All Of Monday’s Reasons - 29
29. Hungry In Yugoslavia
Map
An hour or so into the journey a uniformed guard stepped into our compartment and asked for our passports. He leafed through them individually matching up the photographs with the bearers, stamped them, and handed them back.
He strained a “thunk yo” as he handed back the British passports. I turned to the page he had stamped. The stamp was a rectangle with the name of the Yugoslavian border town, Gevgelija, printed above the date. Below that was a cartoon silouette of a black steam train puffing a trail of vapour behind it. John noticed this at the same time.
“Oh wow. How creative,” he said, almost pondering.
The stamp was unofficial in appearance and looked ridiculous next to the Turkish symbols of excessive bureaucracy, whose entry stamp filled an entire page. The Yugoslavian choo-choo required a modest inch in length of the opposite, previously blank page.
I asked John if he had ever been to Yugoslavia before. He said he hadn’t. He had hitch-hiked around Europe for a month and a half when he was seventeen and went on a train trip for a month the previous year.
I thought of buying some food in Belgrade, but I didn’t want to change any money into Yugoslavian dinars. My travellers’ cheques were in twenty pound denominations, meaning that if I changed any, I had to change a lot.
Yugoslavia was a centralised economy which was suffering the effects of over-borrowing from the West in the Seventies. In mid-1970, the exchange rate against the dollar was 13 dinars. By early 1990 that figure had risen to 1,000,000,000. In February the government made the dinar convertible into
more western currencies and announced the elimination of the last four zeros from the Yugoslavian banknote in an effort to stall inflation. The rate, therefore, dropped to 100,000 dinars to the dollar.
Although the dinar in 1990 could be bought with a variety of western currencies, it was technically illegal to leave the country with more than 10,000D, which with the inflation rate at 2,600% was ten cents. It would have been difficult to change dinars outside Yugoslavia and the selling rate within the country would be criminal.
A man came through the train offering to sell his dinars. He got on at a small stop in the republic of Macedonia, just before the city of Skopje. Dressed in plain clothes, he carried a soft leather briefcase.
“Dollars, deutchmark, francs francais, sterling,” he called as he walked slowly through the carriage. He told me took travellers cheques but he was charging half the official rate.
“Are you going to change any?” asked Claus, who had reappeared from the corridor.
“Forget it. Not for what he’s offering.”
I was getting hungry and Claus probably was too. Even if I had accepted the rate, I could not be sure of when we would get to Belgrade, or if the train would stop long enough for me to buy some food, or if I would find anywhere that sold food, or if it would even be open when I did. I also knew nothing about Yugoslavian prices. If the food was cheap and I had twenty pounds to spend, I would have to buy more food than I could carry and lug it around cramped spaces. It was not worth it.
I felt ashamed at dreading the prospect of waiting twenty hours for my next meal, but hunger was getting to me, as I had not eaten since dinner in Thessaloniki, the night before.
Claus looked at me for a solution.
“Looks like breakfast in Vienna,” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled with one side of his mouth as if to say “I guess so”.
All the tourists on the train were consulting each other in an effort to establish the official exchange rate, which was set by the government. John and I talked about the Yugoslavian economy and wondered that if it
weren’t for tourism, would the country would fold. The irony of this was that I was trying to spend nothing. He said he met a Yugoslavian in Czechoslovakia who said that the only job in his country with any future at all was printing money.
Every fifty miles or so, we would pass what resembled little more than a bus shelter alongside the tracks. At each of these stood a man in his thirties or forties who would wave the train on as it passed. We rolled by one when John said, “These huts have a little man in a railway company uniform posted there probably all day. All they seem to do is give the driver a thumbs-up for the next fifty miles. And they wonder why the economy’s in ruins.”
I laughed and said, “It’s a beautiful country, though. Scenically.”
It was. Three quarters of Yugoslavia is covered by mountains and one third by forests, sometime both. Rarely throughout the journey up the length of the country did the tracks not run alongside a river. We started along the Vardar
in Macedonia and the tracks divided with the river where we rode alongside the Morava into Serbia. There we joined the Danube, or Dunav, to Belgrade, then the Sava through the republics of Croatia and Slovenia.
The weather in most places was a perfect seventy eight degrees. The scenery and the company were what made the trip bearable.
The Yugoslavians had built a magnificent railway only to run a squalid train on it, with little consideration for the passengers. Most of the Jugoslovenske Zeleznica carriages were old German cars sold off cheaply more years ago than JZ would care to remember. The corridors hold as many passengers as the compartments and a walk to the toilets was more like a clamber, with people sprawled in every space available.
The train was painfully slow. About every three hours, the train would stop for no apparent reason at a small station for about an hour. Why it stopped I didn’t know, but I suppose they were cooling down the engine.
The 1,400 kilometre journey took thirty-three hours and we arrived in Vienna seven hours late, fourty hours since my last mouthful of food.
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March 1st, 2007 at 9:27 am
Kill CLaus.