Trans Siberian Part 13 - Driving home for Christmas

Germany

It was very late when we arrived in Travemunde, and I still had miles to go before I slept.  It was warm though, and I found myself only wearing a single layer on my legs for the first time since I'd left.  Also, I was back in my Fedora, my Russian hat proving too warm and thus ill suited to the purpose.  My gloves too were discarded upon arrival in Germany, and these changes I welcomed.  Nice to throw off some of my wintery bulk.

I was asked by the old lady to check if her taxi was on its way, she advised I ask for one myself but the only man in the large stark office complex advised me to instead catch the bus for €3.  I heartily concurred, laughed falsely and headed back outside.  As I helped the old lady with her oddly shaped bags the bus arrived, I waved and raced over in the grey.

Boarding with me were a pair of twins.  They were in their 50s, mustachioed and balding, these identical men were wearing the same shoes and the same grey rain jackets,  both also held identical plastic shopping bags.  They huddled together as though connected.

The bus trundled through a security gate into a concrete no mans land, then through another gate.  The twins got off, elbow to elbow.  According to my map there was a station nearby so I hopped off too.  Here was a streetlight less strip of concrete with a bus stop.  Unbounded Tarmac and a sodden strip of grass stretched towards a wire fence and the industrial debris of the port beyond.  Across from the bus stop was a darkened warehouse.  The bus trundled off into the dark.  The grey twins huddled at the bus stop.

On a rise behind them sat the tram station, shining starkly in the gloom.  Floating in the air.  Access was via a concrete underpass.  So I headed over.

The bus stop in the gloom

 There was nothing and noone.  Empty.  I hung about for a bit.  Looked at the information notices.  Puzzled over the German.  Bought a ticket.  Nothing.  No train.  No indication of a train.  10 minutes passed;  I gathered from a map that the bus had gone in the opposite direction to the one I needed to head in - that is, towards the train station.  The plan, you see, was to stay in Hamburg that night.  I'd even booked a bed.

I headed back to the bus stop.  The twins were gone.  And so I sat.  In the dark.  Quite unworried, content that I'd find a way out of it.  But still annoyed I'd gone in the wrong direction.  Annoyed that I had to hang around in this no place German industrial estate.

Waiting.  Thats my bag there.  And thats my view back the way I'd come and needed to go.

20 minutes waiting for the bus. About a minute before it finally arrived, a train came along, back up at the platform, suspended in the sky.  It too was going in the wrong direction.  There didn't seem to be any other tracks.  Maybe it reversed?

But I was on a bus anyway.  Off through Lubeck to its train station.  Its bahnhoff.  An unknown town passing in the dark.

The ATM at the station would only give 50s, the ticket machine would only take 20s.  I had 7 minutes til the last train. Drunks wandered free, a large percentage of them wearing inflatable viking hats.  As such, access to the only place where I could break my 50 - McDonalds, was blocked by a large rowdy queue.   There was only one server.

I had 4 minutes to my train.  I tried a different ticket machine.  Same problem.  Desperately hurrying around the station, bag trundling behind me.  2 minutes.  In a distant corner of the brightly lit station: another ATM, tried it, 20! Got my ticket.  Just in time.
Quite stressful.

Modern , swanky grey train.  Two stories.  Drunk teenager diving about, hanging off the ceiling rails, Hooting at each other, the same in any language.  But I was not in the mood.  I rushed on to Hamburg.

The hostel was quite close to the station, only a ten minute trundle.  It was big and funky, a converted warehouse.  All the desk jockeys funky and cool.  Cool and hip.  Cool and hip and with it.  Except my dorm mate.  A large room, its wooden floor divided up with low lying white mattresses.  No bunks here.  Space did not seem to be at a premium.  My dorm mate was a bald old man.  As I said, not exactly 'with it'.  He slept three mattresses over.  He was gone when I woke.

I feasted heartily on the €7 breakfast buffet, and headed off out into the city.  I stopped off in the Bahnhoff to check in my bag, the continued on through the station, towards the centre of town.

