OK so there was one odd memory I had from Belgrade, and it was when our train had just entered the city limits from Novi Sad (a 1.5 hour journey that costs less a ride on the Montreal Métro). Will and I were sitting on either side of the train, absently cracking dumb jokes to each other across the aisle as you tend to do when you’re flushed with the excitement of a new city. But the train pushed ahead a little further, reconnecting with the Danube, and as we stared out the window we both went silent at the same time.

Next to the highway on either side were enormous interconnecting huts made of little more than sheet metal, dirt, and rocks. The huts were all the same. There were clotheslines hung with laundry, oil drums tipped over, garbage everywhere. There weren’t any people around, but the destitution seemed recent and alive somehow. People were living in these hovels, definitely, and all the huts were sort of built together in neat rows to form little streets. Hundreds and hundreds of them. All of this was built right behind large industrial lots filled with machinery and bustle, shockingly close to the action. From the train you could see forklifts and trucks at work right next to these villages. The train slowed down a little, and finally I saw a group of people crowded around something near one of the huts. It was a family of Roma as best I could tell, and the father was holding in his arms a little girl, about ten years old. She seemed to have badly twisted or broken her ankle as it was hanging rather askew from her leg. None of them seemed to know what to do. The father seemed to be quite upset and maybe crying but I couldn’t tell for sure.

I looked up ahead, towards Belgrade, to the lights and condominiums and riverside views, couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This is a major modern city, isn’t it? And this, here, is third-world poverty on its outskirts?

Well, I never worked up the courage to head over there, but I later met a Canadian guy who decided to take nothing in his pockets except bus change and take the bus over there and walk through this ‘Gypsy quarter’. He gave me the following account:

I took nothing except the bus change I needed to get there and back. I told the bus driver where I wanted to get off and he looked at me like I was nuts, and asked me if I was sure. The bus let me off about two blocks from the place. As soon as I turned the corner and saw the first set of shacks, they saw me, and a bunch of kids came running over and started grabbing me, grabbing at my pockets, grabbing everything. I sort of pulled them off me and they let me go. I tried to laugh with them a little but they weren’t friendly. For a little while I was left alone, and I kept walking and looking in the huts. People looked at me and yelled things to their family. Then an enormous herd of people—kids, adults, everything—came running out of two or three huts after me, waving their arms and begging, and this time I started running a little bit. It wasn’t so much scary as very uncomfortable. They kept following me, really bearing down on me. I had to start sprinting. The last of the kids followed me for three blocks before giving up. I ran to the next bus station and luckily my bus was right there and I got the hell out of there.

All this and more, just a city bus ride away from your hotel or guest house.

A question I hear from nearly everybody is, how the heck did you save up enough money to travel for ten months? My salary was decent but little more than that. I have no secret stash of money to cushion my fall. The truth is, I have neither Croesusian wealth nor a particularly Spartan travel style. The only way I can travel for this long is by budgeting carefully, and enduring the incredible stress that goes along with it.

Yes, that’s right, to travel the world you must deal with relentless budgetary stress. There is a constant tension between the desire to see sights, experience things, make the most of your trip, and the conflicting obligation to maximize value, cut corners, make spot decisions with salesmen breathing down your neck, and avoid indulging yourself needlessly. Budget travel is a matter of turning down familiar comforts whenever they appear without compromising your spirits. Every opening of the money purse is preceded by hesitation, and followed either by relief or shame. And your lapses in discipline add up quickly.

For example, right now I am sipping a coffee while sitting in the hostel courtyard. The coffee ıs sucky Nescafe, but cost about one dollar CAD. But as the words I’ll have a coffee left my lips, I began to doubt whether it was the coffee I wanted, or just the familiar comfort of coffee, of sittıng beneath an awning on a breezy day with a coffee which I otherwise had no desire for. I upbraided myself a little. The expense was nearly nothing, but what sort of habits would this fiduciary laxity beget? And furthermore, if I’m to stay on budget, I’ll have to make up for this purchase by saving an equivalent amount somewhere else, won’t I? Oh lord, what am I to do? My bank account will be bone-dry in months at this rate! And so on. This is how the cheapskate mind churns, and for the next nine months, I am wholly of his ilk, the skinflint, the killjoy, subsisting on bread and water and wagging a dirty finger at money-wasters.

