The Long Haul – An Exhausting Journey To Oradea (The Lost Cities #6)

If you ever want to amuse yourself with a slightly sadistic activity, I highly recommend the travel journey planning website Rome2Rio. Type in your points of departure and arrival, then wait for a couple of seconds as the website works its magic. The site will give you train, bus, and car options to any destination they desire. These can be a source of fascination, especially when transfers are involved. Any search between two places that cannot be reached with a non-stop service will result in numerous options, some of which are scarcely viable unless you are willing to endure extreme fatigue.

I found one particularly exhausting option while searching for the most efficient way to travel between Uzhhorod and Oradea for my Lost Cities beyond the Hungarian border itinerary. There is no non-stop train service between the two cities. The fun really began as I looked through the options that were offered. One that got my attention was “Train via Biharkeresztes” because it offered the shortest travel time. I did not have the slightest idea of where Biharkeresztes was located other than in Hungary. Clicking on the option revealed a nightmarish itinerary that made me want to book my tickets just to see if I was up to the challenge. 

On-time arrival – Train from Puspokladany arriving in Oradea (Credit: Boldizsar Sipos)

Beyond Midnight – Ready For Departure
My fascination with a potential journey via Biharkeresztes began when Rome2Rio showed that it would take eight hours. I sighed. While I expected a lengthy travel time due to the lack of a direct connection between Uzhhorod and Oradea, seeing an eight-hour journey listed as the first option, made me realize the difficulty of getting between the two cities in a timely manner. There was no getting around the fact that this leg of my itinerary would take most of a day. Little did I know that the time given did not include transfers and waiting at stations. When I investigated the option further, I saw that the entire trip would take 14 hours and 14 minutes. I was astonished to learn that the details revealed the trip would be even tougher than the amount of time it took. I would spend two-fifths of the time waiting in stations, part of it in the dead of night at a station in the Hungarian town of Puspokladany.

Public transport stations late at night and in the earliest hours of the morning are something I generally avoid while traveling in Eastern Europe. For that matter, I try to avoid them anywhere I travel in western Europe or America. A railway or bus station around midnight or thereafter is an invitation for trouble. While I have never noticed any violent criminal element in the evening at stations I have frequented in Eastern Europe, the possibility is always there. After the sun goes down, there is usually a noticeable increase of seedy characters that look ready to commit petty theft at stations. In my opinion, they are more of a danger to someone’s belongings than they are to passengers, but why tempt fate unless it is absolutely necessary. My late-night experiences at stations are limited so I am no authority on the matter. The most memorable of these turned out to be completely benign.

Awaiting arrivals – Puspokladany Train Station (Credit: Tony Fekete)

Nocturnal Travel – A Marathon Journey
I arrived not long before midnight on my first visit to Lviv in western Ukraine. I went into the main hall expecting it to be deserted. Instead, I found a large crowd awaiting arrivals or departures. The worst thing I encountered on that occasion were the taxi drivers. In Eastern Europe, it does not matter if it is morning, noon, or midnight, the taxi drivers are always prepared to fleece foreigners. They haunt arrival areas in railway and bus stations waiting to confront bleary eyed travelers. In Lviv, the taxi drivers were no real danger to anything other than my wallet. Despite coming through this experience unscathed, I am still reluctant to take my chances by hanging around in a public transport station late at night. Nonetheless, this is sometimes unavoidable. For example, the journey from Uzhhorod to Oradea.

If I was to take the timeliest train option that Rome2Rio provided me, I would find myself waiting in a railway station late at night. The marathon journey begins at Uzhhorod in the late afternoon. That time of departure is never a good sign if you are traveling across three countries with three different languages while navigating two border crossings. This would surely be enough to induce plenty of stress. That might help me stay awake during what would be a long day’s journey deep into the night. One positive would be gaining an hour after crossing into a different time zone from Ukraine to Hungary. One negative would be losing that same hour after crossing from Hungary into Romania. Traveling is never easy in the remoter reaches of Eastern Europe. The toughest part comes when making a transfer at Puspokladany in eastern Hungary. The problem is that the train arrives there at 8:33 p.m. followed by a four and a half hour wait. I have made transfers at Puspokladany before. The station is in excellent condition and safe. Still, spending a considerable amount of time there long into the night is less than ideal.

Somewhere down the line – Beside the platform at Puspokladany (Credit: Tony Fekete)

On-Time Arrival – Before The Break of Dawn
The train from Puspokladany to Oradea does not leave until 1:01 a.m. This is a sleeper train traveling between Budapest and Brasov. I would be at risk of falling asleep on this train. There are worse things in travel than missing a long-awaited stop and waking up in Transylvania. One of them happens to be trying to stay awake all the way to Oradea where the train arrives at 4:17 a.m. That just might be late enough that all the miscreants and ne’er do wells have either passed out, stolen their quota of cigarettes, or gone to bed. I would be left searching for a bed of my own while wandering the streets of Oradea a couple of hours before dawn. Is there anything worse than those final hours of the early morning before dawn? I am not sure, but I intend to find out. This might not sound like fun, but it is an adventure.  

