Full Steam Ahead!

The engineer puffed on a cigarette while he waited for us to embark.  Elvetia, the 1954 Romanian built locomotive he was perched in, puffed along with him.  Heavy mists were slowly lifting from the Carpathians and the lightened clouds, having shed a good amount of rain the night before, were moving across the sky.  It was 8:30 in the morning and we'd maneuvered around potholes and horse-carts to make our train - one of the last wood-fired, steam-powered trains in Europe.  You could smell the lumber in the smoke, its brown bark adding sweetness like the burnt caramel on crème brûlée. The smell reminded Merlin of sugaring in Vermont.  At 9am, with the shrill whistle of a gargantuan teapot, we were called on board.

The CFF Vișeu de Sus, also called The Carpathian Forest Steam Train, is referred to simply as "mocăniţă" by locals and the signs they have posted along the road. It's a derivation of the Romanian word "mocan," which means shepherd or mountain dweller. The mocăniţă which begins its journey in Vișeu de Sus snakes its way up into the Carpathian Mountains to collect timbre and shepherd it back down to the village. Its narrow gauge track follows the Vasar River toward the Ukrainian border, up into the Vasar Valley. The valley is unique to the Carpathians in its lack of habitation - well, human inhabitants at least. Deer, bears, sheep, abound. And those quickly proliferating beasts known as 'tourists.' 

Okay, now's the time to say it. This was a tourist ride, as are all of the wood-fired, steam-powered trains that leave this and any other station in Europe.  They are such rarities that it only makes sense to utilize them in this way - to offer a technicolor experience to people's sepia toned dreams of old-timey travel.  A Swiss nonprofit helped turn this railway into an attraction, to preserve the track, the trains and offer aid to the community around it in an ingenious way.  Merlin and I talk about foreign aid like this a lot, likening it to buying someone a cow instead of giving them milk money.  The 'cow,' being tourism.  Because of this, we assumed the "CFF" on the side of our train referenced the Swiss Federal Railways.  It actually stands for Calea Ferată Forestieră, "forestry railway" in Romanian.
In most of the world, roadways began to push locomotives out of business in the 1950s and 60s.  Romania isn't most of the world, though, and steam locomotives were still being built as late as 1986.  Along our way, we saw two of these re-jiggered vans moving right along next to us.  For loggers and livers in this neck of the woods, the train track is still the only access route.  We'd actually seen one of these on our first day in the country, crossing from near the Serbian border to Cluj Napoca.  What a crazy thing to see sidle up next to your passenger window.  On that modern diesel-powered bullet of a train, the van putted alongside and then fell back into the distance.  During this ride, it smoothly moved forward beyond us. 

At least two people are needed to run a steam locomotive.  Ours was staffed with five.  You had the engineer, the boilerman and a third fellow who swapped places with both of the others.  In addition, two young women acted as conductor and kitchen car cook.  One donned a lop-sided cap when collecting tickets, the other was in charge of grilling hot dogs at our lunch break.  They chatted the whole time, along for the joyride.  The other three had no choice but to run this thing like they always would, whether it was just doing a loop with some foreigners with cameras on board or not.  That's the amazing thing about this ride, to actually feel the mechanics of this bad boy.  To feel it jut and spurt, to watch them feed logs into the boiler and gather water from the river to replenish the locomotive tanks.  It's like watching men re-cobble a street - outmoded skill sets that become lost arts.

The Vaser Valley has had economic significance since the 1700s, when it was still a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.  When the railway was built at the beginning of the 1930s, German speakers and Romanian Jews were running the show.  They would cut down trees up in the heavily forested mountains and then send them down to saw mills in Vișeu de Sus.  The two World Wars affected both ethnic groups in some really dire ways and the lumber industry diminished - almost vanished.  Even with modern transport, the area is not the cash cow that it was in its heyday.  It was amazing to see the loggers' settlements along the river.  In just under three hours, I think we saw four.  The bridges made us gasp - two long logs strapped together with a railing.  Don't be fooled, it was actually just one log, until it bent toward the water. 

At the start of our journey, we passed more houses.  At each one, someone stood outside to watch us go by.  We waved, they waved back.  I wondered how many of the very old ones had watched the first wave of trains pass by.  How amazing they must have seemed.  How amazing they still are.  The Maramureş region is still a part of the world that remains mostly car-less.  Houses do not have driveways, horse-drawn wagons are the norm.  It only makes sense that these locomotives would draw a crowd.  Especially with a bunch of foreigners on board.  A German couple who were so intent on picture taking that they reminded me of that video of Britney Spears attacking a car with an umbrella (yes, I've seen it. so what?)  Cultural paparazzi these two were.  For all our grumbling, they elicited smiles and waves from everyone we past.  Their photos were probably amazing.