I keep a detailed log of every cent that leaves my pocket. This is pretty much required for long-term travel unless you’ve got enough padding in your bank account not to worry about it. Doing this lets you see not only how much you’re spending, but whether you could cut down on some recurring thıngs. There are a lot of ‘Beer’ entries. I haven’t decided what to do about those. More worrisome are the food costs, easily the most frustrating aspect of budget travel. You simply must eat three meals (or really two and a half) a day, and sometimes you’ve got little choice but to absorb the sting of that $12 tourist-trap dinner. Conversely it’s quite rare to find food that is all three of: cheap, good, and convenient, as most of those get spotted by Lonely Planet and up up up goes the price. These are the stresses of the day, of scrounging for food and beds and cheap attractions so that you don’t just spend your time walking around the park all day. Quite a bit different from the stresses of meetings and project schedules, eh?

There is a three-day gap under ‘Belgrade’ in my travel journal from Aug 21 to Aug 24, during which I managed only to make a note about how I enjoyed the Nikola Tesla museum, and how I’d like to find a good Tesla biography. This is because my three days in Belgrade were severely impeded by a combination of extreme heat and wanton drunkenness. Belgrade is not a pretty place, nor is its layout welcoming to visitors. It took us a good hour to find our hostel, fruitlessly circumnavigating the hills surrounding the Kalemegdan complex until finally chancing upon the main pedestrian street, Knez Mihajlova. After unloading our gear, I sat on a park bench and resolved to learn the Cyrillic alphabet properly so that I might be able to make sense of the signage. From that point on, Belgrade began to open itself to me. The first day, I walked the city to the bone, starting with Kalemegdan and on down the Knez Mihajlova, through side streets, museums (incl. the aforementioned Tesla, which featured some wonderful demonstrations of his inventıons such as an enormous Tesla coil that, when activated, lights up the [unconnected] fluorescent bulb in your hand—sadly, the museum made little mention of his many notorious quirks, but I expected that). I took refuge from the heat in the cavernous St. Sava church, the interior of which was under construction, but cool and dark and with many pigeons. Tesla would have loved it.

At night the hostel crowd made their way down to the infamous ‘barge party’, which is a series of no-cover barge nightclubs floating on the Danube. We spent a time listening to some kind of Serbian rap show in which a very large man simply yelled at the crowd while some obnoxiously loud drum ‘n bass music pounded our ears. We went next door to an R&B place where near-nude dancers with leathery tanned skin danced on a tiny circular platform, so dangerously high above the crowd it made you cringe. In any case, the setting was less than ideal, but we had a large entourage and a group of Danish guys providing enough entertainment in the form of pitiful drunken leering at women that we managed to have a good time. We took a taxi home, in a taxi with no seatbelts and with an ancient taxi meter with one of those analog numerical displays where the numbers flip manually, like a clock radio from the 1960s. And it didn’t really work. The cab driver, a heavily tattoed man with a moustache that meant business, took us on an unforgettable death ride through Belgrade’s hills, culminating in his getting pulled over by a cop who demanded to see his credentials. And the numbers on the meter kept on flipping, but fortunately, taxis in Belgrade are so cheap we didn’t much care.

The next day was so incredibly hot we could barely even go outside. I walked to the store and back, no more than three minutes walk, and had to change my shirt when I returned. So we spent the day watching DVDs of some British TV comedy called Peep Show, as well as the movie Back to the Future II, and doing laundry, and all the other mundane things you hate to do when you’re traveling, but don’t have any choice.

The final day, we messed up bad. We discovered at the last minute that our flight to Istanbul was much earlier than we thought it was, so we had to endure yet another death ride from a Serbian taxi driver, who took us on a journey so incredibly dangerous and thrilling that I would almost expect the Serbian ministry of Tourism to consider selling these as a tour package. Our entry to the highway was particularly memorable: the driver passed a car on the (single-lane) on-ramp, weaved recklessly in and out of highway traffıc, drove a good 3 km on the shoulder, and then proclaimed the highway too busy to continue, opting instead to take us to the airport via the backroads. After another fifteen minutes of hairpin turns and nick-of-time passing lane antics, we landed at the terminal and he charged us the modest sum of 1000 dinars, which is probably cheaper than going to a movie, and at least three times as entertaining. And we were off to Turkey.

