By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong (7 page)

Maybe the nerves were of my own making, though: this was the last port of call I would be familiar with. From here on in there wasn’t a country I’d visited before until we reached Australia.

We were heading for Croatia where less than twenty years ago there’d been a bloody war. I didn’t know what to expect but had some ideas; poverty, smashed buildings, pot-holed roads . . .

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Two and a half hours later the boat docked in a beautiful Mediterranean town where massive yachts were moored alongside traditional fishing boats. I was reminded of the south of France; balmy night air, pavement cafes and the most amazing sunset.

‘So what’s this car we’re getting?’ Russ asked.

‘A Yugo: like a Fiat 127 only not as good.’

We carried our bags towards the car park where we had arranged to meet some guys who had agreed to lend us the car. Yugos aren’t just like Fiats - they
are
Fiats, made under licence. This one was old and apparently nowhere near as good as the original. But it was local - the car of the masses in the days of Tito - and that was what we wanted. I’d heard it called ‘disposable’: drive it once and throw it away, the Bic razor of the automobile world.

‘The transmission is like churning a baseball bat in a barrel of coconuts,’ I said.

Mungo, weighed down under a mountain of camera bags, shot me a look. ‘I hope it’s got a boot.’

‘It’s a two-door hatchback,’ I told him, ‘hardly any room in the back seat and bugger-all boot.’

‘I’ll think positive. Maybe there’s a roof-rack.’

There was, fortunately, and most of the gear fitted on it. Dean and Kristijan were waiting for us. They seemed like a couple of really nice, friendly guys. They showed us the car: it was compact as I knew it would be, but it was in good nick. They helped us pack the gear then invited us to stay with them in the hillside town of Motovun, about eighty kilometres away. We piled into the Yugo and eventually I found first gear. Soon we were bumbling along having a great time, following our hosts into the mountains, some good old-fashioned Croat music on the radio.

I pointed out of the window. ‘Can you believe how clean everything is? Not a trace of litter; it’s so pretty.’

None of us had known what to expect. Neither Russ nor I had been to the Balkans before. Mungo had been to Split briefly with the British army, but he’d not seen much of the country. Tonight we’d stay in the mountains and tomorrow we were heading for Zagreb.

‘To get a bus to somewhere else,’ Russ said. ‘I can’t remember where right now, we’ll think about that tomorrow.’ He laughed. ‘That’s how it’s been, hasn’t it? We can just about think from one day to the next. Any further than that and we get lost.’

He was right; we were covering huge distances and had planned for maybe thirty countries. To think much more than a day ahead at this point was too much to take in. And who wanted to anyway? I loved the spontaneity of this trip. On a bike you have to concentrate on riding a lot of the time. Here I could kick back, and I was finding it much easier to get to know people along the way.

‘Can you believe that fishmonger this morning?’ Mungo piped up from where he was hunched in the back. ‘
Hey, Charles Boorman
: nobody calls you Charles, Charley, do they?’

‘Venetians do,’ I told him.

We stayed in a small house in a hillside town with bumpy cobbled streets. Leaving the main road we crossed a river, the croaking of bullfrogs following us all the way up the hill. We stopped at a local shop selling wine, cheese and grappa, which we imbibed of course; it would’ve been rude not to. Then we ate dinner and had a few beers with Dean and Kristijan, who told us about their country. They said that luckily the war hadn’t really affected this area except in a few places, and that the young people in particular preferred to look forward, not back.

They put the three of us up in one room with only two beds. We stared at the beds for a moment. We were friendly enough, I suppose, for three blokes on the road, but not that friendly.

‘So, Mungo,’ I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘There’s no way Russ and I are sharing . . .’

Mungo scratched his stubble. ‘No worries. You two get your beauty sleep - you need it. Me, I’m pretty enough - I’m happy on the floor.’

 

In the morning we woke to a cloudless sky and the sound of cuckoos in the trees. We were overlooking a lush green valley and I was reminded of Tuscany: sloping hills, clusters of spruce trees and banks of olive groves. Russ came out and paused a moment to take it in.

‘Beautiful, Charley, isn’t it?’

I nodded and yawned. Very beautiful.

