Life, with the garden
Location: Zagreb, Croatia • • • Visit: July 2013
On the train from Budapest to Zagreb, I shared a compartment with Kate and Mollie from Australia and Josefine and Alexander from Denmark. It was an old train, it stopped a lot, and Josefine and Alexander, who had traveled by train in the Balkans before, told us that the train wouldn’t be on time. No way. It never was.
I didn’t mind that much, though. The train was super-hot, but as long as it moved a little bit, the breeze that came in through the open windows was soft and fragrant and just really nice.
Conversation never ended in the compartment, we talked about everything from our studies to the European Union, the Australian water shortage, and how strangely popular the Eurovision Song contest was in Australia. Outside the windows, the fields of sunflowers, corn and grains gradually changed into deciduous forests. The air smelled of sundried earth and summer afternoon. I had a plastic bag full of the sweetest apricots I had ever tasted. I was content. Life was good.
But then, later, arriving in Zagreb at night: I had my first pang of homesickness. 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 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 have wanted a travel companion. It’s easy to make friends when you backpack, but train friends and hostel acquaintances are rarely the kind of people who’ll share your lostness 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 we 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 to get accommodation in 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 who were willing to take us in. We cleaned ourselves in the water buckets and then Natalia and I crawled onto the queen-sized bed in one of the non-air conditioned rooms and just collapsed into oblivion.
It was a terrible experience to go through, that long, rainy, muddy journey through the Bolivian rainforest, but I went through it with Natalia, Cecilia and Jonna. They were there, to sing songs with and drink cheap rum and share in the experience of being denied entrance at hostel doors and then, finally, to crawl into a bed with.
And here I was, sweaty but otherwise clean, fed and rested in nighttime Zagreb, without a person to share it with, and somehow this felt so much worse than that arrival in Trinidad.
Meeting those two Australian friends and that Danish couple made me realize that I’m doing this on my own, and that that might not only be good.
Eventually, I did find the hostel. It wasn’t even that complicated. 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 a Swedish podcast, three comedians talking about current events and a whole bunch of sillinesses. And, before falling asleep, thinking: if I sleep on this, I’ll hopefully feel better in the morning.
Right next to the railway tracks lies Zagreb Botanical Garden. It is a small garden and not particularly well organized, but it didn’t have an entrance fee. In the afternoon I spent in Zagreb, the air turned clammy by a heavy summer rain, a walk among the water lily pools and ironwood trees was perfect.
Katja Malmborg 