No, this is not going to be a piece about how sorry I was to be heading for Hungary. I was actually rather pleased… Not that I regretted visiting the Balkans, which I had found always interesting and sometimes beautiful, but I was ready to rest up a bit.
Ottoman era house museum in Sarajevo
This would be the second time I had arrived in Hungary by train, the first being an unfortunate journey from from Zagreb to Budapest back in 2004. The fast train I had expected morphed into a slow train that stopped at every station. The old-style carriages with non-AC compartments, a hot day, and the hours we spent traversing the southern shore of Lake Balaton, a blue vision of coolness out the window, added up to misery.
My go-to site for all things train is seat61.com, and Mark Smith had nothing much to say about the Sarajevo-Budapest Intercity I would take to Pecs. No doubt all would have been well, except that that the railway workers in the Republika Srpska had gone on strike. Where’s that? That’s part of Bosnia. Actually, saying it’s part of Bosnia is shorthand as the country is properly known as Bosnia and Hercegovina, but almost half of it is the semi-autonomous Republika Srpska, the area ethnically cleansed by the Serbs during the war.
Thanks to the strike, my direct train journey involved three trains and one bus. When the train from Sarajevo reached the internal border with Republika Srpska, we got off the train and boarded a bus – only one was needed as there were less than twenty of us. A couple of hours later, at the international border with Croatia, we got off the bus at an isolated station, crossed the tracks and boarded a second train. At this point I figured I was set for the rest of the journey, but no. At the Hungarian border the remaining passengers, less than a dozen at this point, were kicked off the train again.
Turned out we had to wait for the southbound Budapest-Sarajevo train to arrive, and for its passengers to clear immigration, before we able to board the third train of the day. I believe that the people going through to Budapest had to change trains yet again in Pecs, but I was so glad to arrive I didn’t hang around to find out. I was too busy tracking down the (helpful) Tourist Information office.
Central Pecs