A good amount of ink has been spilled on the subject of Tourists, a pejorative term meant to denote a sort of reptilian creature that slithers on its tanned belly between approved locations in major cities, excreting money in exchange for the souls of the indigenous population. Much of this literature builds its house on the premise that one who simply snaps photos, wanders aimlessly between monuments he knows nothing about, and returns home utterly unchanged by the experience is a Tourist, while one who reads up on his destinations, experiences other cultures, partakes in sights “off the beaten path”, moves freely among the locals, and returns home profoundly altered, even shaken to the bone by what he has seen, is something else—perhaps a “traveler”, an “explorer”, a “vagabonder”. In other words, a Tourist is someone with no purpose to his travel, and you’d have to be a real sucker to be one of those.

Well, I’m not so sure. For one thing, it’s not quite accurate to say that a Tourist has no “purpose”. It seems to me that the purpose of most travel, Touristy or otherwise, is novelty. Not banal or tacky, simply new. North Americans, for example, don’t get to brush up against ancient history very often. We rarely get to see great sprawling castles and towering statues of war generals atop mighty steeds. So that’s a “purpose”, even if the Travelers say otherwise. It might be that a so-called Traveler has a different conception of novelty, but novelty it is. And the Travelers will visit these sites too, of course, but they’ll learn about them beforehand. Fine.

But what of “experiencing other cultures”? The Travelers love to drop that one. But I haven’t quite figured out what this expression means, if anything. For example, I wrote this journal entry in a bar in Vienna, seated near two older Viennese men with sagging eyes, each chain-smoking, drinking heavily, and staring head-in-hands at the wall in what seems to be outright despair. I doubt many want to “experience” their “culture”. The statues and castles, likewise, represent bygone eras, never to return. Nothing of the present generation indicates that they are fond of building palaces and imperial gardens, especially when that land could be used to build condominiums instead. The romance of foreign cultures tends to disappear after the fiftieth Turkish carpet salesman or extortionary taxi ride. Nightclubs are nightclubs the world around, and they all play more or less the same music.

So, “experiencing other cultures” could be defined any number of ways, such as: dislike of one’s own culture, appreciation for particular quirks of the foreign culture, a lust for their women, an affection for a cultural genre for which that country is prominent (”Warsaw has the best DJs”), delusions about noble savages brought on by reading anthropology textbooks, etc.

The reasons for my trip are still not fully clear to me. Apart from the desire for more autonomy and independence, I cannot frame my motives except in the most hackneyed New Agey spiritual stew whereby my contact with remote places will teach me only of the constancy and immutability of all things, of the essential sameness of all human life, in order that I might appreciate my own circumstances better. Thus far, these feelings have been duly affirmed, but it is not really why I’m here. It might just be that all I want is novelty, like everyone else.

The phrase “Eastern Europe” calls to most Western minds a certain aesthetic to the environs, namely of dilapidated buildings covered in graffiti and bullet holes, ancient cars, beefy men with short brush-cuts, dance music, and muggings. I must admit that this perception is more or less correct, and as we moved from North to South, from the tidy simplicity of Vienna into Hungary and down to Serbia, the landscapes changed with every passing hour. Abandoned buildings multiplied, cars grew older and more Lada-like, the graffiti shifted to the Cyrillic alphabet, and so on. But the people in Eastern Europe show none of this unkemptness. They are remarkably fashionable and even in the small town of Novi Sad, tremendously lively. We arrived on a Sunday night and found the entire downtown core, a stretch of no more than six square blocks of restaurants and bars, completely packed with strutting adolescence, every bar filled to capacity, teenagers walking around licking ice cream cones while their chihuahuas sniffed each other.

