The Adventure began 20 years ago – I never expected it to continue this long

Kunsthistorisches Museum, August 2022

'They were not true pub-crawlers, who are content to spend hour upon hour in slow tippling and silent reverie in a tavern. No, these two were merely visitors, who went to taverns only for the sake of daily arguments, and once there, cared not a whit about what they ate or drank, minding only what was said. They would have sat around in a tavern forever, if it were a matter of relating some heroic adventure, especially if they were able to weave themselves into the ramifications of the narrative.'

Life is a Dream, Gyula Krudy

Sucker for nostalgia that I am, I couldn’t help but reflect on the start of the epic adventure that started for me right around 20 years ago, September 2002, as I turned my back on a long-term relationship, an extended stint in the US for university and then work, and embarked on a month-long solo backpacking excursion around central Europe. It was a new chapter in my life, and I wasn’t sure what or where I was heading for, but fast forward some 20 years later, as I find myself in the middle of yet another ‘adventure’, one I don’t really want to be a part of, and I never expected anything like this.

Paddy Leigh Fermor was only a mere whippersnapper when, in 1933 at the age of 18, he set off on an epic journey on foot across Europe from England to Constantinople. This was a world a bit different from today’s, and my journey, in comparison, was undertaken by a slightly more grizzled adult in his mid-20s. He only got down to writing his first book, A Time of Gifts (1977), some 40+ years later, and he did much of it from memory, parts of his travel journal having got lost or stolen. I had a travel journal of my own for my trip, and it has since been lost*, so my memory of that trip is pretty fuzzy and I only remember fragments of what I did. 

And that’s not because the trip involved a non-stop bacchanalia of drunken beery scribbling as I frequented taverns and seedy bars night after night – there was only 1 night of that in an entire month and I actually barely drank at all on the trip, but that’s also primarily because of that 1 night which really did it for me. I was on a tight budget at the time, but honestly, it’s just the passage of time and my current decrepitude that means the trip is all a bit of a blur.

The trip, ostensibly, was about my thirst for adventure and to prepare myself mentally for the road ahead. In October, I was to start my Master’s in International Relations at Edinburgh University, and I thought this was to lead on to a career in the foreign service or something similar. Teaching was in the back of my mind, but not teaching English as a Foreign Language, but teaching history to bright and impressionable kids in somewhere like Berlin or Budapest. Way back then, with the end of the Cold War still not long past in my rear-view mirror, I never expected to eventually find myself in Ukraine one day. I probably had no idea where I thought I’d end up, in all likelihood. 

I bought my first backpacking rucksack – if that’s not a tautology – and packed the bare minimum of clothing and toiletries and overloaded it with books: these were the days before e-readers. I definitely had stuff on the history of International Relations (50 Key Thinkers on International Relations, if I recall) and Scottish nationalism, but for the rest, I can’t remember all of what I lugged around with me. 

The itinerary: Prague-Krakow-Budapest-Zagreb-Dubrovnik-Split-Ljubjlana-Salzburg

I set off at an ideal time, the start of September, for my first trip of this nature. The summer is wrapping up so the crowds are starting to dissipate with kids back in school but the weather is still lovely enough to make the most of the cities. On top of this, this was just after some of Central Europe’s worst flooding in decades and Prague was virtually empty as it recovered from the damage. Even though the metro was closed, trams were running and I had the city pretty much to myself. A nice, easy gradual introduction to my trip, with a tinge of guilt involved: Prague’s misfortune was my fortune.

A lovely start quickly turned into a rough start. As I’ve said, I was on a tight budget, which meant my drinking was going to be limited. I mostly ate supermarket fare and at that time, I was on a strict two-coffee a day maximum. An unhealthy proportion of my daily budget was squandered on coffee and I couldn’t afford beer, as cheap as it was. If I ever splurged, it was on a takeaway kebab or, in the Czech Republic, some smažený sýr (fried cheese).