Click here for: Whisper To A Scream – The Door In Nagyvarad (The Lost Cities #7)

Time Management – A Race Against The Clock To Oradea (The Lost Cities #5)

There are the trips not taken, the routes not followed, and the timetables that cannot be worked out. I rarely write about my stillborn sojourns. It is painful to recall aborted plans that started with hope and ended in hopelessness. These chances not taken can be summed up as an inversion of the famous Sinatra lyric from My Way, “Regrets, I’ve had a few…too few to mention” into “Regrets, I’ve had many, too many to mention.” My way ended up being the wrong way.

What worries me the most about my itinerary for the lost cities beyond the borders of Hungary is that it will never come to fruition. That is why I have tried to trick myself into believing the itinerary is for armchair travel only. Nevertheless, my underlying and unspoken aspiration is to make this dream become reality. The reason it might not is a matter of time. As I plan this potential journey, I am becoming acutely aware just how much time plays a part in the choices I make while traveling in Eastern Europe.

Managing time – Oradea City Hall Tower

Road Weary – Crossing The Upper Tisza
There is Eastern Europe, and then there is far Eastern Europe. I define the latter as places in the region that are remote from the popular tourist routes. The westernmost stretch of the Ukraine-Romania border is one of them. I consider this to be the wildest of the wild east.  This is not just because of both countries’ association with some of the most volatile European history since the beginning of the 20^th century, it is also because a stretch of the border is naturally demarcated by the Upper Tisza River. When I learned this a decade ago, it astonished me. My image of the Tisza had been informed by numerous crossings of the river on the Great Hungarian Plain. I had always thought of the Tisza as a broad, languid river flowing through flat land as it heads south to feed the Danube. That was until I saw photos of the Upper Tisza along the Ukraine-Romania border that showed a narrower, faster flowing river. The photos led me to daydream about one day crossing this natural border.

While developing my Lost Cities itinerary, I thought that there might be an opportunity to cross the Upper Tisza when I traveled from Uzhhorod to Oradea. That was until I looked closely at a map and noticed that the Ukraine-Romania border was to the southeast of Uzhhorod, whereas Oradea was directly to the south. Trying to find a way to cross the Upper Tisza between Oradea and Uzhhorod would require a detour. On the map, this detour did not look that difficult, but railways in the area are few. Roads are often the only option. I have been on enough to-lane highways in Ukraine and Romania to know that traveling on them is time consuming due to their narrowness and condition. Despite these drawbacks, I researched a potential trip routed through the small city of Satu Mare in northwestern Romania.

The place to be – Satu Mare Railway Station in 1911
(Credit: Brück & Sohn Kunstverlag Meißen)

Clock Watching – Taking My Time
Bus travel in the remoter reaches of Eastern Europe is often the only means of transport. That is the case for anyone looking to get from Uzhhorod to Satu Mare. It requires two potentially exhausting bus rides. That is followed by a three-hour train journey between Satu Mare and Oradea. All this adds up to at least a twelve-hour journey. Timeliness is not the strong suit of public transport in Romania. Neither is a border crossing from a country at war, to one that is a member of the European Union. Specific travel times are rendered meaningless. The best that can be hoped for are rough estimates of arrival times. In this context, a couple of hours can easily double. For this potential journey, time was working against me.

Sitting in an armchair months or years away from an actual trip between Uzhhorod and Oradea, it is easy for me to delude myself into believing anything might be possible. Pushing the boundaries of endurance is appealing from a distance. I know from experience just how different reality can be, especially when bus travel is involved. I love riding on trains because I find even the worst ones to be more comfortable and relaxing than traveling on a bus. The trains I have been on in Ukraine and Romania are slower than buses, but they have everything else to recommend them. For instance, on a train I can stretch my legs while not worrying about the numerous near misses that occur on bad roads with drivers who love to risk everyone’s life. Furthermore, I do not have to sit in cramped quarters among fellow passengers whose clothes are permeated with the smell of cigarette smoke. Avoiding these annoyances makes the slower pace of train travel more tolerable.

There is also the historical accuracy that comes with train journeys to the lost cities on my itinerary. When Uzhhorod and Oradea were known as Ungvar and Nagyvarad in Austria-Hungary, those who traveled to them would have done so by train. Contemporary railway lines still follow much of the network laid down by the Hungarian National Railways network during the last half of the 19^th century. Taking trains offers me an opportunity to follow the exact same routes in many cases. I am seeing the same landscape, as citizens of the empire saw it over a century ago. It is possible on these journeys to relive a semblance of the past while traveling at the same speed as citizens of the empire did long before me.

A New Direction – Puspokladany Railway Station (Credit: Aspectomat)

Mental Sanity – A New Direction
My love for train travel led me to decide that my best bet for efficiency and mental sanity will be to travel in a straight shot south from Uzhhorod to Oradea. This will not be easy. Traveling through rural areas that have changed little since the days of Austria-Hungary takes patience. The one thing that has changed is national borders. This inevitably leads to delays. Add to that, the usual issues with poor infrastructure found in some of the poorer parts of Eastern Europe and my journey from Uzhhorod to Oradea will either be an adventure or a nightmare. In this case, probably both. I began researching more straightforward and expedient options for the journey. This led me in another bizarre direction, the town of Puspokladany in eastern Hungary.