Christmas Hoover Ville

A lovely city, in the throws of Christmas.  Little wooden villages fill the squares, selling mulled wine, sausages, and expensive festive trinkets.  Above, wondrous steeples, light and heavy at the same time, fancifully tall, capping old Germanic buildings, sprinkled amid the modern steel glass and concrete.

Wintery Christmasy Hamburg

Hamburg, of course, is a city of canals, locks and canals; still very much in use.  Barges wandering through the city, to and from the low countries.  One section of the city is all high red brick industrial, wrought iron bridges treading through, most of the bridges with two levels with spiral staircases linking them.  All very pretty in an industrial revolution sort of way. Old Hamburg.  Cleaned up Industrial Revolution.

Old Hamburg

But I soon grew tired of all the wandering and waiting.  Sat in a lot of coffee shops.  Reading and watching the people wander by.  Mostly I felt like a lost soul, watching, looking in as this affluent race rushes about in its western holiday frenzy.  Christmas Christmas Christmas.  Passing through a thousand Christmases as I go.

Feeling a little bit lost

Later, after the sun had gone down, I found myself in one of those Christmas fairs.  Swept up by the babble of conversation and the glow of the fairy lights.  Sipping 'eine Gluewein mit Ameretto' (mulled wine)  Sitting back and burning some time.  Feeling briefly more a part of the places Christmas spirit.  But in truth I was just waiting to leave.  To continue on towards home and family.  My own personal Christmas.  I was quite tired.  Had I somewhere to stay in Hamburg perhaps I would have been able to focus my brain, try see more of the city, visit some museums, something.  Instead I felt listless and weary.  Impatient.

Christmas Glow

The station in Hamburg is a buzzing space.  The huge overhanging arch of the roof is typical of anything you might see in London or Paris, but here shops and restaurants are not relegated merely to one end of the station complex, instead they thread through the central point, clustered on bridges and balconies that overhang the departing trains.  As a result the place felt lively, colourful, energetic.  Like a hive buzzing.

Hamburg Bahnhoff

  However, the time square like buzz of the place did not lend itself towards ease of use.  Point of fact: it is a very confusing place.  So much so that an unpleasant knot of stress had formed in my chest before I was safely aboard a sleeper to Paris.  It was some time before I realised that the entirety of the train I needed to catch was not bound for Paris, in fact some it was headed for Zurich, most of it, as it turned out.   As such my train was listed as Zurich bound on all the station departure boards.  Also, unlike the Trans Siberian, the train only appeared on its platform mere moments before its departure, as such it felt like an awful risk to wait upon the Zurich platform for my Paris bound train.  To make matters worse, the train due before mine was the 18:48 train to Bremen, this train was quite late, and so "18:48" dominated the notice boards swinging above the platform, that I was reasonably sure I needed to be on for my 19:14 departure, right up until about 19:10 when the Bremen train finally arrived.  As such I was quite unsure whether I had read the augers correctly until pretty much the last moment.

Luckily I had. I was soon aboard the rickety and confusing night train to Paris.  I needed help figuring out where my cabin was as the ticket I simply could not decipher.  Once found I realised that this was no Trans Siberian Kupe.  The little space contained 6 beds, 3 on either side.  The access ladder, opposite the door, was not bolted onto anything, instead it simply hung.  As such it came off in my hands during a few of my nightly dismounts.

I did not sleep well.  It all felt so flimsy. It was breezy, clickity clackity, cramped, and not very comfortable.  The lady across from me (I was in a middle bunk) had left her reading light on, and what a reading light it was!  Like a spotlight, shining directly across at me through the night until I summoned the gumption to lean precariously over the sleeping face of the young French woman and flick it off.

Still not much sleep though.  A narrow breeze snuck in from neath the window to whistle round my ears; and whatever folding and bolting the lot in the carriage next door were up to sounded like it was being folded and bolted within the confines of my weary head.

But still, groaning aside, we were indeed in Paris by morning.

France

When I wrote about Rome way way back many centuries of words ago I mentioned how my first ever traveling adventure saw me race back from Rome alone.  Here in Paris I picked up my old scent.  From here to home things were more familiar to me.