We received a royal welcome from two Serbs, Razkol (?) and Sergey, friends of friends of someone in Toronto. They immediately took us out for a traditional Serbian dinner of… meat, piled on top of additional meat, served with bread and yogurt. The dish we tried (”cevapcici”?) is called “spicy hamburger” in English, and a more perfect translation you could not find, for that is exactly what it was. I’ve become intimately familiar with the ubiquitous Kebab these past few weeks. It is difficult to walk three blocks in any Eastern European city without walking past one of those enormous rotating meat logs being sliced into by a man in a hat. But Kebab is something more like ground meat fashioned into a particular shape, spiced heavily, and set atop a bed of lettuce or a pita round. Anyway, it’s delicious, and probably the most cost-efficient meal you can find out here, meaning that I’ve eaten more than a lifetime’s worth of Kebab in fewer than three weeks.

Sergey and Razkol (I’m calling him Razkol because I read Crime and Punishment a few weeks ago, and the name Razkolnikov is still stuck in my head) are software developers who work in the outsourcing business. Specifically, they are the “outsourcees”, as Serbia is starting to become a major destination for that sort of thing. We talked shop for a little while and they expressed all the same gripes about the software industry that I have (and probably every industry): incompetent management, hostile executives, people getting paid to do nothing, etc.

As is the norm in Serbia, talk turned to politics shortly thereafter, where Sergey related the following story about Montenegro (and the famous Montenegrin highlander temperament), which he claimed is true (further research is needed here):

There was discussion in the Parliament of Montenegro about what to do with their newly won independence, and one MP suggested that they ought to declare war on some other country and lose. His rationale was, look at Germany. They lost the war and then became one of the richest countries in Europe. And Japan, look at them. They lost the war, and now they’re wealthy and their country is booming. So why shouldn’t Montenegro do this?

Therefore it was of immediate importance that Montenegro declare war against the United States. They would lose, and shortly after, they would grow to be the biggest, richest, most powerful country in Eastern Europe.

And another Parliamentarian raised his hand, stood up and said that this was a fine idea, and that Montenegro most certainly should declare war against the USA, except that he held one small reservation: “How can you guarantee that we would lose?”

May I introduce you to the thermal baths of Budapest?

After four or five days of nonstop sightseeing, there was no better idea than to grab a pair of shorts for a bathing suit and head up to the Szechenyi Bath for a prolonged soak. The place is a large spa complex that has existed since 1881. No mere tourist trap, the locals bathe here in great numbers, arriving in the morning and slipping in and out of pools and saunas until the early evening.

I can’t remember what all the various rooms are called, but the place consists of a series of pools of varying temperatures, some stirred with Jacuzzi jets, others with large fountains spitting water onto the shoulders of bathers below. The first pool upon entrance is a deep pool of formidable Arctic-cold water that I foolishly underestimated. I jumped out and ran immediately to the adjacent warm bath, which was much more agreeable, and proceeded to spend a good hour in there, staring at the ceiling and the ornate pillars that held it up, thinking of nothing much. Afterward, we walked outside and spent the rest of our time dipping into the assorted outdoor baths, doing a few perfunctory lengths of the Olympic pool, and so on, until my sunburned shoulders decided that it was time to go.

We’ve since moved onto Serbia, with some regret, as I really enjoyed Budapest and would definitely recommend it to anyone. We are now in Novi Sad, two hours north of Belgrade, and I’m writing this in an Internet cafe full of chain-smoking teenagers playing World of Warcraft (a relief from the Hungarian cafes full of people looking shamelessly at porn). It’s growing harder for me to find reliable Internet access, as the hostels tend to have one computer that everyone fights over, and as such it’s been hard to do anything resembling a real post here, but we’ve decided to slow the pace of our travel down a little, and cut out some places. My original travel plans involved trying to make my way all around the Balkans in one shot, skipping only Macedonia and possibly Albania, wandering slowly across Romania and Bulgaria, and taking a conventional beach vacation in Athens or Dubrovnik before heading back up to Munich. But in talking with some people around the hostel and in interpreting my own mood about our trip so far, I’ve decided the best option is to head directly, without stopping/passing Go, to Turkey, and spend as much time there as I’m able. More on this when I get to the next computer.

