Inter Rail 1984 Day 16

Monday 17th September 1984
Woke up before the alarms went off. Realised our route home gets us back on Friday not Saturday which means if we don't buy our duty free in Monaco we arrive in London Victoria during the Friday night rush hour. Had exactly the same breakfast as yesterday and then attempted to pay for the room (7504 dinar) by Eurocheque. Discovered the hard way that they didn't accept it. Jon had to rush off to the post office to cash the Eurocheque. They took ages to work out what to do with it and then said he could have £50 worth only so Jon cashed a travellers cheque instead. He also had time consuming problems trying to buy stamps for the postcards.

After a very brisk walk/trot to the station we eventually caught the train, just. Our compartment was eventually invaded by loads of foreign types. The route was absolutely gorgeous between Kardeljevo and Sarajevo. Very mountainous. We went through 96 tunnels. We started off in a deep river gorge (the river Neretva) with imposing rock faces and then went into the mountains proper. The track went up and up and round and round and the views into the valleys were tremendous.

We had our lunch on the train in Sarajevo station having bought some beer and negotiated for a label each saying "OlympiK Pivo". Sarajevo is a relatively big town with lots of industry, totally different from what I was expecting. Looked for but couldn't find the mountain with the restarant built on top which we'd seen a lot of during the Olympic coverage.

The journey took us through rolling hills and lush green valleys until we reached Doboj where the line turned towards Zagreb. The land got progressively flatter as we approached Zagreb which we reached 20 minutes late after covering over 750km. Once in Zagreb we left the station, crossed the road and found a place to have a kebabburger and coke. It took a while to work out how to get the food as you had to order it from one person who you paid, and then collect it from someone completely different. It is very difficult to point to what you want if it isn't anywhere near the person you are trying to buy it from. Our next train pulled in at about 9.20pm so we got straight on. One of the Venice only carriages was a Yugoslav carriage which looked empty. It was the most comfortable carriage we had been in so far. 6 people to a compartment and cloth seats. We pulled the seats down to form a bed leaving only the seats on the outside and settling down pretended to be asleep in a vaguely intimidating manner. Our off putting tactics worked well until the last five minutes when two guys decided to risk it but they didn't disturb us. Nor did the lass with the strange English who demanded to be given a seat because she had a ticket.

Half an hour after leaving Zagreb, the passport checking man appeared but he refrained from doing ours once he saw we were Britsh. Another 30 minutes later the ticket collector came and scribbled a novel into our InterRail ticket. Peace then reigned and sleep was got until 3.15am when we reached the Yugoslav border. The first man didn't bother to check our passports but the one with the stamp took them away and didn't bring them back for about an hour. 2 other British lads on the train got very concerned at this turn of events. We went back to sleep. At the Italian border, the passports were looked at perfunctorily, the tickets were checked again and then we were left in peace. I slept through Trieste and beyond. Apparently the route was quite scenic as the train followed the sea. Another enormous thunderstorm was also missed in the land of Nod as was Lido di Jessolo.

Sarajevo Mountains