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)

Closing The Gap – War Crosses The Lower Danube (Russian Invasion of Ukraine #343)

If you have ever stood on one side of a large river and looked across at the other side, then you know just how far it can be. Fifty meters might as well be a mile, one hundred meters a marathon. Anyone who risks a crossing must contend with the river’s current which can easily sweep swimmers away. Many ferries and small watercraft have suffered the same fate. A river might be flat and relatively shallow, but it is still not terra firma. Water is transitory terrain with a power all its own. The other side of the river might as well be in another country because it seems unattainable. In some cases, it is in another country.

Flowing on – The Danube near Vadim Bulgaria (Credit: Janusz Recław)

Crossover Appeal – The Difficulty of Switching Sides
I can still remember the first time I saw the Danube River. It was not the way I had imagined it. The river was inky and dark, a large ribbon of water languidly flowing beneath the Friendship Bridge (also known as the Danube Bridge) on the Bulgaria-Romania border. Vienna and Budapest seemed a million miles away. This part of the Danube was a political rather than cultural. It was not an icon, but a dividing line between two nations that had a history of being at each other’s throats. Bulgaria and Romania may have had communism in common for forty years, but during that time they suspiciously eyed one another and assumed conspiratorial intent. The Friendship Bridge was nothing of the sort. It was imposed on both countries by Josef Stalin, a dictator who was never known for being friendly with anyone, especially foreigners.

Even with a bridge over the Danube, the Romanian side of the river looked impossibly far away. Some of this had to do with passport control. The wait was only 15 minutes, which is warp speed by the standards of two countries that will never be known for bureaucratic efficiency. Nonetheless, the passing minutes seemed to make the opposite side of the Danube grow more distant. I soon learned that perception had played a trick on reality. Crossing the bridge by vehicle was quick and easy. Still to this day, I cannot shake my initial perception of the Romanian side being a distant horizon. It retreats ever further in my mind as the memory fades.

I imagine that my perception of the distance between the Danube’s riverbanks is shared by those who live along the lower portion of the river. Just as the Danube has a long and storied history as an avenue of transport and trade, it has just as long a history of being a natural impediment that people have found difficult to cross. Modern engineering has mitigated some of that difficulty, but largely on the upper and middle Danube. For those living along the lower portion of the river, accessing the opposite side of the river can take a half-day or more of travel time. It all depends upon how far they are from the nearest bridge or ferry. The difficulty of getting from one side of the lower Danube to the other is demonstrated by the fact that there are four more bridges (10) across the Danube in Budapest, then there are along the entire stretch of the river that borders Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine (6). And one of those six bridges, the New Europe Bridge between Vidin, Bulgaria and Calafat, Romania only opened a decade ago.

Flowing away – The Danube along the Ukraine-Romania border

Natural Borders – Keeping A Distance
Bridging the lower Danube has proven difficult, if at times impossible. This is especially true when it comes to connecting two different countries. The modern age has not been kind to bridge builders on the lower Danube. A combination of geopolitical difficulties, the legacy of historical mistrust, and bad government has kept those who live along the banks of the river apart. Even with Bulgaria and Romania as European Union members, the situation has only improved marginally. Romania has no connections by bridge with either the Moldovan or Ukrainian stretches of the Danube. With war raging in Ukraine this situation is unlikely to change anytime soon, if ever.

When the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February, the geopolitical distance between Ukraine and Romania along the lower Danube widened. Romania is a member of both the European Union and NATO. The latter provides it a level of security that Ukraine can only dream of. Russia willfully avoided Romania because it was in NATO. It is not an exaggeration to say that if Ukraine were in NATO the war would never have happened, nor the occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014. The difference between war and peace for Ukraine is NATO membership.

Since the war started, Romania has been a relatively quiet place despite combat on the Black Sea not far from its coastline. It has become one of the safe havens for refugees from Ukraine. Romania enjoys a large American military presence, part of which is stationed at Constanta, the country’s largest port. As a NATO member, Romania can rely on security assurances from the world’s premier military alliance. That has not stopped the Ukraine-Russia war from closing the distance between Romania and Ukraine. The situation is tense along the lower Danube where Romanians live a mere 200 meters across the river from the Ukrainian ports of Reni and Izmail.

Wide flow – The lower Danube in Romania (Credit: Christian Gebhardt)

A Frightening Reminder – On The Doorstep
Recent Russian attacks on grain hubs at each of those ports is making Ukraine seem much closer to Romania than the usual perception allows. The river is not so much a barrier anymore, as it is a connection. Russia’s attacks are too close for Romania’s comfort. The gap between Ukraine and Romania on the Danube is being closed. The effects of explosions are felt far beyond their point of detonation. War does not need a bridge to cross the Danube. There is nothing other than a guidance system separating missiles and drones from Ukrainian and Romanian territory. The latest attacks could be an ominous portent of what is to come. Looked at another way, it is a reminder that the war has already arrived on the doorstep of Romania. The longer the war goes on, the more likely that Romanian territory will become collateral damage. In one case it already has.

Click here for: Digging Up Bones – Evidence of Conflicts Past & Present In Ukraine (Russian Invasion of Ukraine #44)