But I was young and naïve and wanted to do something evocatively bohemian, and I had my journal with me and thought I could be a scribe of sorts and so I thought what else can I do but find some sordid underground tavern where I could partake in absinthe, and do what Oscar Wilde and James Joyce had done and let the thoughts flow freely through my body and out into my pen? 

I wanted to do the whole lighting the fire on sugar trick and then downing my absinthe, but the barman laughed at me and told me this wasn’t how it was done. Just drink it neat, he said. With a chaser, if you must. Determined to send myself into a state of total inebriation, I opted for a sweet mead as a chaser (good lord, what was I thinking?). The night did not end well. To call the ‘content’ I produced pure drivel would be a compliment. It was dire dirge. Most of it was illegible.**

It took me a few days to recover. And that was the last drop of alcohol I would drink for another two or three weeks.

As every good backpacker should do, I took overnight sleeper trains to save on accommodation costs and to experience more ‘adventure’ (really, it was more about saving money). This being in the days before Google translate and even widespread internet booking, and with the Euro not in effect in this part of Europe, there was a large amount of hassle and kerfuffle when planning the next leg of the trip. Even though I had a rough itinerary, every arrival in a new place invariably started off with trying to work out how to buy train tickets to my next destination, exchanging currency or withdrawing money and trying to break huge banknotes and finding a cheap hostel to stay in. I think Hostelworld existed at the time, and there was certainly internet access in tawdry cafés, but I remember just turning up at places from my Let’s Go Eastern Europe guidebook and hoping for the best. But there was plenty of currency and language fumbling in the process. At that time, there wasn’t much English spoken and only a handful of signs and restaurant menus were in English. 

Whilst in Prague, before my absinthe shenanigans, I took a train to a town with a castle outside Prague, along the banks of the Vltava River, seeing the destruction the flooding had wrought on the countryside. It was tragic and I couldn’t even imagine the pain and anguish that people had had to deal with as everything they owned was washed away. The normally lacquer-black river was tinged with an olive green muddy hue. I was reading my Scottish nationalism book when a little old lady peeling apples with grubby fingers sitting in my compartment asked me if I was Scottish. I had just closed the book and was looking out the window, trying to comprehend the damage that had been done on the river banks. I think that’s what she asked – she only spoke Czech and after I politely declined a slice of apple, she tried to tell me about the Soviet invasion and the tanks that rolled through Prague in 1968. I got the general gist of it, but couldn’t imagine at all what it must have been like to be invaded by the Soviet Union. She talked to me for a few minutes and I was genuinely interested in what she was attempting to say, and I’d like to think I got the gist of what she was saying.

I was going to be studying International Relations. I grew up in Europe during the dying days of the Cold War. I was in Germany when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Perhaps I wanted to understand more about what I had lived through, to make sense of it all, to figure out why and how it had all happened.

But for those who know and study International Relations theory, you’ll know what’s coming next: one of the great failings, one of the most stinging criticisms of IR theory, is why and how it failed to anticipate or even predict the demise of the Soviet Union. What good was studying all of this if it hardly helps you prepare for the future? What the hell good is understanding realpolitik, ostpolitik and liberal internationalism if the world we live in is populated my irrational megalomaniacs and despots who flout the rules of game theory based on their own mad reason and insane whims? I’m not sure if, 20 years later, I have a good answer for that. Was Francis Fukuyama, who wrote The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, right or wrong? 

‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’

(Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?", The National Interest, No. 16)

I knew none of this at the time. I knew nothing at the time. Twenty years later, I think I still know nothing. Who does?

