How many pissed off, confused backpackers can you pile in to bratislava hlavná stanica?

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Bratislava really doesn't seem to like me much.

I write this from an internet café on the way back from Budapest. I had a really cool time, went there last night for a club night at a boat on the danube which a friend of mine was putting on with some other guys. While it lasted it was good, however we were caught by an absolutely ferocious windstorm which proved having the club on the boat too dangerous, so it was shut down at something like 1:30am, about 4 hours earlier than planned and just as everyone was starting to arrive. So we spent the rest of the evening at my friends flat eating cheese sandwiches and listening to classical music and weird electronic classical stuff.

I managed to sleep on the train back as far as Bratislava, only being woken up at every intermediate station by some hopeless couple of american tourists panicking loudly about whether they could trust the station signs informing them that they were in štúrovo/nové zámký or whether those were "just the name of that store over there, and we might be in Bratislava already". Finally the slovak capital did return to me, at which point it got too full and I couldn´t get back to sleep. Not that I needed to. Along came the announcement telling us that the train, which was bound to go all the way to Hamburg in Germany, was terminating at Bratislava!

Cackling slightly at all the confusion, I swung onto the osobník to Kúty - the next international station on the way to Prague - on the opposite platform, which a lot of other people seemed to be doing, obviously so instructed by a member of ZSSK (the slovak rail company). Arriving at Kúty we could pick up another osobník to Břeclav, and we would be safely back in the Czech Republic and able to move on. Maybe. After a few stops at various sidliště bumfuckovice panelák estates on the outskirts of Bratislava, along came another announcement telling us we had to alight at this silly little town called Zohor (i think) 20 minutes north of the capital.

A rather scary looking Slovak woman went to get some actual info out of the guys at this place and it transpired that that storm we had felt in Budapest was nothing, affecting ČR far far worse, and that a load of trees had fallen on the line in between Bratislava and Kúty. So we stood around in this place for ages waiting for a rail replacement bus service, wondering why the hell they chose to send us to a ridiculous place in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a furniture shop and a closed ice cream parlor, rather than just leave us in Bratislava. When a bus finally did turn up, it was not big enough to house the contents of one train carriage, so me and this Australian dude I´d been chatting to, and the scary Slovak woman, all decided to go back to Bratislava and try going to ČR via Vienna.

However I was told back at the positively chaos stricken hlavná stanica that Vienna was no good either and was told, probably under the impression that I was just travelling, to "wait til tomorrow" - clearly there is more damage than just between Bratislava and Kúty, because Vienna to Prague doesn´t hit that track at all. I am now at an internet café near Bratislava international bus terminal, hoping to god that the roads are okay enough (Czech roads have a penchant for being unreliable at the best of times) to get me at least as far as Brno. I've also just read up about this storm on BBC news and found that 7 people were killed by falling trees and wires in Poland.

Update from Prague, 22:17 CET: I'm back, it took me a total of 15 hours 30 minutes, or 8 and a half hours longer than it should have. All buses from Bratislava to Brno (let alone Prague) were full for the next three days, at this point, I simply went back to the train station with no other hope than to try the same from Vienna. However, back at the station, I was greeted by the announcement that the zombie train from Berlin, which was now 9 hours late, had finally arrived in Bratislava thus having cleared the Czech Republic! And the next train going the right direction took me all the way to Břeclav without any worries, where I changed onto the pendolino back to Prague. On the way to Břeclav, the sights of the damage caused by the storm were absolutely unbelievable. Videos at the top are supposed to show that - sorry about the poor quality, you might see it if you look closely.

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Photos

Utter state
We are sorry to announce that the 5:53 EuroNight service to Budapest-Keleti Palyaudvar is running approximately 6 hours late.

Nabytok
That's all there was open in Zohor.

Complete confusion
Zohor might hope it never sees this many backpackers again!