Diesel trains that run along this same track do most of the dirty work these days, leaving these antiques for lighter loads. We saw weighed down carts awaiting pick-up and the trains that retrieve them sliding down the track on neutral.  This is how this line was designed, allowing small trains to move upward at a steep enough pace that their return trip (with looooaads of wood now attached) would be aided by gravity.  Our own train picked up small delivery of its own - all tourist rides are still working trips for the local logging industry.  If no one shows up, they still go up to get the logs that are waiting.  We wondered how our train was going to turn around to go back in the direction from which we came.  It simply didn't.  The main cab disattached, moved back and around and joined back up with our cars on the other side.  The conductor navigated our way back in reverse.

We may not have needed to be on the train for four-odd hours to get the point.  Sure, I may have begun to think of The Kinks' song "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains."  And I don't know where I'm going/Or why I came.  I wasn't the only passenger that napped.  But don't they say it's all about the journey and not the destination?  Isn't that basically what our lives right now are all about?  It was amazing to have done it, especially in Maramureş County, where boarding a steam locomotive didn't feel all that unusual and it being anything other than wood-fired would have been bizarre. They use wood for absolutely everything here. As I'm sure we'll explore in greater detail really soon. 

The Bitola-Skopje Train

All provincial train stations have a weary countenance built up over years of waiting.  The station master’s shirt is starched and blue.  The ticket men are disheveled and nimble-fingered. All stations have the same stretched, narrow shape along the tracks, the same graffiti scratched into old plaster. The waiting rooms are dark, the benches are slatted wood, the platforms have a windswept loneliness.  There are precise, square-edged clocks.  These aren’t the terminuses, the bustling hubs of the cities - these are buildings put up to give small towns a hold on the tracks. Train stations are meant to be passed by and left behind.
On our way from Prelip up to Skopje, we left from one of these engine-buffeted buildings, passed dozens more and met some very interesting people.  This is why we love traveling by train.

The day before we went we walked to find the station, which was difficult.  Prelip stretches, like many big plains towns, in a disorganized, flat sprawl.  When we asked a man for directions, he insisted on driving us.  “But,” he said, “why are you taking the train?  The bus is the same price and faster.”  When we told him that we like trains, he looked amused.  “In Macedonia,” he said, “the trains aren’t good.  They are like from last century.”
The journey began in the heat of early afternoon.   The waiting room was full of older people and their little bags.  One man carried a few spools of wire.  A pair of swallows swooped in from time to time, perched and then flew back out.

It’s amazing to think of powerful, momentous movement after this quiet.  The mood in the station was subdued, everyone was hot and an hour passed slowly.  When the train came, it seemed like a surprise, even though we’d all been thinking about it.
It’s a short route, traveling from Bitola – the cosmopolitan hub of the south – up to the capital, stopping along the way to pay grudging, hurried respects to the places in between.  There are four trains a day.  The track isn’t used for much else.

On this train, there were no rows of seats – the cars were broken up into compartments.  This meant that, when we boarded, everyone began rushing up and down the aisles, peeking through doors and looking for a cabin with both a place to sit and occupants willing to give up the spare place.  After some looking, two young men nodded us into their cabin – which is how we met Victor and his wordless (non-English speaking) friend.
They were university students, nineteen years old, and returning from Bitola to their hometown of Veles.  Victor had a jokey, cocksure nature that came from being young and from long years of work and near self-sufficiency (he’d been working since he was eleven, and had spent some years alone, laboring in Bulgaria).  The early current of conversation took us by a litany of common hard-luck stories – Macedonia is difficult, he has no money, there is no future in the Balkans – but then turned to the scenery and the beauty of the country.  It is beautiful, especially seen blurred by the dreamlike lens of a train window.