After Prague, it was on to Krakow…Auschwitz-Birkenau, an incongruous type of experience in the sparkling sunshine of a glorious early September day, trying to process what had gone on here over half a century before. And then Budapest and trying to locate my flat in some out-of-the-way neighbourhood, and where in the quiet, dimly lit streets with only floating strung-up solitary street lamps to guide me, I thought I was right in the middle of life in the Soviet bloc. There was the glory of the Budapest opera and the painfully overpriced, even more painfully mediocre coffee in the coffee shop opposite. There was the epic trip to the Rudas Thermal Baths in Budapest, the only bath with separate male and female sections. Now that really was an epic trip, from what I can remember. I am as blind as a bat without my glasses and as much as I [used to] enjoy trips to thermal baths and hammams, there is a certain kind of challenge navigating your way through these in glasses or without, on top of dealing with the language barrier. Hungarian is an impenetrable language, and on my trip, I did my best to be polite and learned the words for ‘hello’, ‘thank you’, ‘good bye’, ‘how much’ and ‘damn, you’re stunningly beautiful!’ (making sure to get the last two in the right order), but that only gets you so far when trying to work out the rules of thermal baths and where you go to change and lockers and time limits and whatnot. What a mess it was. But somehow all worth it in the end, even as I got hit on my two gentlemen who followed me around to every nook and cranny the baths had to offer. There was a comfort in not being able to see them clearly and I didn’t even need to feign ignorance. In the blurry haze of steam rooms and hot water pools, I could hardly make out their features, let alone what they may have desired of me. Naivety does have its merits.

I fell in love with Budapest on that trip. What a magical city I found it to be. When I went back in the winter of 2008 with my sister, and then in the summer of 2011 for a few days, with a trip to the Sziget festival as well as a few days of café-hopping and a rendezvous with my dear friend Dr Wasabi Islam, it was as magical as I had remembered it.

Then it was on to Zagreb. Though I was new to solo travelling, I was enjoying it and never sought the company of others. I was staying either in huge hostels where I could blend in and not get talked to, or small apartments I had found upon arrival at a train station, where there were only a couple of guests and people did their own thing. In Zagreb, I found myself having to socialize – this really makes me sound like a misanthrope, and I think this is my memory and hindsight bias playing tricks with me. I was probably more open to meeting others back then than I would be now. Now, if I hear an English speaker, and there are plenty in Vienna, I steer clear and make myself scarce for fear they may start talking to me. 

But back then, I suppose I would have been happy with a bit of company. An Australian tagged along – or perhaps it was me with him – and he was pleasant enough. I was only there a day before taking an overnight bus to Dubrovnik, a town I had eagerly wanted to visit, mainly from what I remember of the war in the Balkans and the shelling inflicted on it from Serbian forces. I knew it was supposedly a majestic place, but I knew the name mainly from CNN reports in the 90s. Was this the new post-Cold War order, what was happening there, with Yugoslavia dissolving and the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats at each other’s throats?

Upon alighting from the bus in Dubrovnik, bleary-eyed and groggy with a stiff neck and little sleep, I was immediately accosted by a gaggle of elderly ladies with rooms for rent. Before I knew it, I had fellow travelers on either side of me who suddenly seemed to be part of my company. I don’t know where they came from, they just appeared out of nowhere, but then we were all whisked off to a little apartment we all ‘agreed on’, and I had company for my short stay in Dubrovnik. 

The American guy was very pleasant, even though he’d sewn a Canadian flag to his rucksack (I hate Americans who do this), but the Englishman, soon to start his undergraduate studies at Oxford, was an annoying prick. And I couldn’t shed either of them. To top it off, even though the Australian from Zagreb was nice enough, in the apartment next to us were four Australians, an extravagantly gay and obnoxious man, and three irritating dimwit women who annoyed me to no end. At this point I realised I just wanted to be back on my own, on the road.

Amazingly, I have okay enough memories of Dubrovnik, despite what happened. Overlooking the buffoons I was accommodated with, I spent a relaxing anonymous birthday, a sparkling sunshiny glorious day lounging at a beach, soaking up the sun. Soaking up too much sun, in fact: I came down with heat stroke. I felt dreadfully ill as the evening came on, and I had the perfect excuse to get out of having to go to dinner with all these nitwits. I instead spent much of the evening throwing up and writhing in sticky sweat, moaning and groaning in discomfort. Some birthday that was.

