“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
-Jack Kerouac, On the Road
When I got off that train from Vienna, an old shadow followed me into Prague. One that had chased me for many years through bridges I burned and relationships I broke, to the lies of the working world into which I bought, and in much of the worst of who I was. It had not been close on my trail since I left California, but it found me yet again. Being in its grasp was like being in a pit with old insecurities, doubt, and self-centeredness as company. The more time I spent there, the less able I was to remember what it was like above.
If I was out of the grasp of that shadow, I knew quite well how to avoid it by doing simple things like, for example, listening to positive music. But getting out of its grasp, once I was already in it, was always something of happenstance. I would stumble on a new hobby, make a new friend, or discover a new truth, and that thing would lead me out.
Once out, it only took one slip up, a week of long nights and careless wandering in thought, and that shadow would be fully upon me. I knew that if there was anything from which I was running on this adventure, this shadow was it. My fear was that if it found me so far from where it had me last, would I ever truly escape it?
In my memory, Prague is only a series of images. The hard stoney buildings stained black, the narrow cobbled streets; cars from the days when my father travelled in Europe; the Old Town Square, with its statue of Jan Hus, the lunar clock tower with its plague-era animatronic figure of death, the cobbled road leading to Charles Bridge with its dark, saintly statues; the hill on the other side of the river over which our little apartment lay through a long walk in a park; and the view of the sharp angles of gothic roofs and old statues in the purple dusks and bright nights. I cannot do justice to that beautiful home of the Czech people. I know that they have fought to call that place their home, yet how dearly is for others to tell.
Unfortunately, this once quiet city, tucked away in the cocoon of Eastern Europe, is being conquered by the tourist industries from the world entire. Winters and summers are awash in a deep sea of noisy, pushy people, especially those who speak Mandarin and American accents of English. It is more crowded than anywhere I visited. In addition to annoying the locals, the hordes of tourists annoy each other, and are united in several ways, chief amongst them: their perturbation that not everyone speaks their language, their fondness of halting all traffic to stand in the way and take a picture, and their general rudeness to anyone serving them.
Despite this, how can I say that Prague is not a city worth experiencing? I have resolved that I will see it again someday, except outside of tourist season.
Jenn and I swam through the waves of tourists to Prague train station, and the tide took us back west, breaking on the shores of Vienna, where we retrieved our bikes from storage. I overpaid at a local bike shop to get yet another broken spoke fixed by a stuffy old grump of a man, then we took our wheels to the road along the nude-Austrian-laiden Danube river again.
The Danube River is the border between Slovakia and Hungary, and we crossed over the border without thinking. We spent less than a day in Slovakia, so I cannot report much on it except that its buildings seemed a little more daring with their color schemes.
The roads worsened the further southeast we went. Those that were paved were upheaved by neglect, many were cobblestone, especially in the city centers, and others were just rocky dirt.
I saw another broken spoke on my back wheel one morning in a city called Győr. At the nearest bike shop, I asked how much it would cost to replace all the spokes on the whole wheel out of curiosity, believing I could not afford it. I almost felt bad for the man when he told me he would do it for 30 euros (which was how much I had paid in Vienna for only one spoke). It took him nearly the whole day to get to the bike, so we stayed another night.
I enjoyed that city, bustling with people and thriving with local businesses. Roads were torn up not from neglect but from construction, new buildings were being built and old ones were being improved and repainted. The investments being made told me that there was much hope there for a better tomorrow.
At breakfast in our hotel, I learned about Britain’s shocking decision to leave the European Union. The breakfast tables at our lodgings for the next month were the site of loud debates. I understood Britain’s decision, as I am a believer in the sovereignty of each nation to rule itself. Yet the EU was losing a major member which was bad for all the other members. The fear of the European disintegration was palpable. To easterners, that was a terrifying prospect. But I don’t want to be a candidate for an exit or a member state.
We struck out again, but this time my back wheel was full of 12 gauge stainless steel spokes. They never met a road that broke them for the rest of my journey.
