... or juggling spontaneity and short timeframes.
What happens when you drop the ball(s).
.
Sometimes events conspire, other times you just haven't thought things through. Sometimes both hold. Mostly, these sorts of beginnings to pieces of writing are tedious and specious. So, sorry.
Anyway, what was probably a fairly unrealistically hurried attempt to see too many people resulted in some enforced taking it slow time. As serendipitous as this may sound, the reality was merely spending a lot of time next to freeways with a diminishing sense of hope that it would all work out.
We arrived in Milan aboard a lovely train from Vienna, having lashed out for a two-bed compartment and slept comfortably overnight, awaking to the terracotta roofs of Italy, Lake Garda in the distance and a distinct feeling of being in a very different part of Europe. All across from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, into eastern Europe, Austria, despite their being significant cultural differences, there is a sense of a broad band of cultural similarity – or at least the housing and layout of the cities share something in common. In Italy it felt somehow different – the obvious thing is to say “more Mediterranean”! We trundled through the run-down looking rails of Milan and got into the big main station. Outside was grotty, inside was a huge, ostentatious hall, with carved walls and ceilings, chandeliers hanging down, roofs with large sections of glass letting in lots of light and generally a big, grand feel. There we were met by Simone, our Irish-speaking friend we'd met at the Irish course in Donegal.
We spent a few hours with him, then went to our couch-surfing host in the Milan suburbs. After a 15 minute train ride and another quarter hour of slightly confusing walking we were almost at his house when he greeted us from his bike – he'd been coming to find us. He was a very well-intentioned but eccentric bloke; he couchsurfs himself a lot, so supports the concept by accepting pretty much anyone who asks to stay. He also told us that in Italy couchsurfing is used as a dating site by lots of Italian men, so he feels doubly obliged to offer his place, both to non pretty young women, who'll have a hard time finding somewhere, and to pretty young women who may find themselves in an uncomfortable situation. All good and well, and we were benefiting from his kindness, but he was a strange character, spending a lot of time telling us about the bad guests he'd had, the ones who treated it like a hostel, didn't talk with others, just came in and went to sleep. As a sometime couchsurfing host I can sympathise with those concerns, but it seemed a strangely captivating obsession for someone who took so many guests!
After some talk with him, a small siesta when he popped out, we headed back into town to meet Simone, with whom we spent a pleasant evening around Milan. Unfortunately some bad news in the family meant he had to leave town the next day, so this was the only time we spent with him. Still, we met some of his friends and got a feel for Milan and had a nice time.
We headed back to the flat, hoping that there wouldn't be too many guests there – our host said the record had been eight, but it probably wouldn't be that many, but it seems he always has many guests who don't show up, so he's never sure how many will be staying! Anyway, our tired bodies tramped up the stairs, hoping there wouldn't be too many – despite the historical significance of the occasion, we were less than ecstatic to find a record-equalling eight guests in the small one-room flat. It was quite clear, too, that our host expected everyone to socialise, so we endured another hour or two of stilted conversation until one of the obviously exhausted guests made moves to sleep. Luckily we had a tarp and sleeping gear, so we headed out on to the balcony, leaving the other poor buggers to divvy up cushions and blankets and sleeping space amongst themselves.
The next morning we were roused at eight with the “polite” request to be out of there by 9:30! We suggested we'd like to maybe come back briefly mid-afternoon before heading out and were told that he had his own life and the flat wouldn't be available until after 08:00pm. Again, all fair enough, more or less, but strange for a bloke who resented being treated like a hotel!
So, despite actually sleeping quite well on the balcony, we hadn't slept enough, so we headed off in a tired state to the town of Como, on Lake Como, to the north of Milan. It was no Prague, but it still had a lot of tourists and a lot of restaurants who traded on location rather than quality, so beautiful as it was, it wasn't fantastic. On a whim we took the funicular up the hill – for those who don't know the term, a funicular is a train (or tram?) that is attached to a cable and goes up very steep inclines. At the top there were paths heading higher, so we had a very nice afternoon traipsing up old cobbled streets to the top of the hill, to be rewarded with expansive views of the surrounding mountains.
On the way back we sat at tables overlooking the town and lake from far above and tried to work out how we'd get to Paris, to visit another friend from the Donegal course, en route to the ferry to Ireland. Well, in Europe, as I have previously whinged, trains are mostly priced like airlines, so booking them the afternoon before on popular routes is generally not a happy activity. Doing it on a laptop, without a power adaptor, is even worse.
