Absolute Hitchhiking Failure In Austria

I'm in central Austria at 2 in the morning and I drank my last Red Bull and no one wants to give me a ride and my bank account won't work until I get to Germany which means I have no money so fuck me.

As they say in Slovakia...Jebautopezdopice (Fuck a dog's vagina.)  I'm sleeping in the gas station tonight.   There's a small restaurant area inside so I stretch out on one of the padded booths and pass out.  It seems the employees don't care.  For the past 5 hours they've been amused with watching me absolutely fail to hitchhike from Austria to Germany.

After the Ruzinov Concert I spent a few happy days joking and playing in Bratislava with my Slovak and Polish friends from Krakow.  I completed my travel circle by passing through Vienna once again to visit and say goodbye to my Bulgarian artist friend, Kosta Tonev.  Once I left Vienna I was on my own again.  I had a few more days to catch my flight from Frankfort back to Costa Rica, so I arbitrarily picked a town half-way between Vienna and Frankfort to hitchhike to.  That town was Regensburg.  Regensburg was the best random choice I could have made, but the trip there proved to be my worst hitchhiking experience ever.
  

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It started fine.  In accordance with hitchwiki.org again, I had taken a bus to a gas station at the farthest possible Western point of metropolitan Vienna.  Within an hour a nice middle-aged lady took me to rest stop  on the highway south of Linz.  From there it got more difficult, and almost 2 1/2 hours passed before a young hippie, professional juggling couple picked me up.  They said they wanted to take me because I had a guitar, so I "must be an artist" like them.  Hippies.

"We are sorry, artist.  We must go south, but can take you to Wels where there is a highway to Passau border to Germany.  It is late."

They seemed very apologetic about having to leave me alone at sunset by the highway.  There wasn't much to look at: the gas station, a rundown hotel and a large parking lot full of trucks with license plates from all corners of Europe.  A typical highway rest stop.

I had a small sign with "Passau" written on it.  I brandished it like a sword at the automobiles as they stopped at the pumps to fill up.   It was far easier than standing on the side of a highway and I felt positive despite it being almost 8 o'clock at night.  Several people were already offering me rides.  Unfortunately no one was going all the way to Germany.  An hour passed in front of the station and the streetlights light up.  It was officially nighttime.

Time to ask truckers.  This idea quickly went south as practically all of them had turned off their lights and gone to sleep.  The cars that remained in the parking lot were full of sleeping families and various boxes.   Most of them bore license plates from Slavic countries, The Balkans and Turkey.  Austria sits at a crossroads between what many people refer to as prosperous Western Europe and poor Eastern Europe.  The parking lot was in the middle of Austria, but felt like one of the many eastern borders I had crossed on my journey.

It was a parking lot of tired transients with no fixed homes: truckers, immigrants and a lonely American hitchhiker.  It was cold and late, so I went inside to spend my last saved Euros on a cup of coffee at the all-night cafe.  The bartender and gas station staff were all Bosnian and Croatian.  The two sexy girls who sat down next to me were Romanians who were "just working" in Austria.  Where were all the Austrians?  Wels stood at the foot of a mass wave of immigrants working in France, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium while secretly waiting for their free days to return to their families and culture in Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and Turkey.  My quick little European joyride felt quite insignificant in comparison.


I slept fitfully for 3 hours in the booth.  In the early morning light I got a ride from a man who spoke neither German nor English.  I tried my Serbian-Slovak-Slavic mongrel language.  His eyes understood and he showed me his Croatian passport.  He was going all the way to Frankfort to work so, yes, he could drop me off in Regensburg.

I will miss "Eastern" Europe.

  

The Wrong Way To Hitchhike Budapest to Bratislava

(As I've mentioned before, my notes on this Eurotrip were stolen in San Jose, Costa Rica.  More on that later.  Due to this my memory of this part isn't accurate so I will substitute it with online information.)