That same afternoon, I had fallen about a mile behind Jenn, and I was on a level two lane road with a wide shoulder. There were almost no cars, and a quiet breeze was pushing at my back. The sounds of fluttering leaves were met by the sound of heavy metal blasting on a car stereo. The noise growing higher and louder as the source drew closer, I saw that it was a group of young men, probably teenagers, driving an old beat up car. They suddenly swerved over to the shoulder on which I was riding, and before I knew it, I was staring right down the barrel of their metalhead death weapon. I pulled near the edge of the chunky gravel, but if I hit it, I knew I would lose control of Samantha. I hoped for a moment that they would relent, but they did not. Without thinking, I swung into the gravel, the handlebar ripping itself from my hands violently in consequence, and I leapt from the bike, landing on both feet, and ran to the utter edge of the road until I was stopped by a tree. The young men hollered with laughter as they swerved back to the right side and revved away.
I waited to see that they disappeared and were not coming back, then I collected my bags, which were thankfully unscathed, straightened the crooked handlebars, and took off. I was not hurt, but my trust in the road was smashed.
Why in the hell did they do that? I was more concerned with why in the hell I was on the road at all. People do cruel, reckless things all the time, without a care for others, so why would I put myself at their mercy? All power over my own life felt stripped from me for a brief time.
My body was still shaking when I met back up with Jenn and all I could say was that I had been run off the road. As we began to roll away again, my shoelaces got caught up in my pedal and I toppled over. After I got loose I lost my temper, pulled out my headphones from my pocket, and threw them down to the ground. They were not destroyed as I expected them to be so I threw my sunglasses to the ground for good measure, cracking a lens.
I felt a little better. Sometimes, it helps to destroy something to get back some temporary power. Perhaps that’s why those metalheads ran me off the road. Jenn did not understand what motivated that violent outburst and she kept her distance for a while. Destruction is not a very constructive thing.
Budapest came around the corner a few days later. Such precious little time was spent between the cool blue mornings and the warm orange sunsets. In my memory, the three days we spent there have fused into one, and that day is one of my favorites. We ate a small breakfast of walnuts and chocolate filled Hungarian crepes at a morning market, then walked the stone streets between the majestic imperial buildings until noon when we had a heavy lunch of sausage and bread. After lunch, we went to a Soviet statue graveyard, climbing on and taking funny pictures with the icons of that fallen empire. Then we headed to a massive, majestic bathhouse, with multiple stories and different pools and baths. Some bath pools were steaming hot, others were nice and cool, and there was even a wave pool that imitated waves much like those on my dear Californian coast. I body surfed to the shallow end and swam back out dozens of times to do it again. Afterwards, we went on a wine cruise under the many ornate bridges, and past the massive, spiny, majestic Parliament Building. The shadows grew long, and soon the streets were a hazy blue as the sun dipped behind the city. The day ended with a goulash, a dark beer, and then sleep.
Of course things are not quite that idyllic. I still felt the way I had a week earlier, like a mailbox stuffed with unopened letters. I was tired constantly, tired of body and mind, and weary of the relentless siege of new places, sights, and languages. The moments that make up that perfect day are those in which I felt I had emerged from battle to breath fresh air.
To leave was the easy cure for melancholy. Jenn and I took an early morning train out of Hungary to Croatia. A fresh set of memories then played themselves in my head.
We had chosen Croatia for no other reason than that it was outside of the Schengen Agreement zone, so would give us more time on our EU visas later. To my shame, I knew little about it, though I would learn. The tracks grew bumpier and less even as we went deeper south towards the old Yugoslav nation. The grass between them grew higher and yellower and I noticed for the first time that tall floodlights could be seen at certain stations. It all reminded me of television footage from the 90’s of the Balkans war and from stories my father had told me of his travels.
The train lulled slowly to a stop. A man in a starch uniform, speaking the more consonant-laden Croatian language, took each passenger’s passport and disappeared behind machine gun armed guards into a long white building with square windows. In no manner whatsoever was the process in any hurry. The air conditioning left the cars, all the doors and windows were opened to allow a cross breeze, and the whole train sat in their own sweat for about an hour and a half.
In the boredom of it, I began to think about what might happen if Yugoslavia had in fact never fallen, and I were accused of espionage by the border guards. In fact, I half hoped this would happen. I expected they would keep me at the shack until an official transport could make it out to take me to an “enhanced interrogation” site. Of course, they would get nothing out of me. My plan A was to bribe an unscrupulous guard at the shack and just get my passport stamped. If that failed, I would have to wait until I could find something to pick my handcuff locks, then I would escape and jump on a freight train car back to Hungary where I would be safely flown back to the US. If I had to fight, I had watched enough James Bond and Jason Bourne that I was confident in my abilities.