We have settled nicely into a routine of bus trips, hostel administrivia (I’ve finally memorized my passport number), and grocery-store dining. We—meaning myself and Wil, a friend from university—worked up the energy to take the bus to Vienna after a lazy week in Prague. The Czech Republic has one of the best bus companies I’ve ever seen, the famous Student Agency (not only for students, thankfully). For 300 Kč (about $16 CAD) you get a very comfortable ride from downtown Prague to Vienna (3.5 hours) in a comfortable coach with leather seats, free coffee and tea, newspapers, magazines, and an in-ride movie. Our movie was a strange Czech film about gangsters who operate in nightclubs both to traffick drugs and to compete for the affections of pansexual bar nymphs. After that, we were shown an episode of Friends with Icelandic subtitles (?) (or as the title translates, The One With The Worst Best Man Ever—shown during the title sequence when all the men are standing by an outdoor fountain in tuxedos).

We checked in at the Palace Hostel, a place far from downtown but with a mini-golf course on the premises. Immediately thence, it rained, and rained, and continued to rain intermittently for the entire time we were in Vienna. The city is lovely, but after two weeks in the European capitals, the gorgeous architecture and ancient statues and cobblestone streets begin to blend together, forming a kind of crust over your eyes, even moreso when they are under a deluge of rain day and night. This is Tourist Stuff, and while I am a Tourist, it is hard not to feel that there is a kind of monotony that blankets the big European cities. The feeling is akin to eating a sumptuous steak dinner every night: eventually, you’ll start to crave a burrito. Hence, Hungary!

I should talk a little about this trip and how it came about. First of all, I quit my job to go on this trip, and when I return home I’ll have absolutely nothing left but the shirt on my back. This is how it is, and how it ought to be. For me, traveling around the world is a one-shot deal. Endless travel does not need to become your “lifestyle”, nor do I care for erecting a philosophy around it (though I did enjoy Vagabonding). I do not aim to globetrot perpetually and forever, stopping off at home every three years when my parents call me home for some family function, only to head back out. For most people, travel is leisure, and a life of nothing but leisure soon wears you down. I’m well aware that after a certain length of time I will grow tired of travel, and when that happens, I will come home.

Fortunately, that time is a long way off.

My itinerary is roughly as follows:

• Eastern Europe (Munich) – 2 months
• India (Delhi) – 1 month
• Southeast Asia (Bangkok) – 7 months

The cities in (parentheses) are the destinations given by my Round-The-World ticket, purchased at the lovely Travel Overland agency of Munich (hence the designation of Munich as “Eastern Europe”, which clearly, it is not).

The way the ticket works is, I fly from Montreal to Munich and then two months later there is a flight waiting for me to Delhi, and a month after that, to Bangkok. Then, seven months later, a ticket home. The destinations are fixed but the dates can be changed for a fee, and the ticket is valid for a maximum of one year.

By “Eastern Europe”, I’m referring to some, if not all, of the following places: Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Turkey.

There are certainly others I’d like to see, nor will I necessarily see all of those (I’m already past Slovakia, e.g.).

My travels in India will be restricted to that country, for I don’t have the nerve for Pakistan or Sri Lanka, nor the patience for Bhutan.

In Southeast Asia, I’m hoping to get through: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Phillipines, various Indonesian islands, Hong Kong, and if I have time, parts of China.

Having no fixed itinerary gives great flexibility, but also induces a kind of travel paralysis. For example, last week I was in Prague, and utterly torn between three possible destinations: Krakow, Poland; Bratislava, Slovakia; and, Vienna Austria. Here are some factors complicating the decision:

• Krakow is about 11 hours by train, and the others are 4. Furthermore, it’s another 7 or 8 hours to leave Krakow towards the south (Budapest)
• bus tickets to Bratislava are in short supply, and I’d have to wait a few more days before I could leave. Vienna, I could leave for anytime.
• Vienna is far more expensive than the others.
• exceedingly cute Czech hostel bartender who is interested in travelling to China herself….

A dilemma to drive you to the madhouse! I chose Vienna, but only because a decision had to be made. Which was a mistake, since Prague was good, cheap, and fun, and Vienna was expensive, bland, and… well, fun. Still, I’ve learned a lesson: as long as you are enjoying yourself in some place, and not fretting over the cost, just stay there.