The journey from Prilep to Skopje takes about two and a half hours.  The country changes as the train goes north – the ground gets dryer and scrubbier, there’s more red soil showing between blades of grass – but the topography mostly stays the same.  There are mountains, but they’re mostly low and smooth edged, nothing like the jagged peaks around the perimeter of the country.  Much is farmland, but the prevailing green is in the hue of forests rather than fields.
Victor like to smoke (“if I had money, I wouldn’t smoke,” he said.  “But you can’t do anything in Macedonia for forty dinar except buy cigarettes”) and he had his friend keep watch for the conductor while he puffed out the window.  A young law-student named Jasmina joined us at a small station – she was headed back to Skopje to her job at a notary’s office.  We all looked out at the passing countryside.  The other three had seen it many times before, but they took a fresh interest because of us.

Every few miles, the train would stop at a platform.  Sometimes, there would be a station house, sometimes only a concrete step on the edge of a forest.  There were always a few people waiting, but they wouldn’t always get on.  Often, a package would be handed down and a few words of greeting would be shared.
Victor didn’t seem to like the train much more than the man in Prelip.  “If you have to be in Skopje at four, you must take the bus.  This train is from the old times.  It might take three hours, it might take nine.  And then you are sitting there in the dark, and you can’t get to Skopje.”  Our experience, though, was nothing like that.  The train seemed to get to every stop on time, and was waved on officially and easily by the blue-uniformed station master.  Each yellow-painted station was unique - but nothing more than a minute of the journey, still a part of the forward motion.

Victor and his friend put their sunglasses on and stepped off the train in Veles, some half hour before we got to our destination.  Before they left us, Victor gave us a mostly-full plastic bottle of homemade rakija liquor.  There was more than a liter in the bottle, and we tried to tell him that it was too much, but he insisted we take it.  It grated on the throat but he was proud and we told him it was good.  He said that he would be staying with his father, and that his father’s rakija was much stronger.  “He says that he likes to drink Rakija, not water!”

Arriving in Skopje, we noticed that our train, which we had come to think of as quaint, suddenly felt like a creature of the city.  In those hours inside, with the verdant afternoon slipping by, we hadn’t seen the graffiti on the outside of the cars or the angular nose of the diesel engine. This was a creature that blasted through the pastoral outside, arriving at home in its metropolis to pant and rest for a while before heading back to Bitola.
We were asked again, in town, why we’d taken the train instead of the bus.  Macedonians aren’t proud of their railway (I’m not sure why, really).  It’s hard to explain to them, but a train is something different to an American than it is to a European.  Punctuality and luxury aren’t that important.  It’s wonderful to be able to stand up and lean out an open window as goats and barns and waving children rush by.  Conversations begin and end, a few new faces become familiar.  Traveling this way, one doesn’t see the roads or the fronts of buildings – just the backcountry.  The rhythm of the starts and stops is a pleasure all its own.  For us, it’s something foreign in itself.

A New Type Of Travel

We traveled by car for the first fifteen months of the trip. Now, the car is back in America. A lot has changed in the way we get around. Above, the Tbilisi train station at dusk.
The biggest difference is the amount we are able to carry with us. We used to have a tent and folding table, a gas stove, pots and pans, spatulas and cheese grater, sleeping bags and wine glasses. We had to leave behind our tripod, our bags of books, our bigger bags of clothes, our thermoses and CD's. We used to feel as though there was a complete home in our car, ready to be unfolded at a campsite or rented room. One bag was called "the kitchen," another "the library," our tent was the bedroom, put in next to "our closets." There were times when we contemplated buying houseplants (or, car-plants?).

Now, everything we carry must really be carried.

Above, an uncrowded moment on the Tbilisi subway, which is actually quite convenient, fast and clean.
Another difference - we now have to know more precisely where the next destination will be, and how we are going to get there. With a car, it's easy to pull over for the night at some roadhouse or inn. We could wander at our own pace. There were no prescribed routes - we could take a back road or continue beyond where the busses ran. Now, we are at the mercy of our drivers, conductors and pilots, whose job is to go from one point to another.

We took a plane from Tbilisi to Mestia, which we never would have done before. On our flight there, we were the only two people aboard (there were sixteen seats, supposedly - I counted fifteen). On our flight back, the plane was full of Svans journeying to the capital for Christmas - it seemed most of them had never flown before.

Of course, in this part of the world, people travel by marshrutka, and so we have too. We'd been on them before, of course (our most memorable ride being into Transnistria), but not as often as most travelers in Eastern Europe.