As far as border crossings go, however, it was inconvenient but smooth. Much to my chagrin, I ultimately found myself without a story, taxiing through another comfortably modernized city to a pleasant little dorm in an upstairs hostel. The manager was even kind enough to let us store our bikes there until we came back nearly a month later.
Jenn and I explored Zagreb for a couple of days, and visited just about every restaurant and pub along the main avenues. Croatia’s capital is an average city, smaller than most capitals in the West, with hardly anything resembling tourist appeal. It is bustling, but with locals. It has pleasant little parks and its architecture is of the empirical box style, much like Vienna, but comparatively they are small in size and grandeur. For the average tourist it is perfectly skippable. Perhaps the most interesting things of foreign interest are the Museum of Broken Relationships, a museum of artifacts that people have donated from their relationships that ended badly, the firing of a cannon to mark noon each day, and the Tolkien Pub, a small quirky joint devoted to all things Middle Earth. Many young Croats to whom I spoke felt trapped and bored there, as it is geographically far from anything adventurous and the country has one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU. While I had the utmost sympathy for them, I grew to love its averageness. The markets and restaurants were affordable, and there was no pressure to have to constantly inhale sensory data from sights and places that I “just had to see”. When all was said and done, I returned to Zagreb two times more and saw practically nothing, and it was great.
We spent the rest of our first time in Croatia at Plitvice Lakes, and on the sunny, rocky coast in Zadar, Split, and Dubrovnik. We were accompanied to Plitvice Lakes by a young woman from Hong Kong, and we spent the day with her. I tried to learn everything I could from her about her home and especially about China. We did not get much time to talk, however, considering what we were seeing. The UNESCO world heritage sight is a series of small crystal blue lakes, pouring into each other over tiers. It is surrounded by a thick forest and caves. The water and much of the land is preserved from human interaction by series of trails and long wooden bridges, carrying on for up to a quarter of a mile. It took all I had that day, hot and humid from intermittent rain, not to break the rules and jump into the water.
The Adriatic Sea coast is similar to to the geography and weather of the Mediterranean. It’s crystal clear waters meet a rocky coast and few beaches, and it is very hot in the summer. But unlike its cousin on the other side of Italy, it is quieter and more affordable.
Zadar is the furthest city north of which we visited on the coast. It is small and quaint, with an enchanting stony city center entered through an old Roman gate. There is not much to do there but explore the shops, lay around in the sun, and swim in the warm waters. There also have what they call a sea organ, which is a series of long, shallow concrete steps leading to the water, into the sides of which are cut slits which breath in and out of a hollow chamber creating different tones as waves rise and fall in and out of them, and sounds like wind blown on top of glass bottles. We ate fish our last night at a small alley restaurant, saturated by a sunset, watching a soccer match on an old TV that a neighbor brought outside. The patrons of the nearby restaurants pulled their chairs together and watched.
Split is far larger and metropolitan than Zadar. It is the twin attraction of western and Chinese tourist groups along with Dubrovnik. Despite the crowds, the ancient Roman ruin of Diocletian’s Palace makes it all worth it. Enough of it has survived that it made me almost feel as if I were there in the days of the Roman Empire. Though it was blazing hot outside, the inside of the tall stone tower was shaded and left open to the sea breeze. On top you can view the whole city, with its red roofs, green hills on the rocky coastline, and the blue sea.
I believed the following events to have happened at the Temple of Jupiter, a small stone structure in the palace complex (later repurposed by the Christians as a baptistery). However, looking at my pictures, it may very well have happened at the substructures underneath the complex. The Temple of Jupiter has a medieval baptistry. In my memory, it is now used as a wishing well.
I do not make wishes, but I do perform the tradition of throwing a coin at times. I have not been a fan of wishes since having so many that were never granted as a child.
As I stood there, I realized that more than anything I wanted to have something for which to wish. Then, something else came to me at the last moment from deep within. The thought, a prayer more than a wish, came to my lips in a quiet mutter as I flipped the coin up out of my fingers. As soon as it hit the water, there was a slight gulping noise, and the coin shot sideways, resting alone on a little lip above the trove of other coins.
That coin and where it rested was a significant moment. It was not simply a wish and a coin toss, it was a knock on the door to a strange new house. A knock that would not be answered for another two months. What was it that had come to my lips as I tossed that coin? It was something that cannot be fulfilled until my time on this earth has ended. Being now a little superstitious, and a believer in wishes, I am afraid that I cannot reveal it, for I fear it will not come true.
