Coffee betokens great adventure

art of packing - dead town - kayak polo - chillin’ in Budapest

Recently my friend and I have done an amazing trip through Balkans traveling mostly by train and hitchhiking. We were wild camping, meeting locals, exchanging culture and taking tons of photos. After few months I decided to jot down all amazing stories we had experienced together.

Enjoy!

The very first day

I packed myself the same way as for every other trip. I mean, it does not really matter for how many days I go somewhere, I have only one 45l backpack and it has to be enough. Thus after few years I mastered the art of back-packing (also noticed significant improvement in playing Tetris) as you can see in the following picture, that’s my whole gear for 2 weeks.

We met each other at railway station in Wrocław, Poland. I came about an hour before arrival and my friend rolled up 55 minutes later, maybe he just wanted to start an adventure right now, but for this to happen we had to wait…

Two hours.

Czechowice-Dziedzice was intended to be just a stop on a road to Budapest, but we had to spend there about 3 hours with no idea what to do in dead-after-5pm town. What is worse, shops, pubs and restaurants were closed due to Assumption of Mary celebration. After a while of loitering along dark streets and joking about splendidness of this town, we found a fountain with drinking water supply and decided to make a tea or coffee just to test our camping stove.

I hadn’t even managed to sit back and yet a guy, who seemed to be a bum, spotted us and immediately bumped into starting a casual small talk. At first, I wanted him to go away, but it turned out he had a higher purpose - he could not stand us struggling with the stove and tap water.

Just - no - stove. OK?

After short time of discussing the ultimate meaning of the stove in our poor situation he introduced himself as the owner of a pizzeria nearby and invited us for a coffee at his place. I could not believe, but he just gave us free coffee. His restaurant was the only one open, because he organized a party for girls working at Lidl, so in the late evening where nobody knows us, we had a coffee, a dozen or so of girls and we knew what to do.

But somehow we ended up watching videos of world championships in kayak polo. It is like rugby on canoes and with much smaller goals. Imagine playing rugby with an additional weapon in the form of a paddle and a possibility of turning your enemy upside down into water. How cool is that! And our host was providing food for such damn good events! Even one of his workers was a member of the Polish number one team (not so impressive when you do the math, but who expected freakin’ kayak polo?).

That’s basically how we spent the rest of the day - enjoying first signs of great adventure ahead of us.

Next day - Hungary

Having no more than 10 hours to visit Budapest, we came up with an idea to just chill out. There was a luggage storage near railway station, so we left backpacks for a trifling amount of money and thus transformed from travellers to tourists. We checked the map, saw an island and had no doubt we’re going there. We also grabbed some vegan pizzas along the way.

The Margaret Island was much larger than ones in our homecity Wrocław and like most of islands it was merely a place to chill, rest and relax. By the time we reached our target we were actually full of pizzas. Unsurprisingly, we started off with lying on the grass and drinking some fancy Hungarian beverages, then played frisbee, took a break, played again and looked for a piece of land with better grass and more shadow. Repeated this workout routine few times.

In the meantime, my friend arranged a meeting with a girl, who was also travelling on InterRail ticket. She was from Germany and, what astonished me, she was vegan. I have to admit - not bad first impression (in my case) - but after all just another misanthropic anthropoid with nothing to say. Fortunately, we tried again and the second attempt of hanging out went better. We met Sarah, a girl from Holland and she was so amiable, amusing and interesting that we almost got late on our train to Arad…