Aboriginal Hostel's excellent breakfast fixed my palinka hangover quick, and I drank enough free coffee to keep me wired until at least sunset.  The hostel staff had no additional information on hitchhiking to Bratislava, so I took the hitchwiki.org information to heart:

When heading west (M7 to Balaton or M1 to Austria and Slovakia), you should take bus 272 from Kosztolányi Dezső tér or Sasadi út and get off at the stop Budaörs, benzinkút. It stops right in the Agip service station with a lot of traffic to both motorways. The journey takes 20 minutes. It can be a great place if you get a chance to talk to drivers, though the staff of the petrol station may not allow it.

It was a lucky day.  I didn't have to wait long to get a ride, and the guy was practically fluent in English.  He was an Austrian-Hungarian who handled construction contracts for various projects in Central Europe.  His current project was a large entertainment park that would be built right by the convergence of the Austrian-Slovak-Hungarian borders.  I had been through that empty region before.  I congratulated him on his success, but secretly felt that the last thing an untamed wilderness area needed was another massive, sprawling building complex.


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What did it matter?  I'm no fucking earth child.  With just one ride I was almost to the Slovak border.  The Austro-Hungarian dropped me off at the highway exit near Rajka which lead to his house and happy family.  At that moment, I saw no safe place by the highway so I went to the auxiliary road to keep from getting killed.

My luck ran out.  After an hour barely a car had driven by.  I was impatient and grumpy.  I estimated the border would be no more that a kilometer away so I started walking down the 150/S2 to see if on the other side I would encounter a bus stop where I could go directly to Bratislava.  My Budapest hostel hangover was starting to return and the coffee had wore off.  It's sunset.  I swear no more palinka ever again.

Highway M15: This is where you should cross the border

When I got to the border, there were no bus stops - hell, there weren't even cars.  A lonely, derelict border station from the days before the highway had been built sat there as a stunning monument to post-Communist neglect.  Here words like "renovation" and "renewal" don't exist.  The desolate relic mocked my stupidity for taking the auxiliary road instead of the highly-trafficked highway border crossing.  I crossed the border on foot alone.  The two cars that followed ignored me as I entered Slovakia.

There was another building ahead surrounded by trucks.  Perhaps I could rest there for a minute and find a ride.  Or perhaps not.

Road 150: This is where you shouldn't cross the border

Strip clubs are fun, but not the place to waste my time while I am still 20 kilometers from my final destination.  Plus I imagine that border strip clubs have some rather frightful ladies.  Beyond the club I saw nothing promising for a ride nor a rest.  I focused what little energy I had and swore I would walk all the way to Bratislava if I had to, God dammit.

Another kilometer down the the road my luck returned.  The two-lane road had been reduced to one-lane for a construction project.  Temporary stoplights had been put up in order to make the two-lanes alternate turns so as to avoid head-on collisions.  This created considerable backup on the lanes.  Bad for the drivers; good for me.  I started casually walking up and down the line of stopped cars asking for a ride.  Within 15 minutes a nice elderly couple had taken me to my old home of Ružinov, Bratislava.

I'm home again.  My European home.





  

Hairy Hungarian Hitchhiker: Belgrade to Budapest

That is an impressive beard!

In hitchhiker language "H" is for Hungary

That is the first thought that came to my mind when I got picked up by the truck-driving Hairy Hungarian Hitcher.  His massive beard, short stature and round figure gave him the appearance of a dwarf who had crawled out of a mountain from Middle-Earth.  I had no way of expressing my thoughts since I discovered with a simple "Hello" that my driver knew not one word of English.  Magically in my travels I had acquired 6 words of Hungarian, which were enough to make the Hairy Hungarian Hitcher (now referred to as the HHH) smile with delight and chat to me as if I were his long-lost friend.

"Szia. Eg, Kete, Haram"

"Ezhgie okjoklkomun keszelk?"

"Uh...Koszonom!"

"Kegeskszouem keszerss!!! Gskgetlkl zeguk eguszoj ...." 