Dubrovnik was the last of the seaside cities we visited our first time in Croatia, though we felt we had not seen enough of it and would return there a month later. It is a port city, with its famous old town across a drawbridge on a steep hill, heavy laden with stone battlements and turrets enjoining its old medieval walls together. Like a few sights in Morocco, it was also the filming location of Game of Thrones as King’s Landing. Outside of the old town, the city is modern with normal Croatian seaside architecture of red tile roofs and white walls.
It was the beginning of July and the sun was bearing down on the Adriatic sea coast. At Jenn’s behest, we took a sea kayak tour. When the kayak tour stopped and pulled ashore at a rocky cove. Before I knew it, I had been coaxed into climbing up two stories high to a cliff, off of which I was soon being coaxed to jump. I looked down into a calm deep blue circumference of water surrounded by white and bubbly laps of sea as it met the jagged rocks. In my mind, I had already jumped several times. I had felt the salty air rush past me I dropped down and the horizon rose til I met it in a fast rush of bubbles. But each time I snapped back to the cliff, watching the waters. Nearly everyone in our group had already gone, and were cheering me on. There was nothing stopping me but me, I thought. I am making the choice to stand or to jump, and damn the consequences, I want to jump.
Three.
Two.
One.
After my feet left the cliff, I began to flap my arms as if I might fly, and I felt a rush of air as the sea got bigger and bigger beneath me. At some point, I thought I should have landed already, and just before I slipped into the deep blue world, I became fully aware of every sound and sensation.
When I emerged from the belly of the sea, all I could do was laugh with every muscle I was not using to stay afloat. I laughed at the world above, not in mockery or defiance, not for any reason other than how wonderful it was to see it all again, as if with eyes that were newly born upon it. How silly the gulls were with their squawking, and dippy the bug eyed fish were with their nervous darts in colored flashes, and how great and powerful and patient the sea was as, sending its rolling emissaries the hard world above. It was only a moment, but I wished that all moments could be like that.
Yet time moved and we with it. It was not so much that I wanted to move on but rather that I wanted to move from, and as I had the freedom to do it, I did. Portugal was one of Jennifer’s dream destinations. I knew very little about it before visiting, but enjoyed my few days. It was sunny, well connected via public transport, the people were friendly, lively, and a little more mercantile than their neighbors in Spain.
Lisbon is a large spread out city with a large hill protruding out of it, the top of which is reached by an elevator. On the west side is large bay which is crossed by several bridges, including a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the east side is mostly a national park, which has magnificent hikes and a few cute towns and castles carved out of its hills. Its architecture ranges from grandiose royal buildings and churches to small neighborhoods of packed together apartments, each vying to be the brightest primary color.
Porto is further north, and a lot cooler. Its architecture is more industrial with a great steel bridge that crosses its river. It is smaller and hillier than Lisbon, and time seems to move a little slower. We went to a port house called Taylor’s. I came to enjoy port, though it took awhile for me to get used to how thick and sweet it is. Whereas I enjoyed and tried to accumulate knowledge about the traditional brew in each place I visited, the experience was nearly religious for Jenn. She took pride in knowing every detail of its origin and the methods used to produce it.
I took pride in other things. For example, I was proud to have never missed a train, bus, or plane in my life. But of course there is a first time for everything. The running of the bulls was coming quickly around the bend in Northern Spain. We had booked the most expensive train tickets we would buy the entire trip, an overnight train from Lisbon for nearly the cost of my plane ticket form the US.
The train station lockers, where we left our luggage, are always assigned a random code which is printed on a receipt. I placed it in my breast pocket alongside a portable USB charger. At some point in the day, I yanked out the charger and it was not until we had reached the train station, with a half hour until departure, that I realized the ticket had been yanked out too.
Everything that happened next was in a frantic panic. The locker attendant was not in his office and I had to get his phone number from a reluctant police officer, a friend of his. A man answered in Portuguese. “English?” I asked desperately. “No. English is…bad…” he replied slowly. But I was too panicked and explained the situation in English anyways. The conversation went on for some time until he said, in quite good English, “I am at other station now. Half hour to you.”
My stomach had thus far remained right side up. Now its position was altered dramatically.
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