So, to cut a long story short, before we'd been able to book an expensive, but affordable, ticket to Paris the next day the battery ran out. Oh, and our host, unlike pretty much every person we've met, didn't have internet at home.
We returned late that evening to find a new cast of characters, again, with us, making up eight people, again all of them, including us, clearly not interested in enforced, awkward talking late into the night. I think it was me this time who broke the ice and headed to bed, again the balcony.
The next morning we got up fairly early and, with laptop charged, headed into the main station, eventually found internet at a cafe and plugged away at options. The wonders of the internet, all the information at your fingertips, is indeed a marvel, but too often in results in me hunched over the laptop crunching numbers, routes, options when I could just be where I was. Eventually, we decided to do what had been our original plan and head north to Tirano on the Swiss border, then get trains through the stunningly beautiful (and UNESCO World Heritage listed) Bernina Pass rail line. I've written about that elsewhere, but suffice to say, it's a stunningly beautiful trip, as well as being a feat of engineering, with looping viaducts, countless tunnels, including ones that spiral up through mountains, and all along stunning views.
Bernina highlights
After this lovely day of travel, we arrived in the small town of Chur, in eastern Switzerland, close to the Liechtenstein border. After a few enquiries about accommodation options and checking onward train prices, we decided to stick our thumbs our as a trial and come back to town and stay in a hostel if we didn't get anywhere. We started off around 5pm and within an hour got a lift from a frenetic, slightly mad young German bloke who told us a series of fairly improbable tales for the hour or so it took to get to the ring road around Zürich. His many alleged skills unfortunately didn't include remembering where freeway service stations were so, despite a few clear discussions about dropping us off on the main road west before he started heading south to Lucerne we found ourselves heading to Lucerne and getting dropped off at the next service station. Now, without getting into the intricacies of hitch-hiking theory, being stuck near a ring-road around a major city is not good – almost everyone is going into the city and can, if you are stupid or desperate enough to accept a lift with them (as we were the next day), only take you somewhere worse, with even more local traffic. Arriving just after dusk is also not the most felicitous circumstance.
So, we stood at the well-lit service station exit and tried to get a lift from the rare vehicles that passed us. A few people did stop, but they were all going into Zürich, which was of not help. After three or four hours of this, with almost no traffic around we wandered away from the freeway and found a relatively nice spot at the edge of a field to sleep, rolled out my capricious tarp, blew up the thermarests, fluffed out the sleeping bags and fell gratefully to sleep around midnight.
Swiss hitch-hiking highlights
Early the next morning, a fresh, misty morn, we headed back out.
I'll try to avoid unnecessary detail: we waited at least another two hours, in various spots, until a nice young bloke stopped for us. By this time we'd decided to take anything to get us out of there! He took us about ten kms down the road, back onto the ring road proper, and dropped us at a freeway slipway with pretty thin traffic; after an hour or two a flamboyant Italian chef picked us up and took us another ten or so kms to the outskirts of Zürich, to an absolutely terrible slipway, from where, after another hour or more a lovely Croatian bloke picked us up and took us to a nearby service station on the other side of Zürich! Here we waited a mere half hour or less and were picked up by a Swiss-Spanish women who took us the unthinkable distance of 80kms to just outside Basel. Here was another long wait, until we were picked up by a French musician who took us out of Switzerland, realised he'd been mistaken about the location of a service station, so went about 40 kms out of his way to take us to the next one in our direction. From there we barely put our bags down before a French engineer picked us up and took as another good section, not much more than 50kms but it seemed a long way in comparison! Again, he went out of his way to drop us off at a good service station, where we arrived a little before dusk.
This place was pretty dead and so were we. We'd had an hour break at the place near Basel to have a snack and a rest, but apart from that had been on the go since late the afternoon before, so after trying a while we wandered over to the service station to get some dinner. Now, I know all the cliches about French food, but if this place was anything to go by, they are justified! In Australia the posh places cook their hamburgers in front of you, but that's about as good as it gets. This place had a selection of well-cooked, reasonably priced dishes, along with salads, wine you poured yourself from little casks and a clean, comfortable dining area. What it didn't have, however, was working wi-fi, so we couldn't check on connection times to Cherbourg, where our ferry to Ireland left from. But we weren't too worried, if we didn't get further that night, we'd hitch into the local town and pick up a train there. This complacence was rather dented when the wi-fi did start working and we realised the very latest, with a tight connection, we could make the ferry was by leaving the local town just after 9am.
