me was beyond value.

I can’t possibly summarise everything he told me here, but most salient was how happy he thinks Sarajevans are. The bare need for survival during the war has engendered a greater appreciation for life in its aftermath – the joy of one’s family being alive and well, the pleasure of walking outside without fear of snipers, the desire not just to survive but to live. My travels will take me to northern India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Argentina, Chile, West Africa and Lebanon – former conflict zones the lot. I want to know if this response – to emerging from the dark into the light – is universal or not.

Travelling the way I’m doing it (hostel-hopping) lends itself extraordinarily to fleeting but deep friendships. An email world means that after you spend a few days with a new person or people, you can easily keep in touch. Moreover, backpackers are a self-selected group, especially when you go to the more exotic locations. To be sure, if you drop in on the Costa Brava or similar during summer you’ll find yourself surrounded by troglodytes – including the eponymous bare-chested, Umbro-wearing, tattoo-porting and shaven-headed Englishman who laughs at everyone and makes a general embarrassment out of himself and his compatriots – but backpackers are a bit different. They’re adventurers at heart. Their thrill comes from exploration and learning per se, the irresistible yearning to see and smell and watch and hear the world and to not be able to sit still for too long. They’re my kind of people.

So it’s a good point to fill you in on a few of the characters I’ve met along the way. Right now I’m in the communal area of my hostel in central Sofia – surrounded by quite the motley crew of itinerant misanthropes. There’s the middle aged Israeli Jew with the ginger beard like a rhododendron bush (to borrow from Blackadder). He talks to himself in Hebrew most of the time and has a peculiar facial tick that gives the impression you’re causing him pain. I’ve tried to be open-minded and friendly. So much so that I gave up my space in the Internet queue last night, as he assured me he needed only 15 minutes (and I wanted much longer). An hour later and after a barrage of harrumphs and tuts in ascending volume from me, he told me he wasn’t yet finished. I told him the Bulgarian government puts all visiting Jews under continual surveillance and my job was to report back on his Internet use.

He gave me the computer.

The man is evidently troubled. What my investigations reveal so far is that he’s 47, backpacking by himself, lived with his mother (I know, what a cliché) and accepted financial handouts until she died and he hasn’t worked since. I put CNN on earlier and he made a noise like a beached whale gasping its last – he doesn’t like watching the news. We discussed the Middle East. I told him that the different birth rates between Jews and Arabs means that Jews would become a minority in Israel within a generation or so – so the clock is ticking on a two state solution. He did not know this, and has looked somwhat lost in thought since.

A Swedish couple are sitting – as always – silently in the corner. He looks about twenty, has dreadlocks like schooner rope and eyes in a permanent squint. She looks about thirty with hair so blindingly white it probably accounts for his squint. Last night a group of us went out to a nightclub (which, after careful examination, actually turned out to be filled with an 80:20 mix of hookers and pimps - and practically no one else) and the apparently lobotomised Swedes resisted every opportunity to make even the barest polite conversation.

And although this particular room is filled with people I have nightmares of being stuck in a lift with, the past weeks have involved some fascinating characters. There was Rikjaard, the shaggy Dutchman who has been cycling for the past sixteen months with no real itinerary and no end in sight. A computer programmer by profession, he decided that he could stomach the routine and pettiness of urban professional life no more. So he sold his possessions, packed a bag (including a Ukulele which he cannot play but carries around with him anyway), hopped on his bike and set off. Although occasionally staying in a hostel to have the odd shower, he is for all intents a nomad, sleeping under trees and in fields. I’m not romanticising this life. There are very few people for whom such an existence could be genuinely rewarding. But after a night drinking beer together and sharing stories, he struck me as a man at total peace with the world. And although, to be sure, he feels the loneliness at times, he is completely content doing what he does – and plans to continue indefinitely. I was honoured and grateful to have crossed paths with him.

As well as the Flying Dutchman, the past few days have seen me return to Belgrade with Johan, a South African Scottish Englishman twice my height and with Samsonesque locks. Soon to be a media lawyer, he’s doing much the same as me – a yearlong voyage around the world with the prime intent of meeting new and varied people and learning more about human nature before he has to settle down behind a desk and a cloak of melancholy. With my assurance that the Serbian girls are even more lovely that the Hungarians, the Croats or the Bosnians, I lured him to Belgrade - and the hostel where Passepartout and I stayed a couple of weeks ago.

As for the other friends of this trip so far, there has been Dylan and William and Rosenne and Eve and Violaine and Guillaume and Ivan and Sara and Monique and Andy and Fede and Suzanne. Little pockets of realness and symbiosis and profundity in a world otherwise replete with artifice.

And so Passepartout’s and my friends are now Johan’s friends and innumerable phone numbers and email addresses have changed hands – and for about the 800000^th time I marvel at the complete splendidness of making new travelling friends – with whom, almost by definition, you know you already have a great deal in common – and sitting up all night over a bottle of whisky sharing experiences of the world and of its people.

But it’s right that I’m moving on to Turkey and India and possibly Kyrgyzstan soon – the Balkans is, as I wrote above, overwhelmingly complex. The depths of the misunderstandings, the nuance of the suspicions and the history – it makes it genuinely impossible for the outsider to cease to feel like one. You can ask every question you can think of about the war, and NATO and religious differences, and the various land grabs over the centuries, and all it does is confuse you further. The history just runs too deep.

What is clear though, what must be obvious to the most lackadaisical of observers, is that this region is still profoundly poor, profoundly corrupt, and – despite the lure of the EU and the trickle of foreign capital becoming a torrent – sad and depressed. Many will disagree with such a characterisation, and there’s no shortage of anecdotal examples which lean the other way. But every shop with unaffordable goods, every university graduate who cannot leave and cannot get a job paying more than minimum wage, every incident of cronyism in the nascent democratic governments, every pensioner surviving on €50 per month while prices double and double – all of these lead you to one irresistible conclusion: that the Balkans and the former Eastern Bloc has a long way to go before it provides its citizens what they deserve. To be sure, it’s not the starvation poverty of sub-Saharan Africa or the child sex abuse of Cambodia or the unconscionable maltreatment of the Indian Untouchables. Of course it's not. I am prepared to accept that there are degrees of suffering, and, for the most part, people in this part of the world do have their basic needs met.

But as well as material poverty, there is the poverty of the human spirit, and it covers south east Europe like a grey, wet blanket. So many people are desperate to leave their countries. They’re exasperated with the failure of liberal democracy to provide what they feel it should. They’re sick of inflation keeping a middle class lifestyle tantalisingly out of reach. They’re (at best) ambivalent towards a EU that makes them jump through economic hoop after administrative hoop like dumb circus animals.

And most significantly of all, I think, almost to a person they feel their standard of living has dropped since the end of communism. I don’t know how one measures standard of living. There are too many plausible criteria to count – both for relative and absolute measures. But what’s changed in the past fifteen years is that now the citizens of these countries get to see western tourists, see western television, and see an alternate life that has pulled perhaps inexorably away from their own.

I don’t know it people really see progress as a “race” between
countries or not. Some definitely do. But the peoples of this region, with so much history and bloodshed and so much to be proud of too, see others in the world pulling away from them, and peace and seven percent economic growth or not – how can you be happy if you wake up every morning and see everyone else disappearing into the distance?

I’ve overstated my point of course – there’s plenty of development and positivism to see too. But I must say I’m glad to be moving on. Tomorrow to Turkey, and as I stay in a hostel on the Bosporus with my lovely friend Sarah, I will peer across the river for a whole week. And it’ll be a sad goodbye back at Europe for almost a year, and a big hello to Asia, where so very, very much awaits.