  

Truck drivers.  The true saviors for many a desperate hitchhiker.  Lonely, creepy, smelly and uncouth...they receive a bad reputation even though most of them have a heart of gold.  All most truck drivers need is some entertainment since being on the road for a million hours can get mind-numbingly boring.  Hitchhikers have received the same bad reputation as truckers thanks to a few bad apples; and we get bored standing by the road.  Naturally, we bond quite quickly.

Lost in Serbia

Somehow my conversations with the HHH were more interesting than Dusan, my first hitcher who had taken me from the northern side of Belgrade to the desolate, hot highway where I got the next ride.  Dusan and I had rambled on in my broken Serbo-Slovak-Polish language and he was happy to leave me with two wonderful gifts.  The first was a wilted cellophane-wrapped sandwich that I greedily accepted (when traveling never turn down free food.)  The second was a fine map of Serbia.  It was not a standard highway map but it was detailed and included all the major roads and cities I needed to know for traveling.

Too bad I'm leaving Serbia today.

I was showing this map to the HHH, who laughed and then suddenly looked concerned.  He pointed at the northern-most point on the map and said something with a rather regretful tone in his voice.  He repeated it with the same sadness and I looked at his hairy, dwarf face.  I gathered that was the point where I had to leave.  Only when I when we reached the border did I understand that the border police was his principle concern.  No hitchhikers.  Were it not for that I would have had a ride on highway E75 all the way to Budapest.  I shouted, "Egészségédre!" and got out.

My next two rides were spent in silence save for the Hungarian greetings.  These people weren't as excited as the truck-driving HHH to venture a conversation with a foreigner when they couldn't speak English.  My final ride dropped me off in central District IX within the vicinity of a metro stop and a shopping mall.  The mall had a bookshop where I quickly checked my email.  My last-minute planning skills were in effect, and I was hoping for a last-minute Couchsurfer to give me a place to stay.

There was no last-minute Couchsurfer.  I received responses, but they were offers for other nights or locations too far outside of downtown for me to handle getting lost at 9 at night.  This left me to search for hostels.  I already knew of some from previous stays so I headed to my favorite of them all: Budapest Bubble.  It's perhaps one of the smallest hostels in Budapest, but by far the coziest and friendliest one.  And one of the co-owners, Olga, has received praise and admiration from far away for her smile and indie-girl good looks.  I took the nearest metro there.

Budapest Bubble was full.  No surprise for a place that only has 20 beds.  However they did send me to their sister hostel, Aboriginal Hostel, which was a mere 500 meters down the road.  I thought I would get some sleep.  Instead, as a card-carrying hostel manager from Costa Rica, I met some very important hostel people who revealed to me the rather sordid and often dirty business of hostel management.  This is gonna be a long night.

In The Shade of The Bubanj Memorial Fists, Nis, Serbia

(Part Two of a more detailed account of my time in Nis, Serbia)

Welcome to the dark side of the moon.

The three stone fists of the Bubanj Memorial Park stretch defiantly skyward.  They jut unnaturally out of the featureless, flat grassy field like alien-made monoliths on the surface of a far away planet.  Or as one of my friends so eloquently put it, "Dude, it looks like the cover of a Pink Floyd album."

It was still scorching hot.  I sat in the shade of the largest fist in deep, melancholy thought.  My thought process was a depressing continuation of that from Crvni Krist Concentration Camp where I had just came from.  Although Bubanj Memorial Park is located several kilometers from Nis and requires a 30 minute walk uphill, it is intimately connected to the camp.  The prisoners of Crveni Krst were executed at Bubanj Hill.

The three fists are different sizes to show that men, women and children were all killed and buried here.  Since bodies were buried with bulldozers and many were burned to cover up evidence, the number of dead can only be vaguely placed at somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.  At one point between February 16th and 17th, 1942 over 1,400 prisoners were executed on the hill.

