The JaYmes Escape

The Bulgarian waitress shakes her head. It takes me a few moments to remember that here, this means yes.She is going to get us another beer. I’m sitting in Angelina’s restaurant in the Bulgarian mountain town of Etropole. Yesterday, under a hot Bulgarian sun sitting in a crystal sky, my cousin Michael married his beautiful bride Millena in a tiny chapel in the nearby village of Boikovets.

The orthodox minister chanted in Bulgarian, with Millena’s mother Mariana occasionally chipping in with English translations, a role she reprised several times during the day as everything down to the speeches are carefully translated into the other language. It was a day Pimms and local wine, of Bulgarian dancers and late night disco, of wedding cake and shopska salad. A truly bilingual, bi-cultural wedding unlike any other.

Tonight, the two waitresses in Angelina’s have been running around all evening catering to our every whim, but as we prepare to leave they are incredibly happy. Our party of 24 eating tonight have rounded up the bill giving them a tip of around £50 (US$100) between them, a small fortune by local standards.

“We want to escape the cigarette smugglers”, the young Norwegian girl says to me, worriedly. Her friend, a Polish girl, says that they study together in Italy and explains that she can understand about 30% of what the people in her compartment are saying because Serbian and Polish are similar.

“They are worried about getting caught”, she says, “very worried. And I don’t want to be in there if they do”.

I’m on the train from Belgrade to Sofia, which has been running slowly and stopping for the whole day with no apparent reason, and is now something like two hours late. It’s looking like I’m going to miss the last bus to Etropole, the small town in the Bulgarian mountains where my cousin is getting married in two days’ time, and might end up staying the night in Sofia or doing the two hour journey in a taxi.

I’d seen the dodgy looking men with rather too many bags with rather too many right angles protruding from them, but it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would want to smuggle cigarettes from Serbia into Bulgaria. I can’t imagine them being anything but incredibly cheap in both countries, but they must be doing it for some reason. The train staff and even the Serbian police appeared at one stage to get in on the deal, and the dodgy looking bags were spirited away as we approached the border; presumably to be hidden somewhere discreet in the depths of the train.

As we trundle across the frontier towards the Bulgarian customs post the train is clearly home to a number of highly agitated people. The men in uniform board, check passports and poke around suspiciously in various bags. They know something is going on but can’t seem to find anything. When the train eventually pulls away the relief is apparent; beers are opened and celebrations ensue. Pity I’m still not going to make that bus.

“Ask that man if you can stroke his hedgehog”, chuckled Sarah. She and her friend Becci are music teachers from Stourbridge, and we’re sitting in the midst of the Belgrade beer festival with Paddy from Melbourne.

For reasons that will always be a mystery to us, a local character is carrying a hedgehog around the rows of makeshift bars and bustling tables. Actually, ‘makeshift’ is doing them a disservice; the local brewers have clearly gone to town with their illuminated giant inflatable beer bottles and enormous branded banners. This is not the kind of festival to attract connoisseurs of rare ales so much as a free rock concert geared up to sell as much of the stuff as humanly possible.

As the dubious Serbian rock music booms out here below the walls of the historic Belgrade castle, at the point where the river Sava meets the mighty Danube, the bizarre man stops to entertain us, or perhaps to be entertained by us. Becci does indeed get to stroke his hedgehog.

“Nye, nye Pivo”, the Serbian barman says to me resignedly, before continuing in English, “Would you like something else? Brandy? Wine?”

I’m surprised. The train has run out of beer, and despite the heavy night in Munich, ten hours of travel has left me hankering for refreshment.

“Vodka?”, I reply hopefully, and the man nods and heads for the fridge. The train is now in Croatia, the fourth country of the day. It all started at 0726 in Munich with the journey heading south through the beautiful Austrian Alps where I struck up conversations with students heading home; an Austrian to Vienna and a young Serbian bound for Belgrade after her first ever trip to Western Europe. Then there were the Japanese girls en route to Dubrovnik.

The restaurant-bar was coupled on after we emerged from the Alpine tunnel that connects Austria and Slovenia, but it was the Croatian hordes who boarded in Zagreb that seem to have consumed all the beer. Maybe it was something to do with the burgeoning temperatures.

As I sip my rather disappointing (but astonishingly cheap) Serbian vodka it starts to get dark and I chat to a gynaecologist on her way home to her family in Serbia from her job in Ljubljana. As we approach the final frontier of the day I begin to wait impatiently for this pento-national, fifteen hour ride to finally conclude.

“Bavarians have a special beer they drink for breakfast”, explains Ozzy, our Canadian-Bavarian Munich tour guide, “It’s very filling, a litre is he equivalent of eating a loaf of bread.”

Ozzy is herding a group of some 40 travellers, from places as eclectic as South Africa and Georgia (that’s the country, not the state), along with the inevitable bunch of Australians, around the city, telling us all about beer, hitler, beer. churches, beer, bratwursts, biergartens, Bavaria and beer. I left London on the Eurostar yesterday and had to hang out in Paris drinking beer for the evening before taking the sleeper to Munich; so I’ve only been in the city a couple of hours and I can’t say the rattling German night train gave me my best night’s sleep.

After the magnificent churches, famous brauhauses, historical monuments, watching the surfing on the river, and sneaking past the naked hordes in the Englisch garden, we settle in the city’s largest biergarten to enjoy Munich’s most famous product - The amber stuff itself, served in traditional one litre steins. Quite a few of those later and we’re making our way in the dusk to the Augustina Brauhaus where there is even more beer and quality Bavarian food. As things start to get really hazy I realise that I have to catch a train to Belgrade at 7.30 tomorrow morning. Eventually I manage to stagger back to the hostel, fill up on water, make my bed and set my alarm.