Although its fair to say I'd packed in a bit more of the world between Rome and Paris then I had that last time 10 years prior.

"Paris remains the same.  Beautiful Boulevards with cheap looking shops unworthy of the monumental beauty.  Fake nails, fake rolexes, and dodgy phones, all for sale on these beautiful marble streets.  The old world charm made vaguely threatening by the dodgy modernity of it all.  At least in the area around the station anyway.  That end of Gare L'est does not seem to be the nicest of neighborhoods.  Monumental central Paris.  I've never seen the suburbs of Paris.  I imagine they look like those of any other city, fast ugly buildings in glass and concrete."

I traveled to Saint Lazare to purchase onwards tickets and leave my luggage somewhere.  The lack of proper baggage sized gates leading to the Metro at Gare du Nord, led to some confusion.  I had to hoist my luggage on to my shoulder; said confusion resulted in the loss of my ticket, as I failed to notice it popping out of the machine as I struggled past.  However, when I did get to my destination, a graceful old French lady noticed my plight and handed over another ticket in a true moment of festive charity.  I was overwhelmed.  Bowing and stuttering out my mercis and Bonne Noelles.


I bought a ticket to Cherbourg for that evening but was surprised to learn Saint Lazare possessed no Left Luggage facilities, I had no option but to trundle back the way I came and use the facilities at Gare Du Nord. Here I finally found left luggage behind a wire fence and x ray machines, €7.50 to leave my bag for any length of time.  Extortionate.  The machine I coughed up this king's ransom too, to further the indignity, issued me with a flimsy piece of tissue paper masquerading as a ticket.  The mere hint of moisture would probably see the thing fade away.

But at least I was now unencumbered.

Notre Dame

It had been some years since I'd been in Paris, and so I wished to reacquaint myself with some of the more well known sights, see what change in perception the dint of experience might awaken.  I decided to walk all the way to Ilse de la citie, which was further away then I expected.  Paris did not seem as exuberant as Hamburg had, but the French have never been that enthused about Christmas, at least in comparison with their German neighbors.

Paris

 By the time I had reached the Seine my spirits had once again dropped, but crossing over lifted them considerably.  What a lovely way to spend a Friday in December, wandering about the grounds of Notre Dame, strolling along the embankment.  I popped into Shakespeare and son as I went. (A first).

"The Nourishing dreamscape of old books held me like a musty old soul mate.  I sat a bit and picked books at random to read. - one, an English lady's diary written while staying in Amsterdam in 1900 held me for half a chapter - another, an American politician recalling " the day the Negroes went insane" disgusted me in the space of a page.

I wished I'd had more time to stop there, or more of a mind to, I'm all over the place today."

I planned to walk all the way to the Eiffel tower, so started off along one of the banks of the Seine.  It was a lovely walk, but I was weary by the time I reached the Louvre.

By the river

View from the banks

Parisian Promenade

I think we all hold Paris somewhere in our hearts.  Or at least we'd like too.  The myth of the place.  We all want to be part of that lost generation, an artist wandering the Boulevards of the city of Love, finding art in its cobblestones.  We all want Paris to seem like a homecoming.  But its not.  At least not for me.  Not this time anyway.  Maybe it was because I was tired, but it all seemed more alien then I ever thought it would.  And of course the old place still carried all those associations it always has, and always will, that have afflicted so many generations of romantics.  Associations formed both from the myth of the place and from things more specific and personal.

The way back

 I wanted to stay and explore; at least part of me did.   The rest of me was weary from crossing the planet in too short a time.  Paris could wait.  So, I turned my course Northwards once more, collected my bags and back to Saint Lazare I went.

Here I found, that in France, booking a place on the train and booking a PLACE on the train were two entirely different things.  And so it was that I spent the journey to Cherbourg sitting in a baggage rack.

It was dark as we sped through the hallowed ground of Normandy, famous place names sped by in the black.  Yet again,  I arrived in a bit of a panic.  Once more fearing I'd be too late for one more vital connection.  Outside the station was sheer panic, cars slid about all over the place, up onto the pavement, going the wrong way, pedestrians ran about in the streetlamp lit semi darkness.