We drove six hours on empty roads right through the mountains. We crossed rivers and cut through massive pine forests back into open countryside dotted with old farm buildings and Friesian cattle. The Yugo was superb fun, the gearbox no worse than any other small car and unlike the Citroën the fuel gauge worked properly. Mungo rode up front some of the way, Russ in the back catching flies. We were beginning to think he had narcoleptic tendencies: car, boat, train . . . give him five minutes and he’d fall asleep anywhere.

It was after twelve-thirty by the time we reached Zagreb, which was later than we’d hoped. The bus was leaving for Vukovar at one-thirty but we had to be ready at one o’clock, which didn’t give us any time to look around. We just about had time to cross the tramlines, say goodbye to our hosts and give them back their car. We wrote a quick postcard home and got on the bus; the three of us occupying a couple of rows of seats at the back.

Five hours later we pulled into Vukovar, which was very much the Croatia I remembered from the news. Most of the buildings had holes in them, sections missing as a result of shells or mortars; the stonework riddled with bullet marks. The city had a distinctive feel to it; uneasy, even a little dangerous. In 1991 Vukovar had been surrounded by what was the former Yugoslavian army. There was no Croatian army and two thousand ‘defenders’ took up arms and managed to hold out for eighty-seven days against tanks and mortars, trained soldiers. Ultimately they were massacred; eight hundred people went missing and twenty-two thousand were forced into exile. It was a stark reminder of what had happened after Tito died; how this region had crumbled again into the kind of warfare that had raged for centuries.

It was still beautiful, though, this city set at the confluence of the Vuka and the Danube; the water mirrored like glass. I stood at my hotel room window gazing beyond an inlet to the far bank shrouded by evergreen trees.

 

The following morning we were outside at seven-thirty. It was really warm, as if summer had arrived already. It did the old bones good after ten days on the road. We were heading for Serbia today, but first we were going to speak to a woman who survived the siege of Vukovar by hiding in her basement.

‘You know the river pretty much surrounds the city,’ Russ told me. ‘A bit like the Serbians did in 1991. It’s hard to imagine this city being attacked with tanks.’

I was staring at the hotel doors, the brown metal frames around the glass. ‘See that,’ I said. ‘The door frame is riddled with bullet holes. Even this little hotel; God, nowhere escaped.’

Russ shook his head. ‘The whole city was destroyed. When Tito died the states began to split up again. Croatia wanted independence and with it the piece of land that had been defined by Tito. The Serbs said they could have their independence but they didn’t need all that land. The Serbs wanted access to the coast.’

‘So they rolled the tanks in.’

After breakfast we met up with Natalia, the woman who’d spent three months in her basement. Echoing what Dean and Kristijan had told us, she said that since the conflict ended in 1995 the younger people in Vukovar had moved on. That wasn’t necessarily true of the older generation, though. Some of their Serb oppressors had previously been their neighbours, some had committed atrocities and others held positions of power locally, particularly in the police force.

Natalia pointed out a water tower that we’d seen from our hotel. You can see it from lots of vantage points around Vukovar; it stands as a symbol of Croatian unity. When the Serbs shelled the defenders of the city, the water tower was hit six hundred times, yet still it remained standing. Every building around it was flattened but as if in defiance of the brutality, the tower refused to crumble. The Croatian people refer to 1991 as the ‘Time of Hate’: like a cancer they saw it consume individual people, communities, whole towns. When the fighting was over and Vukovar was overrun, the Serbs dragged two hundred and sixty-one wounded defenders and civilians from the hospital and brought them to an old building that is now a museum. There’s a massive cross outside with lighted candles and smaller crosses draped in rosaries. Four people died from beatings that first night and over the next few days twenty people at a time were loaded onto a trailer and towed by tractor to a farmer’s field. They were shot then dumped in a mass grave, all two hundred and sixty-one of them. The youngest was seventeen and three of them were women.

Natalia told us that so far two hundred had been identified, but seventeen years later the others are still to be named.

In a quiet suburban street across the road from a little petrol station there’s a set of tall yellow gates that mark the site of one of the camps where the Serbs held Croat prisoners. Natalia’s house is just up the road, a little place with pebble-dashed walls and a brown tiled roof. She told us how she and her mother hid in the basement with only raw potatoes to eat. They remained there for three months.