Bubanj Memorial was as lonely that day as Crveni Krst.  I sat under the largest fist for nearly an hour and not a soul came to interrupt my peace.  Once again there were no signs to explain the history nor tourist-friendly lights to illuminate the stones.  The only signs of human interaction with the monuments were squiggles of blue graffiti.  The wide, grassy field was overgrown and unkempt.  Amazingly the loneliness here felt more crushing than in the camp.  Dying in a concentration camp is horrifying enough, but being brought to die on an extremely isolated, unidentified hill in the middle of a forest seems far more frightening.

This sculpture has no explanation

The sun was setting and the moment was over.  I am not some heroic backpacker who independently desires to learn of the history and suffering of the Serbian people by visiting such an unfamiliar place.  The reality is that a Serbian friend told me about it and I thought, "That sounds like a good idea."  She was kind enough to let me explore the field and monoliths on my own as she slept by the path that lead to the desolate area.  If not for her, perhaps I never would have translated the Cyrillic message on a stone I saw at the memorial before we descended the long hill back to Nis:

  “From the blood of communists and patriots fists were born: fists of revolt and warning, fists of the revolution, fists of liberty. We were shot, but never killed, never subdued. We crushed the darkness and paved the way for the Sun.”    
                                                                                                                      --Ivan Vuckovic                                                                                    

My Own Private Concentration Camp in Nis, Serbia

(Part One of a more detailed account of my time in Nis, Serbia.)

I've been to Auschwitz in Poland.

It hit me in the gut.  I felt sad at the mass atrocities that had happened.  I felt relieved that my great-grandparents from Poland had left in the 1890s so they had avoided the horrors of the war.  I felt angry and felt like punching some asshole tourist when I saw him filming and taking pictures of the interior of the prisons and cells in direct violations of the rules. I generally hate rules, but...don't you have any respect? Asshole.

I had many strong feelings.  But they were stronger at Crveni Krst Concentration Camp in Nis, Serbia.  

Why?  At Auschwitz I stood in a line for a ticket, followed a tour guide around in a line, watched other tour groups walking through various parts of the camp and finished the tour at a souvenir shop.  All the exhibits were clean and shiny and well-kept.  The whole thing felt like a creepy, well-maintained ride at The Walt Disneyland of Death.

Crveni Krst looks like it hasn't been touched since it closed in 1944.  The one employee simply collected the $1 entry fee, let me in and went back to sleep.  He offered no tour, no advice and no explanation.  Not a single other tourist came during the hour I spent there.  All the signs were in Serbian Cyrillic so I could only make vague assumptions of what happened.  I was alone with my own private concentration camp.

I did not feel a cold chill as I walked into the camp; rather I felt extremely hot, sweaty and uncomfortable.  My American brain has problems with metric conversions, but that scalding Serbian summer cemented in my mind what 40 Celsius feels like: really fucking hot (or 104 Fahrenheit.)  Any prisoner who had been there during the summer between 1941 and 1944 would be sweating bullets for more reasons than one.  Ironically, stepping inside the prison building was relieving. 

The lack of any English in the building confounded my attempts to learn the history.  I squinted at the exhibit signs and desperately hoped to understand them, but I did not magically gain the ability to read Cyrillic.  One wall had pictures of various prisoners, so I started counting them until I lost track.  Human skulls were in a display case and I could only assume they were from dead prisoners. The entire experience left me feeling more lost and alone, until finally I found a room full of artwork that put the camp in perspective.

Kids draw the damnest things

The artwork was graphic, disturbing and was clearly drawn by children.  In the United States these drawings would get a child sent to the school psychologist for counseling and a call to the parents.  Here they appeared to be a project approved by the school itself.  I was able to discern that there had been various acts of torture against Jews, Gypsies and Communist prisoners.  Several pictures depicted a large unarmed revolt.  Many prisoners were escaping over the walls, but many others were shot dead while tangled in the barbwire.


