Off the Rails Written by Hanna Lindon
Photographed by Lusine Stepanian and Matthew Scuby
“Please, just check again,” I asked the Italian clerk
wearily. “I’ve got to get to Prague by tomorrow –
even if I have to sleep in the luggage hold.”
It was two o’clock in the morning and I was standing in
Venice’s train station looking like something out of Chainsaw
Massacre. My hair had formed itself in a beehive to rival Amy
Winehouse, my clothes smelt like a Venetian canal and red backpack
wheels covered my shoulders. Even the drunks having an impromptu
party in the departure lounge were keeping their distance –
so I could understand why the clerk was easily resisting my attempts
to charm a night train pass out of him.
“I’ve got
a ticket for the opera in Prague tomorrow night,” I
pleaded truthfully. “The opera?” he sniffed,
clearly convinced that I was either a deluded liar or tripping
on something hallucinogenic. “Well… we have got
one bunk left on the next train. You would have to share the
compartment with somebody else, though.”
Share? Sharing was just dandy with me – or so I thought
until I opened the door of my compartment and saw the man
spread out naked on my bunk. “Terribly, terribly
sorry,” I stuttered. Being British, my natural response
to any embarrassing situation is to begin apologising. “I
thought that this was… but perhaps I’m bunking
next door?” “No no,” drawled the naked
one in a strong Romanian accent. “It is I who should
apologise. I did not realise that I would be sharing this
compartment with…” he paused for a humiliatingly
long time, “…a girl.”
So there I was – dithering in the doorway of a tiny night
train cabin with two alternative unpleasant futures spread out
before me. Should I spend the night in close proximity to a hairy,
naked, and possibly mad, Romanian man, or should I wait for the
next Prague train and risk missing the opera? During the course
of six months of inter-railing I had faced many dilemmas –
but none, perhaps, quite as unpleasant as this. In the end, the
opera won out. Averting my eyes, I climbed fully-clothed into
my sleeping bag and zipped it up tightly around my neck. What
with the heat, the Romanian’s active sweat glands and the
necessity of wearing my trainers in bed, I could tell that it
was not going to be a comfortable night.
Let me tell you about my embarrassing trainer problem. After
six months of carrying a dirty woman and a three stone backpack
around Europe, those Nikes were really suffering. Matters had
not been made any better by my losing all my socks in a hostel
fire two weeks earlier. Not to put too fine a point on it, the
trainers had got to a point where they had to stay on my feet
or risk gassing everybody within a ten-mile radius – and,
much as I wanted to deter the naked Romanian, I didn’t fancy
actually knocking him out. Fortunately, it looked as though my
cabin partner wasn’t bothered by the strong hint of cheese
seeping through the pores of my sleeping bag. The train had scarcely
eased its way out of Venice station before the peaceful sound
of chug-chug-chugging was broken by a raucous snore. Not even
the passport checks that took place as we passed through every
new border, and in my nightmares I still hear power-crazed custom
officials shrieking ‘passporte!’ in my ear, could
wake him up.
But my naked Romanian is the best example I’ve ever encountered
of a saying that is popular here in England: ‘Don’t
judge a book by its cover’. He may have been slightly smelly,
excessively hairy and rather too bare for my liking, but at heart
he was a diamond.
“So, what are you doing in Prague?” I asked, making
reluctant conversation as he dry-shaved in a small hand mirror
the next morning “Visiting relatives? Travelling?”
“No,” he said. “I’m conducting.”
“Oh – you’re a bus conductor?”
He gave me a look that would have sent a basilisk off with its
tail between its legs. “I am not a bus conductor. I am the
conductor of a national symphony orchestra. Here.” He held
up two pieces of card. “Tickets to my concert the night
after next – I hope you can come.”
Gulp. I spent the rest of the journey disposing of my shrivelled
prejudices and trying not to make crude jokes about his baton.
Hanna Lindon
graduated from Cambridge University in 2006 and is now working
full time as a travel and emigration journalist for Outbound
Media. Her passion for travel has its roots in a gap year
inter-railing experience - since then she has travelled Europe
widely, as well as visited America, South Africa, Australia
and New Zealand. In March she will be embarking on a journey
across Canada and the US by train.