Marshrutkas are, essentially, private busses - usually vans, actually - that run along predetermined routes and pick up or drop off passengers as they go. Sometimes they are quite pleasant. Sometimes, they are over-packed and uncomfortable.
We took a slow sleeper train from Tbilisi to Baku in Azerbaijan. It was, at one time, probably very luxurious, but was now tattered and faded. We felt that the journey - especially in between dreams, waking to darkness and clanging - was decades-old. The curtain rod was rusty, the fabrics musty. The porters had raucous laughs and a tiny room where they drank tea. They spoke Azeri to each other, hard-edged Russian to us. Outside, only occasional lights in the desert. We felt, for many hours, the slow tilt of the land downward to the caspian sea.

It was wonderful to drift in this relic of empire and Brezhnev, letting the miles pass unnoticed. We could read and play cards, drink Georgian brandy and use the bathroom. We miss our car very much - but this kind of travel isn't so bad.

Prague Trolleys

We drove straight from Vienna to Prague, stopping only to eat the sandwiches we'd packed. The quick transition put us in a comparative mood. When the streets of Praha didn't feel quite as Bohemian as they did well-trodden, I began to miss Vienna. A truth: the city of Kafka, Mucha, Kundera and Havel is touristy. Perhaps, though, it is also more accessible than Vienna - a thought that surprised me. Vienna was more closed to outsiders, except for the artifice of museums and chain stores. One got the feeling that the people there maintained some distance, that they kept a certain identity separate from the grand facades and Hapsburg finery.
Maybe because its tourist industry came of age more recently, Prague doesn't feel quite the same. There is more of a feeling - probably false - that the life of a citizen isn't quite so distant. It's been easy to find atmosphere (doesn't that word seem like the currency of this city?) and feel that the revolution is still echoing in the streets. It's an idea that is grounded, of course, in the mirage of Prague as wilderness, outside the bounds of travel normalcy. Sometimes that idea is all it takes to make a place feel more immediate, even when American and German voices fill the air.
The pictures are almost an illustrative aside at this point, but they do serve a purpose here. We've been so impressed by the trolleys, cruising the streets quietly and smoothly, making up the bulk of the excellent public transportation system. Politely, the drivers ring a little bell if they perceive that a pedestrian might be stepping into harms way - it's less bullying than the blast of a bus horn, I think. The routes run everywhere and trolleys are omnipresent - two things everyone wants from their trains.
There's something so much nicer about standing in the sun, waiting for a trolley, than entering into a subway warren. It has a democratizing effect, I think - with clear vision and a more accurate sense of direction, moving about in the streets is much easier than it is in a subterranean system, and it makes novices feel more at home amongst the commuters.

Of course, I'm sure it's not as nice if it's raining.

The Aluksne - Gulbene Narrow Gauge Railroad

We drove to Gulbene to take a ride on the little narrow gauge railroad that runs between that town and Aluksne, where we are staying. Sadly, there is a bit of a blizzard going on and the scheduling didn't work out in our favor - we would have had to drive home in the dark along badly-plowed dirt roads, which was a frightening prospect. We still got to see the train, though, and the strange Gulbene station.

The rail line is the last, 33 kilometer long segment of the Stukmani - Vecgulbene railroad, which was built in 1903 and was originally 212 kilometers in length. Narrow gauge lines were once quite popular in Latvia, and in the Baltic in general, but are now considered something of a curiosity. The Aluksne - Gulbene train runs twice daily (the first train, strangely, is at one o'clock in the afternoon), and is both a tourist attraction and a working commuter line. The station of Gulbene is huge and ornate and empty. There were a few men drinking beers out of large cans and a smattering of people who appeared to be seeking shelter from the cold. It is a place that must have, once, been bustling.

Now, it is dark and echoey. The station cafeteria was a time-warp, with a few old women eating and a stern lady serving food. We ate some pea soup. Surprisingly, it was some of the best soup we've had in Latvia.The trains are pulled by diesel engines nowadays, made in Russia during the 1960's and 1980's. More functional than romantic, but still interesting.
Each of the three cars (that we could see) looked the same on the outside, but had different design schemes inside. One of them was modern-Amtrak, one was soviet-spare and the third was opulent-plush (above). When the train was heading out of the station, only the modern car was attached to the engine - and ten or so people on board looked less like rail tourists than like regular commuters.
The train pulled out, heading towards Aluksne, traveling quite slowly. We were sad not to have the courage to get on it, but we're happy that we made it home. We are holed up in a cabin by lake Aluksne, listening to the wind out in the darkness and watching the snow inch up our windowpane.