I wish more history was told this way.  If I could have read the adults' Cyrillic signs, I'm sure they would have tried to impress me with elaborate stories involving phrases like "astounding heroism," "incredible atrocities," and "never again in our lives."  These fancy words are always accompanied by various facts, figures, graphs and numbers.  Do we need numbers to prove that war is bad?  The childrens' drawings get to the point.  

                         Some people live.  

                                                    Some people die.

The first floor was a museum.  The second floor was just a large attic with prison cells; nothing more.  The cell doors were open, so I went inside one and sat down.  I didn't think.  I didn't want to think, because I would start coming up with all those florid, elaborate, "adult" phrases that I hate.  I stared at the door.  Then I stared at a wall.  Then I picked another wall and stared at it.  I stared at different walls until I found myself staring out the shutter window that was in the roof.

I started thinking.  What if I couldn't leave?

(Of course I'm an adult, so I had many thoughts, and later I fact-checked everything with my Serbian friends and the Internet.  But I'm not some douchebag who works for Lonely Planet, so I won't write it here.)

Sweet Home Nis Serbia

I hitched a ride from the Serbian-Bulgarian border.  I planned to be in Nis, Serbia before the sunset, but it's already nightfall and I'm in a small town called Pirot, still 75 kilometers from Nis.

I'm dining on a traditional 'gurmanska pljeskavica' (Serbian cheeseburger) and a not-so-traditional Coca-Cola.  The old man who picked me up, Dusan, just paid for my meal with one of the fattest rolls of Serbian Dinars I have ever seen.  I estimate its worth at at least 100 American dollars.  He's waving the money around to let the world to know he has just paid for the Amerikan's dinner.  I remember I'm not in Latin America where such an act might get you robbed.

"Ciefing" in Mostar, Bosnia

Southern Serbia (and the Balkans in general) operates on a different wavelength from the rest of the world.  Only in Nis do I see people spend a 12 hour day drinking the same cup of coffee while talking about all the things they have to do, need to do, should do, could do...without ever actually doing them.  In neighboring Bosnia this has a name, 'cief,' which loosely translates as 'doing nothing and loving it.'  This sounds more like the laid-back 'mañana' attitude of Latin American countries such as my current home of Costa Rica.  However the Balkans has managed to create an equally laid-back, but more sophisticated culture, around something which is not supposed to relax you - a cup of coffee.

I blame the evil tourism industry.  Since I live in Costa Rica, I use it as the obvious example.  Costa Rica has marketed and sold the expression 'Pura Vida' as THE way of encompassing the people's friendly, relaxed attitude towards life.  This place is sold as a peaceful, military-free country with gorgeous beaches and perfect sunny weather where nothing goes wrong.  They don't mention the criminals who prey on tourists, the tourists who prey on prostitutes, the trash and piss-smells in the streets and the fact that it rains 11 months out of the year.  

While it is true that Costa Ricans are happy and friendly, that's only true if you talk about happy, touristy things.  If you take the conversation beyond the weather, they turn out to be as conservative, deeply religious and closed-minded as your average American Southern Baptist Republican.  Despite me tolerating criticism daily about 'gringos' and capitalist USA, if I criticize Costa Rica I'm usually told to, "go back to your own country if you don't like it. (see Youtube comments.) Sound familiar?  Yeehaw!

The Balkan countries of Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia, (and Kosovo depending on who you talk too) have stunning mountains and beaches, nice weather and friendly people who will often invite you into their homes like family.  Unfortunately tourists still see this region as a war-torn, poverty-stricken place full of violent, genocidal war criminals.   

Horrible, war-torn former Yugoslavia

When my nice Serbian friends travel through Europe, they hear supposedly intelligent people call them 'war-criminals' and 'racists' because of the actions of a few powerful people with evil ideas.  Oh well...such is history.  Germans still have to apologize when they get 'too patriotic' at international football games because some politically sensitive, whiny pricks start throwing out the word 'Nazi.'  I don't care.  I was cheering for Deutschland at the Eurocup 2012. 

