A Trip to Trieste

Trieste – August 2006

We took a trip to Trieste. Trieste is a border town, and I like border towns.

We took a bus in Trieste to visit some caves and it ran right up to what was once the imposing Slovenian border post and then turned down a lane instead of passing over the line. Trieste was an important port in the Austro-Hungarian empire and still retains much of the architecture. It’s at the foot of cliffs leading down from the Karst, or Kars, or Carso (depending on your language), a limestone plateau with lots of caves, that drops down steeply to the sea. So Trieste is very picturesque.

We went to Trieste on the train from Porto San Giorgio; a journey of three trains in fact which, amazingly, all arrived on time. All went well until the final leg, when three unfortunate events happened, all disconnected, except for the connection that unfortunate events always come along in threes.

First, I trod on the toe of an African woman and she became most angered. A kind of:

One day this bold Russian had shouldered his gun

And assumed his most truculent sneer.

To the train he did go,

Where he trod on the toe

Of Abdullah Bubul Emir.†

Young man, quoth Bubul, has life grown so dull,

That you wish to end your career?

Vile infidel know you have trod on the toe,

Of Abdullah Bubul Emir.

† These words are an adaptation of the song by Percy French, usually known as ‘Abdul Abulbul Ameer’, or variations on that. I have used as a basis the sheet music published by EMI London in 1980 under the title of ‘The Best of Percy French’. It seems to be closer to the original than the more widely-known version as sung by Frank Crumit. So there.

Sort of anyway, except that I’m neither bold nor Russian and it wasn’t Abdullah, probably more likely something like Bridget.

This unfortunate incident out of the way we decided to have a picnic on the train.

In Britain everyone eats on trains but in Italy practically no one does. But we were in a secluded set of seats so thought we wouldn’t cause too much offence, but then the ticket collector came along and he was a tall thin officious misery, and he looked rather disapproving, but we gave him our ticket and he told us it wasn’t valid.

What do you mean, I asked him, look, it says here; and he said no, it hasn’t been validated. In Italy (and France) you buy your ticket but before getting on the train you must feed it into a yellow machine on the platform, which stamps it to validate it. We’d remembered to do this for the first two of our journey-legs that day, but completely forgot it for the third, for although it was one journey, we had three tickets. We explained that on account of a tight connection at Mestre it had completely slipped our mind, so he huffily validated it with a pen and clipped it and gave it back to us without charging a fine (which he can, apparently, but tends to waive for foreigners).

Then at some point later in the journey I dropped my glasses case onto the floor, and immediately picked it up. This may not sound like anything worth reporting but when we got to the hotel I found that my glasses case was empty. When the case hit the floor it must have opened, the glasses scudded out under a seat or something, and then it closed again, so that in Trieste I had a case but no glasses and could therefore not read anything.

We went to the station next morning and eventually with asking variously we found the lost property office and asked if any glasses had been handed in. Yes, said the man, and opened a cabinet to reveal the most motley collection of sunglasses, with frames from pink to baby blue, but specs there were none.

So we went to look for a glasses shop to buy some reading glasses, but it was Monday, and on Mondays, all the glasses shops in Trieste are closed (this may be one of those stupid archaic regulations that the Italian government has not found the time to reprieve, and that glasses shops are closed all over Italy, on Mondays). On Tuesday we travelled back to Le Marche, and here I had a spare pair of glasses. But apart from that silly episode of life playing a run of stupid practical jokes upon a person, all went well and was fun in Trieste.

Looking down onto Trieste from the cable tramway that takes you straight up onto the carso.

The old tram at its topmost terminus.

He’s a Bloody Nightmare, That Boy

The Family on the Train – July 2006

Monday morning I took the train from London to Darlington, sitting next to the mother of a family of four children that was returning to Peterborough from their holiday in somewhere that had required them, that morning, to land at Gatwick. This woman was short and slim and elegantly dressed in a shopping-mall kind of way and had a London accent and handled her children, one of whom had a learning disability, brilliantly, with firmness and kindness and respect, while her old man sat at a seat nearby (for the train was crowded and they each had to sit in separate places) and complained that that Matthew, where is he? He’s a bloody nightmare, that boy. Matthew was the lad with the learning disability and was obviously a bit given to going walkabout, as his mother so neatly put it. The eldest of the four children, a girl, was in stroppy teenager mode, and I thought that in a way this was inevitable, she was copying her mum, who had to be firm and determined and bossy to keep this jumpy troop in order, (hyper partly on account of their having been to McDonalds for breakfast, I did suspect), and this firmness was interpreted by the youth as stroppy behaviour to emulate, such as when she wanted to buy a drink from the buffet and her mum said no, you’ve had your breakfast, and I’m not giving you any money! It got quite dull after Peterborough, and I tried to concentrate on the newspaper I’d bought at Kings Cross, but with the entertainment departed I nodded off until York.