‘It was terrible,’ she told us. ‘We are very afraid: every day soldiers come along the street tossing bombs into the basements.’

Russ was appalled. ‘You mean grenades? They threw grenades into people’s houses?’

She nodded. ‘Every day we thought it would be our house, every day.’ She had been a small child; her father hadn’t fought as a defender but he’d been hauled off to a concentration camp anyway. He was a good man and believed they would survive, but he had no idea whether he would be shot and there was nothing he could do for his wife or daughter. He just had to hope and pray. In the end it was a Serbian neighbour that saved them, plucking them from the basement and taking them to safety.

I’ve always felt very strongly that war achieves nothing but suffering and misery. Listening to Natalia, the full horror of this conflict really hit me hard - perhaps because it happened so recently and most of the people killed were my age. Earlier we had paid our respects in a massive cemetery: it had beautifully paved walkways and sculpted trees, flowers everywhere. The headstones were black marble, and reading them I had realised that most of those who were killed had been born between 1959 and 1966. I was born in 1966: I have a wife, two beautiful children and a great life. These people hadn’t made thirty; some of them not even twenty. There was one entire row where the victims had lost their lives within a few days of each other.

Feeling sombre we left Vukovar, hitching a ride on a maintenance barge to the town of Ilok further down the Danube. We could see the water tower from the deck; an everlasting reminder of Vukovar. At Ilok we’d cross into Serbia.

The crew of the barge were young guys who troll up and down the Croatian side of the river, fixing buoys and maintaining signposts that give vital information to shipping. The shore is thick with trees and part of their job is to clear dead or overgrown wood. Kitted out in hard hat, goggles and ear defenders, I had a go at cutting down some trees but kept jamming the chainsaw. When I did manage to make it work, I almost dropped a tree on Russ and Mungo. The bloke supervising me told me the Danube starts out in the Black Forest and runs all the way to the Black Sea: it’s 1,774 miles long and has been a trade route and a supply line since before Roman times.

Downriver we came to a damaged buoy, the top bashed in by a passing boat. The crew hauled it on board with a crane then replaced the top and stripped the float of barnacles. After that it was repainted: on the Croatian side of the river the buoys are red and on the Serbian side they’re blue.

Docking at Ilok we crossed into Serbia in a taxi. The cabbie spoke good English and was very chatty: he took charge completely, driving us across the bridge that spans the river between the two countries. We didn’t have to do anything: he took our passports to the officials while we stayed in the car then drove us to the town of Backa Palanka and dropped us outside a carpet factory. I was due to drive a delivery van as far as Novi Sad. From Novi Sad we were taking a train, twenty-four hours to Istanbul. It was there we would have to overcome our problem of crossing the Black Sea. It had proved really difficult to get any kind of ship. We’d looked at containers, tankers, oil field tenders . . . but so far we had nothing lined up.

‘It might be a case of being on the spot, instead of trying to organise it from London,’ Russ said. ‘We’ll just have to see. If we can’t get a ship we’ll just have to drive across Turkey.’

We were waiting for the carpet to be loaded into the van. And here it came now, a massive thickened roll propelling its way towards us, end on. Raised slightly from the horizontal, it bounced up and down like a live thing on the prong of some kind of forklift. For a moment we just stared. Then we fell about laughing.

‘Welcome to Serbia,’ I said. ‘Not as big as mine, boys: but it is pretty close.’

5

I See No Ships

About fifteen minutes from Novi Sad a community of displaced gypsies live in a camp known locally as ‘Bangladesh’. Anna and Danka, a couple of girls who work with the people who live there, showed us around.

It’s a miserable place; more like an old, abandoned army barracks than a place to raise a family. The buildings are single storey and built in terraced blocks with a string of concrete alleyways running between them. The walls are a grubby whitewash over concrete, the roofs corrugated iron. As we turned down a dirt road, a rubbish skip greeted us; beyond it rose piles of rubble, broken-down cars and bits of old iron. Even the impoverished highlands of Ethiopia weren’t as derelict as this. The houses didn’t seem to have any doors, most had plastic sheets for windows, and it didn’t look as though there was any electricity. Dishevelled kids were running barefoot through the alleyways. We saw one man riding an ingenious contraption he’d made by welding the back half of a motorbike to a trailer, which carried his wife and daughter.