The Galaxy's guide to where not to hitch-hike

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On July 18th I set off on another solo trip through the balkans. A bit of background info to this trip is necessary. M and I were supposed to go on solo trips at the same time, her to the Alps and me to Bosnia. Hers was to do some serious mountaineering and mine was for background research for my next book. My trip was delayed because I was waiting for a new passport and some 400,000 applications were piling up in a conference room somewhere in the Scouse Republic, mine being one of them. Finally, a week ago, I set off on a train for Budapest and checked into the grimmest and most cheap and spiteful hostel I've ever seen, though for 10 euros for a private room one can hardly complain. The next morning I got on a train to Szentlörinc and then took a connection to Barcs, a Hungarian-Croatian border town. There used to be a train which went from Budapest to Sarajevo but they cancelled it, so rather than doing the sensible thing and going via Zagreb, I decided to do this maneuvre around the border along almost the same route for three reasons: 1) I love walking across borders, 2) to check out Slavonia and 3) as a way of saying fuck you to whomever was responsible for cancelling that train.

A site called "BalkanViator" told me that there were buses going from Barcs to the Croatian town of Virovitica. I was prepared for this to be bullshit and it is complete and utter wank. BalkanViator is an unreliable website, do not trust anything you find on it. Let this be the first commandment of backpacking in the Balkans - do not trust any information you find on the internet. Most people in ex-Yugoslavia clearly don't use the internet to find this kind of information, so no one would put it there, let alone keep it up to date. I therefore reverted to plan B which was to walk across the border and then try to hitchhike the remaining 14km to Virovitica. If I couldn't, I would walk it.

Let these be the second and third commandments of backpacking in the balkans: do not overestimate your abilities - it is fucking hot in summer and long walks in blaring sun with a heavy bag on the back can be dangerous. Next, do not bother attempting to hitch-hike unless someone in your party is a girl. I am guessing this is how it is, because I had no problem hitch-hiking small distances with Jitka in the middle of fucking nowhere in Hungary/Romania in 2010. No car stopped for me during the 10km I walked along the main road. My google map I had printed out showed me that I could take a shortcut down a dirt track which crossed a couple of villages and then into Virovitica, and would save me a few kilometers. I went down this route, past the two villages, and then it turned into some kind of inter-field route for tractors before ceasing to exist completely. Fourth commandment - don't trust google maps walking directions. My google map of Barcs also had a "road" marked on which was just a piece of grass some cars had driven on and led into wilderness so thick I wouldn't consider it passable except by lawnmower. Just to make it worse, as I turned around ready to walk back to the nearest village, it began to rain.

As I walked through this village (one street of houses), I realised I couldn't go on, I had run out of water, my feet were killing me as was my stomach - the bag on the back was beginning to harm my body. I phoned M back in Prague and went on a tirade about how fucking inhospitable people are and how could no one stop for me, before finally asking her to find me a phone number for a taxi company in Virovitica online. 20 minutes later she wrote back that she couldn't find one (I guess since the internet is useless out there), but luckily I stumbled across one on a sticker stuck to a lamp post. I barely managed to communicate my whereabouts over the phone in garbled South Slavic and half an hour later was finally on my way to civilisation. By that time I was feeling more towards sleeping in Virovitica, but there was apparently nowhere to sleep, so I went on with my plan of either going to Daruvar or to Osijek. I found that there were no buses or trains to Daruvar left, so arriving into Osijek at 9:30pm was my only option. Asking directions to the station was fun, the guy I stopped squinted at me when I asked for "kolodvor", "stanica", "stacja" and "vlak" but understood "vasútállomás" and responded in English after all that. I had 2 hours til the train left, so I called a hostel in Osijek who told me they had a spare bed. I then tried to find somewhere to eat around the station which turned out to be fruitless, so I went and got my third supermarket scrap meal of the day from Billa and headed for the bar next to the station for a few beers.

I arrived in Osijek, asked for onward train times to Slavonski Brod the next day, and jumped into a taxi to this hostel. The hostel was part of a nightclub which I would have been up for checking out if it weren't for the fact that I was now limp, blistering and exhausted. An old woman who was supposedly the hostel manager led me up the stairs to the rooms and tried to open each one, but all three rooms were locked. No one answered when she knocked on the doors. To be honest I'm not even sure this place was a hostel. She told me she couldn't accommodate me and that I should look elsewhere. "Go round there, there's a hostel above a pizzeria", she said, and disappeared. I went round there and there was no pizzeria.

After walking through blazing sun and occasional showers all afternoon, with no one stopping to pick me up, being misled by google maps, and reduced to eating improvised meals from supermarkets all day, this nightclub had picked the absolute worst time to piss me off. I went back in there and, as the so-called hostel manager had disappeared, launched into a tirade about how I had phoned, been told there was space, and now I've been thrown out on the street with vague directions which make no sense in a city I don't know. The bar staff conferred between themselves in Croatian and one of them showed me to a place called Guesthouse Maksimilian. The guy was nice and listened to my story as we walked and told me that Croatia isn't a good country to hitch-hike in. He left me with an offer of a beer at their nightclub. The girl on reception at the guesthouse was one of those people who can brighten the darkest of days and suddenly everything (except my body) felt okay as we talked while she was copying down info from my passport. I really wished I could have gone for that drink, as I felt a bit bad for shouting at the bar staff, but I could barely move. I lay and read one more chapter of Zlatan Ibrahimović's autobiography before falling asleep. I think, fittingly, it was the one where he says that self-pity gets you nowhere among Yugos. Let that be the fifth commandment of backpacking in the Balkans. Don't pity yourself. You'll meet some good souls eventually.

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Photos

Budapest looks a lot cleaner than I remember
The new Metro line may have something to do with that.

Entering Croatia
This flat, blue-skied shadeless landscape was not the best choice of place for a 14km ramble on a July afternoon.

Church in Gornje Bazije
One of the few villages I trundled through

Virovitica
Unfortunately finding out that it is twinned with Vyškov na Moravě was the most interesting thing that happened there.