Gypsies, sunset, steak, and lovesickness

Passepartout is cross with me, and has spent the past couple of days greeting my every word with a torrent of sarcastic eye-rolling which I’m sure makes him privately dizzy. He accuses me of lovesickness and it’s just as well I’m discarding him at the Croat-Bosnian border. Lovesick I may be, but from a flatulent and sunburned Swedish Harry Potter-lookalike who lives on steak and lager, this seems an unfair slight. The lovesickness he rolls his eyes at is because of a raven-haired Korculan physicist named Sara. But a lot has happened since I last wrote, so I’ll start from the beginning and come back to Passepartout and his pigheaded condescension a bit later.

Serbia is a land of colour. I don’t mean it’s colourful in the sense of replete with bright colours. I mean that you feel the colours more than elsewhere – both their vividness and their absence. It’s really hard to describe. You have to see it to really get it.

It starts on the train ride into the country – and I can’t deny feeling real nervousness. Serbia is not the EU. It has no real prospects or intention of becoming part of the EU. Millions of litres of blood have been split on this soil over the past thousand years and longer, and much more recently than in western Europe. This is the Balkans. We (being NATO) bombed the crap out of it only eight years ago. Hungary and Czech feel like Eurodisney in comparison.

So the train rolls over the border and stops for what seems like forever. The gingerbread villages of southern Hungary with their flowerpots and white fences and farmers driving shiny tractors gives way to a deserted siding as you wait for the Serbian border police to board the train.

They do so, and painstakingly interview every passenger on board. The wait is interminable. You ask yourself whether you got rid of the magic mushrooms you bought in Vienna or whether the Dutch sex aids will start vibrating maniacally in your bag just as Lieutenant Bogdan – in camouflage fatigues and carrying a Kalashnikov and a catalogue of anti-imperial grievances – pushes sternly through your compartment door.

But the landscape is surreal. Even at 5pm, the sky is charcoal and the flat expanse of land drained and ashen. I felt, I must say, a little unwelcome – and I say this as an Australian who has been to Indonesia.

As it darkened and darkened it struck me – the darkness of this country is not just an ashen sky over blackened land, it must partly be due to a lack of reflected artificial light. For two or three hours we travelled through northern Serbia towards Belgrade and saw barely a light – despite the fact the countryside is plenty populated. For whatever Belgrade has become in the past few years, and despite the fact Serbia has become the tiger economy of the Balkans and a lightening rod for foreign investment, this is a dark country with a dark history.

But what surprise awaited us in Belgrade! We arrived at night and stumbled through potholed streets and lopsided alleyways, guided (or misguided) by Cyrillic street names which Passepartout claimed to be able to decipher without difficulty.

Three or four hours and a couple of wildly gesticulated conversations with sour-faced taxi drivers later, we arrived at our lodgings. Which turned out to be about thirty metres from where we started. But the next day brought with it a true sensory smorgasbord and I implore you all not merely to visit Belgrade – but to do it soon. Because as with everywhere in the former eastern bloc and Yugoslavia, the rate of Westernisation is truly frantic.

But Serbia is a country with profound problems. The billboards and neon advertising belie a massive disparity in wealth, a gini coefficient that would make an American CEO blush. The shops are full of broadly the same products one finds in London or Sydney – smartphones and plasma tellies, clothing which (although hardly Paris Fashion Week) are roughly the same as everywhere else. And the prices are the same as in western Europe.

But here is a problem I’ve seen all through the former East – the stores are empty because income is barely a quarter that of the West. My CSFI salary in London would afford me a truly exceptional lifestyle here but it would make me one of only a handful of people in the country able to afford the goods that fill the shelves. Who make up the other handful? The Mob, a handful of the Serbian elite who have made their money elsewhere, and arithmetically-challenged tourists who struggle to convert the currency and enthuse that a Nokia N95 is a real Belgrade bargain.

What’s more, the streets are filled with gypsies, the Roma, and the partially employed. Plus more stray cats and dogs than you’ve ever seen in your life. Street markets are everywhere but sell nothing you would ever wish to buy and the locals seem to feel the same. I watched a busy market for an hour and saw people examine broken digital watches and mobile chargers and cracked glasses and buy virtually nothing. Is it that uncontrollable inflation has extended from the big Market to the street market? Or just that they recognise crap when they see it too?

The grey darkness, as I said, is striking – and it admittedly didn’t help that it drizzled a fair bit of the time Passepartout and I were there. But the smell is discernible too – and it’s not a bad one at all, it’s just familiar to anyone who has visited large Asian cities. It’s the everywhere scent of cooking oil and outdoor food preparation, of street animals and communist-era car pollution, of dust and sewerage and newly-washed laundry. It may sound unpleasant but it’s not at all. It’s a smell that is real and intense and welcomingly reminiscent of my travels in Asia as a child.

We visited Tito’s mausoleum perched on a hill overlooking the city. An exorbitant taxi ride across potholes the size of bomb craters – some of which, I suppose, may actually have been – took us to where the strongman of rump Yugoslavia is buried. The Serbs revere him for resisting Soviet pressure and holding the federation together. He reminds them of a time when Yugoslavia was effectively Greater Serbia with many times the area and population it has now. Only last year Montenegro voted for independence, the last of the SFRY states to leave the once mighty Serbia. You can’t help but feel their nostalgia when talking to them. The young Serbs largely loath Milosevic and Mladic and the other military cronies from the Bosnian war, but even the most internationalist and cosmopolitan among them and those too young to have been drowned in nationalist propaganda feel aggrieved. Aggrieved at NATO for the 1999 campaign, aggrieved at the US, at the Hague Tribunal, at the EU which sneers at them, aggrieved at the Croats whom many consider to have been co-aggressors in the war. The world doesn’t see it that way – because history has written of a regime which was ruthless, racist and expansionist – but they do. With everyone I spoke to, I sensed bitterness at everything which has happened.