Back in 2002 I had made my way to the ferry port with only my wits and the map outside the train station.  Now in 2012, by the time I finally made it into the ferry terminal, some miles away, through urban sprawl and industrial estate, I had new found respect for my younger self.  I'm not really sure how he did it.

Inside the terminal, which hadn't changed, a brace of truckers were wishing the bar staff a merry Christmas with a "Wahay!" and a "Woah!" and "Aha!" in a very Irish way.

There were 3 foot passengers, One was a  drunk Irish man in his 60s, laughing and joking with every breath.  Wisps of white hair congealing into nothing very substantial barely covered his head.  A green kit bag was slung over his shoulder.  He was a merry old salt, like a sailor from stories.  The other, apart from myself, was a lad about my age, he was from Bristol, had a Ph.D in Physics and had just started as an oceanographer in Brittany.  He was on his way to Kilkee to spend Christmas with his family.  He would become my companion once we were aboard - which proved difficult at first as the bus to the ferry could only fit half of its bulk on board, when we jumped off, the back wheels were still in France.

The showband

It was a strange old boat.  Marble floors and leather sofas in the passengers lounge; at first we thought the soft drink only bar in this room was the only one on the boat.  We were wrong about that.  It seemed to be a converted freighter, not really designed with passengers in mind.  Raw and quite fast.  I liked it.  Me and the Oceanographer got talking, and once again I found I had a solid and entertaining traveling companion.  We soon realised there was another bar next door with its own showband, a husband and wife team, in their 60s maybe, singing Christmas songs and Abba.  We drank late into the night, laughing at the band and exchanging tales of travel.  I slept on one of the sofas.

I Don't think I've ever been on a boat that rocked so much.  Bloody thing threw one into the air whenever one tried to make ones way anywhere.

Luxury accomadation

"Day 19 Saturday the 22nd of October 2012 8.15 (GMT) The Celtic Horizon. 

The Irish Sea

Well, if there be any doubt which island this here ferry be steering towards, the weather outside puts paid to it.

First rain I've seen this month on a rocky blustery sea, a close fuzzy blue horizon, grey blue fog to be seen around."

The Final Day

 So the adventure was winding up.  I wandered the ship, took in the wonderful air.  Talked to my new friend.  Met a middle aged Irish woman out on the Port side, watching the sea, talked about life, jobs, adventure and travel.  The storm had delayed us, so it was late when we finally made it to Rosslare.

As can happen on a ferry, the destination sort of snuck up, suddenly there was the red lighthouse of Rosslare, and there we were, already inside the port.

First sight of Ireland

Theres not much more to tell.  My sister picked me up in the port, we gave my new friend a lift to Waterford and then we drove home for Christmas where I slept quite well.  And ate a lot.

It had taken 19 days to cross the distance from Beijing to Cork, and thats including Rome, so 18 days really.  Which is unbelievable.  If I did it again, I'd be sure to take in Mongolia, and to take more time over it.  So much was missed as I raced past.

But still, it was better then I thought it ever could be.

Its March now, as I write this, almost April, and its business as usual.  Life has done its thing, filled up the time that has stretched its way between Siberia and the man I am in this moment.  I've quit my job, said good bye to friends, found and lost hope numerous times, slept and woke, cried and laughed, but never in any way that seemed as important as it did when I was on the rails.

The thing about travel, is that its difficult to know the effect it has had. The question: "How is this current Jeremiah different from the one who set out" sounds quite pretentious, but still, for me at least it is an important question, for why else do we travel? If not to find something.  Why else do we search if not to discover something new.  To change ourselves into something 'better'.  All that time we devote to terrifying ourselves and amazing ourselves, and throwing ourselves to the vagaries of fate must have some sort of net worth surely?

Maybe I have changed.  I hope so.  But I certainly can't tell from my own insular perspective, and life as always is business as usual.   The future beckons etc etc etc

However, writing this has indeed been somewhat therapeutic.  It seems realer now.  Though still fantastic.  If anyone managed to make it to the end, well done! I hope its proven somewhat entertaining.

The blog will continue, with what? I do not know.

I;ll see you in the future!