A Rude Awakening

So I've been battling Google for a while now. First, Google Maps didn't have any coverage in Sarajevo. Next, Google Maps lead us on a two-day-long wild goose chase around Athens in search of addresses that were no where near where the application placed them. Now Blogger won't allow me to post text with an embedded map. So my snarky explanation of "The Odyssey" just disappeared into cyberspace. I feel like I've been pulled from my cozy corner of the Matrix into a cold and inhospitable world in which Google is not infallible, efficient, and the embodiment of all that is right, but just another website in need of an update. Oh cruel world!

So, as the previous post was meant to indicate, we were forced to take a circuitous route from Croatia to Greece despite their geographic proximity. There are no direct flights from Croatia or Bosnia to Athens. Apparently for security reasons, there are no trains or buses through Albania (there's a saying in the Balkans: "Come visit Albania, your car is already here!"), Macedonia, or Kosovo. What's more the friction between the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republik of Srpska runs so high you can't travel directly through all of Bosnia, but have to go through Croatia in order to get from one side of the country to the other. Oh and there is no train service in and out of Dubrovnik.


So in order to get from Dubrovnik to Athens we took a five hour bus ride to Sarajevo where we caught an eight hour long overnight train (through Croatia and then Srpska) to Belgrade. There we caught another train for the thirteen hour long trip to Sofia.

Travel time so far: 26 hours. And it seemed a lot longer because we spent the trip from Sarajevo to Belgrade in an ash tray of a compartment with a grumpy old Serbian who chose, instead of sleeping, to explain how all members of the former Yugoslavia are really Serbian and how Bill Clinton ruined his country by "intervening." Awesome.

From Sofia we took a commuter train to Plovdiv, where we arrived just in time to find a hotel with cable tv and catch the election results live. After a few more days in Bulgaria we caught one more overnight train from Sofia to Athens via Thessaloníki.

So total travel time from Dubrovnik to Athens excluding the detour to Plovdiv: 38 hours!

In the end our time in Bulgaria justified the journey, because there we found some of the strangest sights and best food of the trip.

xoxo Jessie