Vodka Swillers on the Train

July 2006

On the train from Darlington to London I got chatting to a couple, she over six feet tall and he a little chap of perhaps five-feet-two with long straggly hair and glasses, these two having joined the train at Glasgow at seven in the morning, we becoming a part of the theatre at ten in Darlington. They were on their way to a concert in Hyde Park, and had got through their first or maybe second bottle of Vodka before the train passed Stevenage. The woman in particular extremely friendly, telling us the names of the bands that would be playing, which meant absolutely nothing to us.

At one point the woman went off to the buffet, leaving her small-of-stature friend drinking vodka by himself, and after a few minutes he suddenly began shouting, I thought at first at me for looking at him, but I think his ire was directed at two teenage boys sitting in the foursome opposite us, whom he imagined to be laughing at him, or poking fun at him. Or it may have been me, for I did look in his direction now and again, as one might. The two boys were a bit worried and tried to look suitably abashed, but at length the tall lady came back and after a few kind words to him he settled down. She wanted to know whether they’d be allowed to smoke at the concert, as smoking in public places is now banned in Scotland, and I said that I thought they probably would, or at least it wouldn’t yet be against the law. And she told us about her children, who she’d left in Glasgow while she went to the concert with her boyfriend. We must know the bands, didn’t we know these bands?

The Noisy Coach

February 2004

I’m in the carriage on the train that is called the ‘Quiet Coach’, which means you are not supposed to use mobile phones. You can rustle crisp packets and crunch their contents with your mouth open so forming a kind of megaphone of scrunching sounds at great volume, but mobile phones would annoy other passengers you see. It’s the, crunch, crinkle, scrunch, crunch: Quiet Coach. I’m feeling a bit sick.

Train to Cochin

Off Travelling – Kerala, January 1999

This follows-on from The Fishing Village which rounded-off our unintentionally extended stay at the beach resort. Today we are taking the train to Cochin as the start of our travels with the rucksack on the back.

Down at the Station

The next morning, pack the rucksacks and off we go. Doreen agog at breakfast.

Along the beach and up to the taxi rank where a taxi takes us to Trivandrum station for 175 rupees; the official price says 150 but he wasn’t going to do it for that (and for 30p in our money we weren’t bothered to argue).

At the station, we need to find the train for Cochin.

We go to the information desk, who directs us to the ticket window. After fighting our hands in front of pushy old ladies and into the hole in the glass we ask for a ticket to Cochin, air-conditioned 2nd class. The man directs us back to the information desk. There, they write on a scrap of paper: 2 tickets to Cochin, air-conditioned 2nd class, and we take this back to the ticket window where he sells us a ticket for two for 1,000 rupees, rather triumphantly as this we later learn is about six times the non air-conditioned price.

All this while a little chap has been trying to help us, a kind of car-door-opening tip-gatherer. He points us to the train and we give him five rupees; probably not that generous which at least got rid of him.

By good fortune we seem to have arrived at the station just 40 minutes before the ‘superfast’ train leaves. The train will take 4½ hours to Cochin and we could, if we chose, stay on it to Delhi arriving 52 hours later.

It takes us some time to find the air-conditioned coaches as there are only two of about fifty, and at first they seem to be less good than the non air-conditioned, having closed-in windows that have not been washed for some time; whereas the standard class has no windows, or rather no glass in the windows, so you can see out. The train, however, travels so slowly that the non air-conditioned would be very hot. The carriages seem to be fairly full, with bare brown arms and forlorn-looking serious faces at the bars of the windows, anticipating a long day ahead.

On the Train, Air-Conditioned 2nd Class

The compartment we choose is shared by an Indian couple with nothing to say to each other, who immediately upon entering the compartment turn the air-conditioning on full, so it starts to feel a bit chilly. They seem to be transporting a number of carrier bags stuffed with newspapers, together with a box of bananas.

Part-way through the journey first the woman, and then later the man, opens a newspaper-wrapped parcel in which there is a banana-leaf with their lunch wrapped up in it. They spend the next few seconds rolling up a ball of the contents with their fingers until it is quite a large snowball, then popping it quickly into their mouth.

We ate a red banana, bought at a stall the day before.

The guidebook had said that the ride was a pretty one, but we didn’t think it was too special, and eventually the train arrived at Ernakulam Junction, one of the Cochin stations, at about 4pm.

To Bolgatty Island

Having pushed our way out of the station we are amazed to find: no hassle. Nobody saying: ‘You want a rickshaw?’ or ‘You want a taxi?’. Nothing. In fact we couldn’t find a rickshaw at all.

We checked the price to the quay with some taxi drivers and they said 100 rupees. but this seemed too much. Then they offered to take us for 80 but this still seemed too much. We wandered off along the street where a taxi stopped and said the price would be 200 rupees, then another one said he’d do it for 50, so we went with him.

At the quayside we found a rowing-boat to take us to Bolgatty Island for 25 rupees.

The story continues with Bolgatty.