Here is what I wrote in my book after my first half-day in Prague:

Prague smells of vomit and fried chicken. Children everywhere are screaming; the tourist hordes descend on Wenceslas Sq. like a pack of ravenous dogs. We got ripped off at dinner [ed: this was mostly because we misread the prices on the menu, though in hindsight the beer was indeed a ripoff], and wandered the streets to find the lone Deutsch bank ATM; it was broken.

We’ve been here two days since, and things have improved considerably. Prague has many of the comforts I’m used to, and when it doesn’t, things are easy enough to fake. When the cashier rings up my groceries, I don’t understand her words but the register shows the price clearly, and I can mimic conversation with use of “ya” and “no”, more often “no”—I imagine they are giving me smarmy sales pitches for whatever promotion is currently running, e.g., “Do you have an Air Miles card” or “Would you like to Supersize It™ for just 50 Kč more?”; they certainly are not asking me this, of course, which is another reason to love Eastern Europe.

The Czech capital is sort of uniformly pretty, without many striking buildings, and indeed contains a great many tourists in the city centre. But it also has absurdly cheap beer—about 80 cents CAD for a half-litre—and the locals express their approval of the market economy’s effect on beer prices by partaking in cold pivo at all hours of the day. For example, this morning I saw no fewer than three people enjoying a cold pint in the train station at 7:30 AM, for God’s sake. And these were not downtrodden street people, but ordinary folks catching the train to Plzen or Bratislava. Czechs have a great deal of energy; Prague nightlife begins quite late at night, and after a day of sipping the ubiquitous Pilsner Urquell, it amazes me anyone can a) keep his eyes open, and b) stand.

Finally, tonight I am heading out in search of a tankovna, a type of pub that has been given a special license to serve unpasteurized Pilsner Urquell. If I end up with tuberculosis as a result of drinking the stuff, well, there’s only the Czech government to blame.

There is no reason why we in Canada cannot have nice things. I’m talking of the great many nice things they have in Munich, such as clean streets, smiling women, and fat men in absurd, feathered hats. And most of all, a proper and comprehensive train network. The Munich trains are among the best I’ve seen. Their most striking feature is a complete lack of ticket inspectors. I’m told they exist, but I’ve yet to see a single one. My host, S., claims to have had his ticket checked a total of three times in as many years, and he rides daily. The inspectors are content to let the honour system work as intended, backed by the threat of a 40 EUR fine for those who get caught testing their luck. Another way of saying this is, a train pass costs 40 EUR per year, collected at a random time.

At the Deutches Museum, a woman approached me with her two daughters while waiting in the ticket line. She asked me if I wanted to pretend to be the fourth member of her “family”, the daddy, in order to get the “family” rate and save money. It is in this way that I got into the museum for 5 EUR instead of the usual 8.50. Not only are German women friendly, but frugal too. Naturally, I blew the extra 3.50 EUR on a train ticket I didn’t need.

Later that night, S. and I visited the Hofbräuhaus, a Bavarian beer hall and obvious tourist attraction about which I was warned “a local would never set foot there.” Imagine my surprise to find the place filled with people speaking the German language, and a wait staff that understood almost none of the English language. They knew “beer”, “food”, “wine”, “goulash” (which, as it turns out, is the same in German… much like “beer”, come to think of it), and the numbers one to ten. My meal was called something like “Fleischpfinzer”: two large meatballs sitting in a bed of creamy mashed potatoes. Around me on uncleared dishes were enormous ham bones, remnants of braised pig’s knuckles, and shot glasses once containing schnapps. The beer hall was an arrangement of picnic tables around a small stage where a brass band played the traditional drinking music of Bayern. The only song familiar to me was Ein Prosit, I admit, and I gave a heartfelt “Ziggyzoggy ziggyzoggy oi oi oi!” when the time came, proof that I learned something as an undergraduate.

All around, young people mixed freely with old, clanked glasses together, sang songs with the band and at their own tables, got drunk on this Wednesday night. My impression is that Munich is a very regular place, a city not putting on airs of sophistication, or trying to evince a kind of phony metropolitan worldliness. They just like to get drunk and eat boiled pig and sing songs, and it so happens that a lot of people like to visit Munich to do exactly that.