Recently in Europe Category

Lastovo: isolated Adriatic island of jagged hills clad in holm oak and aleppo pine, where the sea laps sunbleached stones with tongue translucent blue. 

Settled by Illyrians and later controlled by Rome, over the centuries it was destroyed by Venice for harboring pirates, joined the Dubrovnik Republic, and passed through the hands of Napoleonic France, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, to finally become a part of independent Croatia. 

Unlike other island settlements, Lastovo Town faces inland. It's stone buildings cling to a natural amphitheater whose basin is fertile with olives and vines. Earlier settlements consolidated on this more defensible site when the people abandoned piracy and turned inward to a life of agricultural self-sufficiency. That same independent spirit is still evident in Lastovo islanders today.

It's a quiet place of lazy heat haze days sipping cappuccino and soaking up village life. Outside a café, an old man in a patched jacket shouts insults at passing youngsters: "Cut your hair Stjepan! You look like a girl!" The other old men chuckle and cough. Stjepan's defense is to talk back in a normal voice as he continues to walk, resisting the urge to look back over his shoulder.

On Lastovo's south side, rocky beaches and barren hills abound with hidden coves - the perfect place for a private swim. I spend my island afternoons plunged in the briny deep, or in sun-soaked sophistry on shore. At sundown, hitchhike back across to my room in Lučica - a narrow inlet of half-abandoned 15th Century stone houses, where we wash down seafood dinners with house wine. And it really is house wine - each house makes their own.

I'm alone in my compartment as the train leaves Slovenia and enters the broad rolling fields of Hungary. The dark blue seat upholstery smells of dust, and the nautical gloss of the walls have faded to matte.

I see "Magyar" go past on a rusted sign, and I'm reminded of a stamp collecting album someone gave me as a child. It was filled with names like "GDR" and "Magyar Republic", names I couldn't find on a map. Names that sounded so strange. Now here it is outside my window. Did I ever imagine I would see such places? Or did I ever doubt that I wouldn't?

Deeper into Hungary, the train to Budapest keeps changing directions. One minute we're traveling forward, and half an hour later we're going backwards. An hour later it will change again. It feels as though we're tacking like a sailboat into the wind, approaching our destination obliquely. Or perhaps they just keep forgetting things and have to go back?

Hungary is a country where the people look just like the etchings on their money. I see that crazy looking guy from the 1000 forint note walk past my compartment again and again. I slip a few notes from my wallet to compare. He's dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket, but otherwise the same.  

There's something about a train that never fails to fuel my writing. I don't know if it's the way a train snakes across vast open land, the metrical clack of the wheels or the grinding of the steel. It's all right there before me in a gently rocking panorama, and all I have to do is take it all in.

The land as it unrolls like a film matches my thoughts, and I roll back through them, peeling away years to connect events into patterns and condense thoughts into notebook words.

I watch the rain bead on the glass and roll down the pale reflection of my face. As I stare through this transparent counterfeit of myself, I realize that I've always lived my life in compartments, with walls of various types and thicknesses, a variety of opacities and stained-glass stains. It began as an antidote to the fatigue that comes with always being the odd one out. But now I contain so many compartments it's become difficult to recognize my core. Which one is truest? Are any of them real? 

I uncovered that core once in Central America, and I managed to free it for a brief period of time. But now it feels like I'm living two types of life: the ideal sort of world that I would like to experience, the one I express in my writing. And the quieter, lonelier life I actually lead in between. 

I begin to wonder if, the more I write and the better I get, if I'm putting the best of myself into my writing, and if what's left over is what's left for my day to day life?

These are the kinds of things I like to think about on trains.

We'll get to North Korea soon, I promise. I'm in London at the moment and wanted to share something with you.

Spent some time searching for the tomb of one of my heroes. He's buried in a marble replica of a Bedouin tent in a little cemetery in Mortlake...

Captain Richard Francis Burton lived a life people today would hardly find believable. He spoke some 29 languages and dialects. One of the most prolific adventurers of all time, he was the first European to enter the Ethiopian city of Harare, was co-discoverer of the source of the Nile, and was one of the few foreigners ever to make the pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise. Burton was also a master of the sword. On one expedition he fought off an attack by Somali tribesman that saw him wounded through the mouth by a spear, the scars of which are visible in all his later photographs.

Burton's writings provide a fascinating glimpse into an age when we still hadn't come to grips with the limits of our known world. They contain a wealth of detailed observations about native peoples, plants, wildlife, minerals, ruins, and the etymology of place names, and yet are seldom dry. His sense of wonder at penetrating the unknown and the freedom of exploration are always present.