Click here for: The Long Haul – An Exhausting Journey To Oradea (The Lost Cities #6)

A Bathroom & A Borderland – Against The Unknown: Lviv to Kiev By Train (Travels In Eastern Europe #51)

Sleep could not arrive soon enough for me on the train from Lviv to Kiev. It was not long before I fell into a fitful somnolence. After about an hour I woke up with my forehead covered in sweat. Once I realized that I was on a train somewhere in Ukraine there was only one thing to do, use the bathroom. I made my way past the other passengers in the semi-empty compartment. Everyone was fast asleep by this point in the trip. Long train rides have an air of romance about them, but that is before you visit the bathroom. The ultimate cure for the excitement and adventure of travel is a bathroom in an older Ukrainian railways train car. This one I found to be like so many others on Eastern European trains, with toilet paper the consistency of sandpaper, powdered soap (if you could call it that) that was dispensed from a turnstile type mechanism emitting dry flaky white stuff.

The worst was the toilet and not because it was dirty. Instead the toilet seat had small spiky gradations atop it, not unlike those found on a cheese grader. I found this rather perplexing, because only the most demented mind would inflict this on passengers. I stared at the dull silver surface of the toilet partly bemused, partly frightened. It occurred to me that someone only invented this painful looking toilet to deal with a real or perceived problem. I shuddered at the thought of what that problem might have been. The one good thing about this toilet was that whatever your business, it did not flow straight to the tracks. There is nothing quite so disconcerting as taking a leak while watching the ground speed past. I did my best to concentrate on using the bathroom and vacating it as quickly as possible. After this bathroom I was ready for almost anything.

Simply frightening – Toilet on a Ukrainian Train

Lost In Space – Unfounded Fears
As the train slowly made its way eastward into the vastness of the Ukrainian interior, I grew increasingly cognizant of the land’s size and scale. Woods, marshland and empty fields passed by, seeming to go on forever. Ukraine was huge by European standards, two of the largest nations in Eastern Europe, Poland and Romania would fit within it. The train was beginning to cross the vast east European Plain, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Imperceptibly the train crept from plateau onto the plain. The hilly terrain in and around Lviv soon became a distant memory, the land became flatter and more featureless. This was a pass-through landscape that kept me falling in and out of sleep. Sometimes I would suddenly wake up and wonder if I was dreaming in daylight. Where was I at? Ukraine yes, but where in Ukraine.

The train made a few scheduled stops, one at a larger town known as Korosten, which was a major railway junction. I could not see very much of the city from my window, but what I did see frightened me. Not because of any real danger, this was entirely imaginary and had nothing to do with crime. I was afraid, because I had no real idea of exactly where I was. I did not have a decent map or travel guidebook. I wondered what would happen to me if I got off at this station. At the time, no one in my family had any idea where I really was, for that matter neither did I. I could not speak more than a couple of Ukrainian words, found the Cyrillic alphabet an endless source of confusion and would have had trouble explaining myself to even the most patient person. I was lost without being totally lost. Of course, the best advice when you are lost is to stay put. I had no intention of doing anything else.

Something fearful – Korosten Railway Station in north-central Ukraine

An Immense Borderland – Filling In The Emptiness
This was why I traveled, to test myself against the unknown. The fear I felt was paradoxically matched by a sense of nervous excitement. Every stop was another offer to step into the unknown. I did not take that chance, but I found the idea intriguing. Part of my fear was a product of ignorance. I hardly knew anything about north-central Ukraine except that it was a horrific place during the first half of the 20^th century and a very tough place to live during the last half of it. Every time I looked out at a barren field I wondered how many peasants had succumbed to hunger during the forced collectivization of the early 1930’s. At the sight of marshland, I imagined invading armies sinking in the mud. When woodland came into view, it was a reminder that in these forests thousands of Jews had been machine gunned by Nazi death squads. This landscape gave the impression of anonymity, subtly disguising the succession of terrifying tragedies that lay just beneath the land. There was nothing in the geography of this netherworld to stop an invasion, ideological imposition or inquisition.

Arrival time – Clock tower at Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Station (Credit: Prymasal)

Ukraine roughly translated means borderland. For me borders have always conjured up images of clear dividing lines and definitive crossing points. This borderland was indefinite and expandable for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. It was relatively easy to cross. The problem was its size, it seemed to go on forever. The sameness, the flatness, the vastness left me feeling defeated. There was too much distance to comprehend. I found its immensity daunting. It took quite a bit of effort to believe that Kiev, with some three million people was getting closer by the minute. There had to be people somewhere out in this empty landscape or so I hoped. I was nearing one of the great cities in both European and world history without much of an idea what to expect. Before I knew it the train was approaching Kiev. My sense of time had been warped by fatigue. One moment time was passing at a glacial pace, then suddenly all the slowness and sameness disintegrated as the train pulled into Kiev-Passazhyrskyi station. The had arrived right on time and I was not ready for Kiev.