After trying for a while more to hitch a lift, we found a nice patch of concealed ground and settled down to sleep, setting the alarm for just before dawn. Next morning, a little panicked, we stood near the bowsers and asked every driver for a lift, either onwards to Paris or to the local town. Eventually two lads on a mission said they could take us as far as the freeway exit to our destination, so we jumped in with them. They got lost coming off the freeway, so said they'd take us to the station. Now, France has these high-speed trains, the TGV, and in many places they run on separate lines with separate stations. Given the general flow of events it shouldn't take too much imagination to work out, despite saying we needed to get to the TGV station, where we ended up. From the local train station where we were dropped it was a 20-minute journey by irregular bus to the TGV station – and our hoped-for train left in 15 minutes! This whole process of discovery was preceded by a feeling of relieved elation. Not all good things last.
As we were working out what to do, Niamh remembered that we could still make it on local trains if we got a train leaving at 7:53, which happened to be the time it was, so without thinking further (surely we would have learnt!) we ran through the underpass, up the stairs and just made it on to the train. Going to...? Well, it was going in the right place, though the conductor wasn't particularly helpful about providing information about further connections, but Niamh asked a fellow passenger if he could look up the connections on his smartphone and we worked it out. On the next train the conductor was much more forthcoming and told us we'd have to get off at Lyon and catch a TGV from there to Paris.
At Lyon we found out that the next TGV was fully booked and the following one only had first-class seats, with a corresponding price tag and a very tight connection to Cherbourg. So we bought the tickets, jumped the earlier train, (where not only weren't we caught but our tickets weren't checked once!) and had another bout of relieved elation that yes!, we were going to make it. This bout lasted significantly longer, in fact until we got to Paris, got the metro from Gare de Lyon to Gare St. Lazare, and discovered that the earlier connection we'd jumped the TGV for had left long ago, as it takes almost an hour to get between the two stations. Nevertheless, we knew we'd just make it if we got a taxi at Cherbourg, as we'd called Irish Ferries earlier in the day, and they'd assured us we'd just get there!
From Paris it was two trains to Cherbourg, with a change in Caen. Not long into the trip the train stopped. Railways staffed hurried along the tracks outside from one end of the train to the other looking slightly harried. Niamh was starting to look harried. But surely they'd make up time? Well, no. Despite explaining that we had a ferry to catch, to get to a wedding, and the very sympathetic rail staff, the train couldn't make up time and the railway controller wouldn't hold the connection train. All this took place over an increasingly fraught hour or two, with the final confirmation coming only 20 minutes before arrival. This meant missing an expensive, non-refundable ferry as well as booking very expensive alternative transport.
As we got out at Caen I rushed out to the taxi rank to see if we could negotiate a price on a taxi to the port. Now, my French consists mainly of being able to correctly pronounce my r's and a smattering of words, so this might explain what happened next. To my great amazement, a driver said the fare would be around 35 Euros and they could get us there in time, but I'd have to go to the first driver in the rank. He told me it'd be more like 200, so I went – frantically! – back to the original bloke who assured me 35 was the price. We then went back to the front of the queue, where there was now another driver, who agreed, after a few confirmations that that was the price. After starting off we then established that there had been a miscommunication he'd thought we'd meant somewhere else. He calculated the fare and yes, it was about 200 Euros. Fuck it, we had to get it, the alternatives were more expensive, so we said go for it! Then he double-checked when we had to get there and said there was no way he could get us there in time.
Well, that was that. We went back to a bar with wi-fi and started to look up alternatives. We ended up getting a later sailing with Stena lines, paying big bucks for a double room with adjoining lounge (and Irish ferries very generously gave us a credit note rather than voiding our fare as they had every right to do), and Niamh's parents agreed to pick us up from the port, two hours south of Dublin, so we'd be back in time.
Arrival in Cherbourg.
Cheery Cherbourg port. Half an hour from the station, supposedly 20 minutes more to check-in...
The aged but spacious extravagance on board the ferry to Ireland.
As a last, somehow fitting, note, when we got to Cherbourg we were told by the station staff that it was a 20 minute walk to the ferry terminal. We had lots of time to get there, which was nice. Then, after well over 20 minutes walking through typically dreary port city streets we reached the port and saw our ship behind razor wire. We asked the workers through the wire how to get to check-in and how long – they gestured down an unending expanse and said it was 20 minutes! Time was now getting short, so as we briskly walked along I stuck my hand out and yet more helpful, friendly French people stopped for us, make room, and dropped us off, far, far away, much more than 20 minutes walk, at check-in. Which we made with about ten minutes to spare before the absolute last call!
So, I'm not sure what to make of all that, but it'll certainly remain a memorable few days in the trip!