I was able to ditch the Oxford-bound Englishman for my trip back up the coast to Split, but the American invited himself along, and he was no bother. In fact, after a night of interesting conversation with him at a seaside café, I was even sad to say goodbye. But only for a few minutes: I quickly got over it.

From there, an overnight bus to Ljubjlana, which turned out to be my second favourite destination after Budapest, for reasons I can’t properly understand. It was stressful and the weather turned bad for the first time on my trip and there was all sorts of hassle, but for whatever reason, I loved the city and loved Slovenia. It was just one of those ‘something about it’ feelings that you can’t put your finger on.

There was accommodation kerfuffle, currency kerfuffle, serious public transport kerfuffle, but apart from that, a whole host of pleasant, cheery encounters with locals, lovely cafés, relaxing moments, a day and night trip to Lake Bled in one of the finest hostels I’ve ever stayed in, and despite the pouring rain that soaked me, my hiking around the forests of Lake Bled was magical, and even with a ridiculously long walk back to the hostel because buses only ran once every couple of hours, I still somehow found magic in the place. And another funny story: even though it was a mixed-sex hostel with 8-10 bed rooms, I was the only male in my room. Up to this point on the trip, to save on costs, I’d been doing laundry myself in cheap laundromats or wherever I could find. But I was down to my final last few remnants of clean clothing so I said to hell with it, I’d pay for the hostel to do it and I gave them all my laundry. Then I got back from my hike, completely drenched. My laundry wasn’t ready. I had no dry clothes. So I came back, had to get unchanged, and I was sitting there covered in bed sheets, waiting for my clothes to dry, while my fellow [female] occupants laughed at my expense. (There was probably an opportunity there, and if so, I certainly didn’t take advantage of it; in fact, that was a totally barren trip for me.)

From Slovenia, it was on to my final destination, Salzburg, only chosen because it was the cheapest budget flight on offer back to Belfast, from where I had started my journey. By this point of my trip, my budget had been stretched thin, and I had to be fairly miserly for my last few days. But this being the final days of September, it was getting chilly and Salzburg was drizzly and chilly, and it’s an expensive city to stay in. I struggled, to be honest. Suddenly I was away from Central Europe and in the cozy confines of more ‘developed’ Western Europe, and I didn’t like it. I couldn’t afford much. To stay warm and out of the rain, I sat in the pews of churches and read my books. I limited myself to one coffee. Cheap supermarket fare and takeaways cost me triple what I had paid in Prague. I wanted a beer, and since my absinthe ordeal in Prague, I had had exactly one beer since, in Dubrovnik, but I couldn’t afford one. It was an anti-climactic end to the trip, but overall, a splendidly adventurous trip all the same.

Right around this time twenty years ago, I said goodbye to my backpacking adventures in Austria. A new adventure was about to begin, and I had no idea what the future had in store for me.

And here I am, twenty years later, back in…Austria. And I have no idea what the future has in store for me.

But I am certainly ready for this particular ‘adventure’ to end.

What I was reading then

a book on Scottish nationalism (I can’t remember which exactly)

Fifty Key Thinkers on International Relations

The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991, Eric Hobsbawm

The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama

What I’ve been reading lately

Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe, Simon Winder

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, Sathnam Sanghera

The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth

A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor

Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, Jostein Gaarder

*mine got lost, and I suppose I have to blame my girlfriend at the time, the other half of the long-term relationship I turned my back on (it was a mutual decision – we each went our separate ways, geographically and career-wise). She had an old hard-covered pink diary for little girls that she’d been given and I used that as my journal. At the time, the journal was meant to be for her, a record of my trip so she could see how I got on. I posted it to her after my trip and over the years, it got lost. When I last asked her about it some years ago, she had no recollection of it at all.

**coming at the start of my trip, my then girlfriend probably read it and thought ‘I frittered away nearly 5 years of my life on this clown?’ and then promptly tossed it. I can’t blame her!