But I digress...

I watched the elderly Dusan wandering around the gas station parking lot and wonder how he could be a war criminal.  He was beyond laid-back, and the fact that he couldn't speak English didn't stop him from sharing his whole life with me.  We had already stopped by his house to move furniture, finished a Serbian dinner on his tab and had coffee at a local cafe that was owned by his son who had lived in Chicago for some years.  His son was 'Americanized' and had explained to his father that although I appreciated the hospitality, it was 8 o'clock at night and I had somewhere else to go.  

Dusan was now soliciting rides for me from truck drivers in the gas station.  His son said I was in a hurry; but Dusan couldn't be hurried.  He strolled from truck to truck seemingly without purpose, and yet somehow managed to find a ride for me within 10 minutes.  He passed me his number and told me to call him when I arrived in Nis...and that I always had a home with his family if I was ever in Pirot.  The same crushing, sad feeling I had had with Maria in the Ukraine - knowing I would never see someone again - came over me.

An hour later I was at the riverside amphitheater in Nis, singing Gogol Bordello, drinking heavily and partying with my friends as if we had never missed the past year together.

  



  

   
  

How To Entertain The Bulgaria-Serbia Border Police

Where the hell am I?

The bus left me on a lonely dirt road that supposedly went to the Serbian border.  The road drifted away and disappeared around a distant corner.  All I could see were haystacks, cows and miles of rolling hills.

Hills.  I wasn't ready for hills.  After 3 hours of sleep, a wild night with a Brazilian backpacker girl, a city tour of Sofia and several hours lost in the Bulgarian countryside I was ready to collapse.  The Red Bulls had worn off much faster than expected and my guitar had suddenly grown a lot heavier when I stepped off the bus.

I shook myself out of my exhausted haze and started walking down the snaking road towards the corner.  The corner soon gave way to a large descending plain of rolling hills on my right and a farm that meandered off into the horizon on my left.  In the distance I saw a farmer with a scythe hacking at hay as several cows lulled around him.  Chirping birds and evening crickets gave the surroundings a tranquil, pastoral feel that I was completely unable to enjoy since I had no idea where I would sleep that night.  I had the vague feeling of a trespasser as the dirt road slowly brought me in the farmer's direction.

Maybe he would offer a wayward traveler a place to stay?  Sunset was evident now and long shadows played over hills which refused to show a large sign or line that said in big letters, "SERBIA."  This was not the kind of road I expected to find any hitchhiking cars on...maybe tractors or donkeys.

Among the tranquil bird and cricket chirps I detected sounds of civilization: cars!!  The large hill descended to a highway - the same highway I had lost when I got on the bus.  The Serbian border would be there somewhere. 

The farmer became a distant concern of mine as I scanned the highway for signs of a border crossing.  I saw it; cars were forming lines in front of highway border checkpoints and two large gas stations.  I breathed a sigh of relief and walked through the trees that lined the road.  Although my route was not the obvious border choice, clearly others had taken it since there was a worn path that lead down the hill to the gas station.

And several border police. Damn. 

Well...even though I magically appeared out of the middle of nowhere like an illegal immigrant, I wasn't doing anything wrong, was I?  The hill was clear and I felt completely exposed as I walked towards the gas station.  Once I walked through the trees, the police saw me instantly and pointed as I descended the hill.

They stared me down as I advanced on them with my guitar case and black backpack.  There was nothing I could do so I continued walking casually as if it was perfectly normal to be wandering around alone on a international border at nightfall.  They stopped me.  They had guns.

They didn't speak English, but "passport?" is an international word.  I stood there tensely as they flipped through my blue passport.  "Amerikan??" I nodded, and fortunately they liked Americans.  Smiles broke across their faces as they pointed at my guitar.

Did I mention "guitar" is another international word?  I celebrated my first Bulgarian-Serbian border crossing by performing "Hotel California" for a quartet of armed border police.