Tito’s burial place is one of the most unusual places I’ve visited. After he died in 1980 they built a museum around his grave, a place of such 1970s tackiness the Brady Bunch would’ve squealed in delight. It looks like the atrium of an unbearably nasty hotel and the museum where his considerable collection of gifts are housed is empty and sterile and staffed by a man who tried to charge an irate Passepartout €7 for a postcard. Passepartout told him in his now-fluent Serbian to stick the postcard up his commie rent-a-cop arse. We left.

On our last night in Belgrade we were joined by an Australian girl who has the kind of presence that when she enters a room it feels like someone left. Soporific but good-natured, she accompanied Passepartout and I to a tourist-less bistro in the suburbs where Passepartout had his fourth steak of the day and after seeing the most extraordinary sunset (smog-induced, alas) we listened to the locals belt out ancient and violent drinking songs. The lyrics to my favourite goes:

“When we cut off the breasts of the women and eat the children of the Muslims and the Jews, then will Serbia reclaim its rightful position as leaders. Because we rape the women and kill the men – we are warriors to the last man!!”

Okay, I’ve paraphrase a little, but I have this translation on good authority from Passepartout (who by this time was loudly boasting fluency in Serbian to anyone who would listen) so it is presumably accurate.

After the bistro we were led to an underground bar so cool it doesn’t even get busy until 3am and we drank ourselves stupid for hours with the locals and some expats until Passepartout wanted another steak so we settled for Preslavica – a Serbian hamburger the size of an Olympic discus – and caught our 6am train to Croatia.

I will save telling you about Split and its underage beehive, and the drive there at 190kph for another time because I’ve rambled on at some length already, so I’ll skip straight to the past four days which we’ve passed on the island of Korcula, three hours off the Croatian coast, and where I fell for Sara.

Korcula is – and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb here – perhaps the loveliest place I’ve ever visited. The island has 16000 inhabitants (of which 3500 live in the town of the same name), and it sits in the middle of an archipelago of crystal clear Adriatic waters, thick forests and a medieval old town which has resisted invaders for centuries. It is also – if you’re interested – the birthplace of Marco Polo.

Our days were spent exquisitely – kayaking, climbing a mountain in search of a Franciscan monastery, sipping espressos with the locals – and no list of adjectives can adequately convey how beautiful, peaceful and welcoming a place it is. Let me just tell you to go there at some point in your lives and you will understand what I mean.

I should wind up, so I’ll finish by telling the cause of Passepartout’s eye-rolling. On Monday, his aunt introduced us to Sara, a girl who grew up there but who now studies theoretical physics in Zagreb and who was back on the island for a couple of weeks. The introduction was made with evident intent to forge a romantic union between Passepartout and her (his aunt had to marry her still-husband in a shotgun wedding in the 60s after they were seen holding hands in public – but things have progressed a little since then).

It transpired that Sara is a lot more like me than like Passepartout (she farts less than 35 times a day, for one thing, and doesn’t give a rat’s arse about buying equities) and we hit it off immediately. She is chic and curious and struggles to understand people in groups. She is melancholic and deterministic and cynical about human nature. She is intrigued by the happiness of others and their lives and the nature of good and evil, and I was immediately smitten.

Passepartout is not quite as dim as he appears and realised this by the second day. “Jump her!” he implores. “She wants it! I asked her friends and they all said yes!” Bless him. But soon I began to understand how differently things work in this part of the world. In a small, catholic town on a remote island where everyone knows everyone and gossip is a de facto currency, a girl cannot be seen cavorting in public. My usual repertoire of innuendo, lascivious sniggering and smart-arse comments would not work here. This would require a crash course in the art of seduction.

The first evening that I walked her home (after Passepartout’s increasingly insistent suggestions) and after she had playfully tossed her hair and touched my arm and girly-giggled a couple of dozen times, I offered my arm as we walked through the moonlit main street. She declined it – the first time a girl ever has. I was crushed. Bewildered. Confused. Fuck Passepartout and his meddling! I vowed to put arsenic on his breakfast steak the next morning.

So I did not pursue and we parted with a smile and a nervous kiss on the cheek, but the next day my various investigations revealed that this is all part of the boy-girl game here – il faut ‘jouer le jeu’ – and she knew that I had one more night on the island. And to be seen walking arm in arm with a man back to her house at 3am would start tongues wagging – even if, alas, not our own.

So after a day spent with her at the beach (during which at one point she emerged glistening and bikini-clad from the water exactly the way Ursula Andress did in Dr No, and I lay on my front to conceal both my white belly and ... well… anyway) we went out again on my last night on the island. And we chatted and played and discussed the world and sat on the beach as the water lapped, and then…well, I will not allow this column to be reduced to salacious tabloid rot, but suffice to say that the night ended perfectly and reminded me once more that although for most people at most times in most places life is tedious and shit, there come occasional moments - for all of us - where you wouldn’t change a single thing.

So we parted, and I shall miss her and think very fondly of the few days we spent. And once I rid myself of Passepartout at the Bosnian border, my voyage will continue solo across the Balkans to Sarajevo and Sofia and Skopje. Alone, perhaps, but not lonely.