Well it’s been a while since I wrote anything interesting here but now that I’m travelling and I have things to say, I feel it might be time…

So, starting from the beginning, I moved out of my house in Manchester and spent a week in London and two in York visiting folks and chilling.

I flew out to Budapest on the 4th July with Miles & Richard and we spent a day wandering around. It was very nice. I expect I’ll be going back at some point (it’s so cheap to fly there). Worth mentioning was Fatâl’s, a restaurant in which you get a mountain of food served in an individual frying pan. Nobody managed to finish theirs even though we hadn’t eaten all day. We met up with Nick, Jackie, Ben, Ben, Steve & Russell and all went down to Novi Sad in Serbia for EXIT festival where we met up with yet more people from Manchester.

The festival camp site was brilliant: nice showers, bearable toilets, plenty of space, free internet, near the beach (on the Danube) and LOTS OF TREES! The shade was especially appreciated since the festival ran from 6pm to 8am every day. We still didn’t get much sleep though. I think I got bitten by something one afternoon. It started with a few little red marks on my ankles which were a bit itchy. However over the next few days the marks grew bigger and my ankles started to swell a bit. I went to the first aid tent who told me to put some ice on it which is all very well but not that easy when you’re camping and don’t happen to have Harrison Ford on hand to make you some.

The festival itself was cool and in an amazing location. When they said it was in an old fortress I had imagined it was in the grounds of the fort. But no, it was actually inside the fort’s battlements. The many rings of roofless 10m high walls around the keep provided enclaves in which each of the 20+ stages were nestled and audibly insulated from each other. The dance arena was especially impressive. There’s nothing quite like watching the sun rise with 30,000 ravers in a medieval fortress which was previously a Roman fortress and a Stone Age settlement before that!

Obviously all kinds of silliness ensued. Far too much to recount here. I’ve got about a dozen Serbian phone numbers in my phone but I can’t remember who any of them are.

Anyhow up until then it was all very easy. The journey really begins the day before yesterday when most people started to head back to home via Budapest. Rob, Erica, me and a few others we met were heading to Croatia for a bit of beach action but Rob & Erica wanted a bit of couple-time and the others were either staying longer or inter-railing which is really not the best of getting around in this part of the world because most of the railways were destroyed in the recent conflicts.

So we all got to the station and I kind of said "where can I go tonight for this much money?" It turned out I could only go to Belgrade or Budapest by train but I could go to Sarajevo by coach so I chose the latter. Of course the air-con was broken and it was over-booked so it wasn’t the best journey but at least I had a seat and about half-way through the some people got off so I had two seats. As the sun rose we were going through absolutely stunning Bosnian mountain countryside. It was how I imagine Switzerland would have looked like 50 years ago. It was so beautiful that I was tempted to get off the coach and just stay there forever.

But I didn’t. Eventually we got to Sarajevo at about 7am. By this time my ankles, which had been mildly painful when I left Serbia, had swollen to the size of watermelons and made walking very painful. I didn’t really know what I was doing but I organised my goals thus:

1. Find ATM
2. Find pharmacy
3. Find internet cafe

Once I had found an internet cafe it seemed I would be safe because that would give me access to a map, hostel info and that kind of thing. I found an ATM and then realised I had no idea how much the money was worth. The smallest amount it offered was 10KM so I went for 50KM.

I started walking back to where I had seen a pharmacy and heard over my shoulder an English voice saying “What the fuck are we doing in Sarajevo?” “My thoughts exactly,” I replied.

It turned out to be three lads from Sheffield who had also been to EXIT but had just got off the coach from Belgrade. So told them I’d found an ATM and when I saw that the pharmacy was still closed I wandered up with them and sat in a café. They had a Lonely Planet but whichever way we looked at the map we just couldn’t work out which bus station we were at. The roads just didn’t fit. I shared out my Noblice biscuits and, when the café opened, we had a drink and took turns to go off on wanders trying to work where we were and how to get somewhere else. Eventually James & Steve returned with some kind of police escort. “Oh god what have they done now?”

