I’ve had my first pang of homesickness tonight. After the hot and very much delayed, but still very agreeable train ride from Budapest, I bid farewell to Mollie, Kate, Alexander and Josefine on the Zagreb train station and ventured out into the Zagreb night. The directions to the hostel I had booked were a little bit unclear and standing there on a street corner, trying to piece together the directions with the city map and the address of the hostel, I realized that right here, right now, I would so much want a travel companion. It’s easy to make friends when you backpack, but train friends and hostel acquaintances are rarely the kinds of people who’ll share your lostness with you on your first night in a new city.
I remember arriving in Trinidad after that terrible, terrible bus ride through the Bolivian Amazon, digging out the bus from the mud, carrying little children through puddles as big as ponds. We arrived in Trinidad two whole days after we were supposed to, and were all completely covered in mud from head to toe. As were all our belongings. We were exhausted. The first hotels and hostels we tried denied us right at the door, looking horrified at our dirty faces. Finally we found a place without running water and a moldy smell in the rooms that took us in. We cleaned ourselves of from water buckets and then Natalia and I crawled onto the queen-sized bed in one of the non-air conditioned rooms and just collapsed.
It was a terrible experience to go through, but I went through it with Natalia, Cecilia and Jonna. They were there, to sing songs with and drink bad rum with and being denied entrance at hostel doors with and then, finally, to share a bed with.
And here I was, sweaty but otherwise clean, fed and rested in nighttime Zagreb, without any kind of person to share it with, and somehow this felt so much worse than that trip to Trinidad.
Meeting those two Austalian friends and that Danish couple made me realize that I’m really doing this by myself, and that that might not be all good.
I did find the hostel. It wasn’t even that complicated, after all. And when I logged onto Facebook, I had received a message from Kirke saying that she now has booked herself a ticket to Belgrade on the same day as Hanna. Which means that in only five days, I’ll spend four days with Hanna and Kirke in a borrowed apartment in Belgrade. That made me so happy – but at the same time it gave me a pang of melancholy. What am I doing here, by myself, when I should be somewhere else, with people I love?
In an attempt to suppress this feeling, I started listening to the season finale of the Swedish Radio morning show Morgonpasset. There are few things that feel more like home, than the voices of Hanna Hellquist, Martina Thun and Kodjo Akolor talking about a whole bunch of sillinesses. And, if I sleep on this, I’ll hopefully feel better in the morning.
Katja Malmborg 