Burton was also a man ahead of his time. He translated the Kama Sutra when Victorian morals would rather have seen it repressed. He referred to native peoples as "intelligent and humane" when most regarded non-Europeans as "sub-human". He approached the world on its terms rather than his own. For the serious traveler, all of his works are worth reading.

Stay tuned for more notes from the road...

moonlight echoes through nighttime streets
reverberating off walls of limburger cheese
and the yellow plaster of peeling bandages
over Poseidon blue.

razor wounds
or Time's shaving nicks?

black cats scuttle
through dead-end alleys
like fading dreams they dissolve into cognac fumes
rain dogs howl and the light peels away
as the evening train mourns its passing with a brassy wail
and a clack of ivory teeth on day-old bread.

the ghost of Durrell wafts through on a telltale scent of wine
possessing those he touches
pulling them into his
hedonist
booze-soaked
aphrodisiac
world
with the magic of the grape and the lure of lost inhibitions.

for a while you inhabit the novel
until the reel world intrudes
and pulls you to earth with Icarian finality
plummeting into the day-to-day
with fluttering stomach and limbs of lead
to crashland in mundanity

not with a thud
but with a whimper of remorse.

The Landscape: Stony Adriatic islands scattered along the length of Croatia's coast. Coarse green shrubs and olive trees whose thin leaves flash silver undersides to the breeze. Translucent blue: a breath would cloud that water of glass.

Light has a clarity there that is like no place else, and it provokes a clarity of thought. Priorities and needs slip so easily into place. You realize the hollowness of the rat race, of consumerism, of chasing anything at all. Life is distilled down, and you understand contentment:  a bottle, a gentle breeze, a pretty girl to cuddle. What need for anything else?

Self-contained with car, tent and food, you hop from island to paradise island. Travel by ferry--the shush and ebb/swell of the waves and the salt smelling air--standing on deck gripping a freshly painted rail, watching the islands recede as the coastal mountains near.

Each new island brings a small village or two with winding streets and stone houses, maybe a fortress or an ancient Venetian trading house from the days when that city-state ruled the waves. In each new town or village you pause for bitter coffee softened by a mound of cream, and all-absorbing conversation over a round café table in a sleepy plaza.

Inevitably, you thread your way down rough gravel roads to your own deserted stretch of shore, where you peel off sweaty clothes to slip naked into the silken waters. You dive deep, past the thermocline, into the grip of the cold. Then, surfacing, float on your back with eyes closed, gently rocked by Amphitrite's currents. The rest of the world sinks down through your back to melt away, lost in the briny deep.

On the stony shore the sun dries salt to a thin powdery crust on browned skin. Under the olive trees you eat a rustic lunch of bread, hard cheese, and coarse local wine drunk straight from the bottle. Your backdrop is the bleached bony spine of the mainland that towers over the islands and the sea, and in the distance the slow clonk of sheep bells.

The poet Derek Walcott wrote that islands can only exist if we have loved in them.

Islands symbolize isolation, remoteness, and sometimes even shipwreck--the forlorn seclusion of the castaway. We sit and gaze out at the sea that surrounds us, but it is ourselves that we are looking into.
 
How remote the past seems. Island life is insular, detached, inward looking. It's closed off, like the blinders of first love, when nothing exists except the two of you within the little round space of that café table. The outside world is helpless to intrude. Perhaps that's why islands symbolize romance better than anyplace else.

Large islands embody the permissiveness and sensuality of islands in general, but they lack the feeling of isolation. Small islands are better. You feel it most acutely at night. Sitting on a tiny sandspit surrounded by the inky void of ocean and sky, you're like Vishnu on a lotus flower, dreaming entire worlds, creating realities because nothing else exists, and nothing can.

Strong syrupy coffee in the cobbled streets of Sarajevo's Turkish quarter. The Muslim call to prayer reverberates through narrow alleyways, the echoes compounding as it bounces back upon itself. Just around the corner is a synagogue and an Orthodox church. East meets West to the metallic tap of tinsmith's tiny hammers.

The centre is rebuilt, but further out bullets and shell bursts have pitted the stone facades. Bombed out buildings stand hollow and abandoned. Staccato jackhammer roar as the city slowly puts itself back together.

Old men in shabby coats and dark berets sip rakija at early morning café tables, starting the day with a long slow burn.