Well it turned out that we weren’t even in Sarajevo at all. We were in some Serbian suburb of Sarajevo which was too far away to be marked on the map. But our friendly police-woman/girl, Amela, took it upon herself to be our guide. She walked with us to the bus stop, showed us how to buy tickets, made the half-hour bus ride with us, walked us to the real bus station where we could leave our luggage, exchanged phone numbers and arranged to meet us later for drinks with some of her friends! To serve & protect? You betcha!

By this point we had walked quite a bit and my ankles were really hurting so while the other lads walked into the centre to look around, I broke off to get back to my goals. I completed goal 2 with a bit of pointing and miming of ‘insect’ and ‘bite’. And goal 3 provided me with the name of a hostel and directions to find it from the bus station. So I went back to the station to collect my bags. I had to wait half an hour for the guy to turn up and I was starting to feel really ill. I had a temperature and my ankles were very, very painful and I had difficulty just standing up, let alone walking. At this point those who know me well will be thinking “Ah there goes Tam the hypochondriac,” and to be fair on a scale of 1 to child birth it was probably only about 17 but it still made everything far more overwhelming than it would normally have been. I was actually on the edge of tears as I went back to the info desk for the fourth time to try to get someone to give me my bags back.

But I got them back and got on a tram and headed into town. Except that by this time I had forgotten what the tram stop was called and there were no signs on them to tell you where you were anyway. Stupidly, I hadn’t written anything down because I didn’t have any pen or paper and the concept of trying to enter all the weird accented characters into my phone seemed too daunting. The trams have that stupid system where the ticket that you buy from the driver when you get on isn’t valid until you put it through a machine that stamps it. Fortunately the driver told me ‘put machine’ and I did. Three other foreign guys on my tram didn’t and the transport police came down on them. It didn’t look fun.

So after I’d been going for a while I decided to get off the tram. I sat on a wall for a while and then saw a tram go past with what looked like the name of the stop I had originally been trying to get to. So I got on another tram and asked the driver to tell me when to get off since the tram stops don’t have names. As I tried to explain this he seemed to be telling me that the name I was saying was the name of the bus staion where I had just come from. Bollocks. So I said I was on the wrong tram and was getting off again. I offered to pay and he gave me a ticket but said ‘you use next tram’ meaning I should save the ticket for the right tram (since I had only been one stop). So I got off and saw a map. Woo! Finally a map! I started looking for the names of the stops and was suddenly surrounded by transport police who demanded in broken English why I had got off the tram. I tried to explain and they kept asking me something that I couldn’t understand.

Before I go on I must remind you that I hadn’t slept at all the previous night, had only had an average of about 4 hours bad sleep per night for the past week, was in pain, had a temperature, couldn’t walk and didn’t know where I was or where I was going.

So I broke down in tears. They wanted to see my passport but I still had the presence of mind not to show it to them. Eventually I managed to convince them that I wasn’t trying to cheat the system (why would I bother for a 50p tram fare!) and they left me, literally in a heap on the floor. I took a few minutes to gather my wits and it suddenly struck me: “Why the fuck am I putting myself through all this shit when I have a Visa card?” I resolved to go into the very first hotel I saw, get a room and sleep for three days. I walked 5 paces and what did I see in front of me? Only the hostel that I had originally set out to find! I fell in through the door, tears still streaming down my face and unable to utter anything intelligible.

“Hello, it’s OK you find us! Leave your bags, sit down. You want a cigarette? Some juice?”

Heaven!

“There is bathroom, you go and wash your face.”

So I went and composed myself once more. Then was shown to my bed and slept for 20 hours.

And so here I am!

My ankles are much better but I still can’t walk very far. The hostel staff are utterly insane but very friendly. The guests are also very friendly. Met a few more EXIT people and an American student of Eastern European history who gave some interesting talks on something I know shamefully little about.

Haven’t had a chance to explore Sarajevo yet but what I’ve seen seems nice. I’ll hopefully get to explore more tomorrow. I’m staying one more night and then taking another night bus to Split to meet Rob & Erica who have been in Montenegro.

Now I’m heading back to the hostel to eat some cornflakes.