You know those times that something happens and you actually believe, just for half a second, that you’re either dreaming or are part of some hideous Punk’d-style reality show?
Well, I was in just such a predicament on a long journey from Belgrade in Serbia to Timisoara, Romania.
The journey started with a clapped-out old bus in lieu of a train (apparently there was some issue with the train lines in Serbia at the time and so the bus would have to take us to the Serbian border, where we would then transfer to a more efficient mode of transport). As soon as I saw the rickety excuse for a bus parked outside the train station, my heart sank. After a terrible bus journey earlier in the year to Sarajevo, I now constantly break out in a sweat every time I have to take a bus journey longer than an hour. I guess that will teach me for not searching harder for cheap flights and instead opting for the “character building” method of overland travel….
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Anyway, the bus journey was fairly uneventful (read: I was asleep or most of it) and we made it to the train station close to the Serbia/Romania border around dusk. Nothing too unusual there; it was actually turning out to be a pretty smooth transport day, something which never normally happens to us.
We lined up to show our passports to the Serbian border officers (who, by the way, never stamped me out of the country. Is this normal? I was travelling on into the EU, so as a UK passport holder, my passport was never stamped or scanned in the new country. I figure some time around March the Serbian authorities may start looking for me, believing me to still be “at large” in their country!) and I scurried on to the train, only to realise a couple of minutes later that Scott was no longer behind me. Was there a problem with his passport? Were they questioning him? I grabbed us both seats on the train and looked out of the doors, where I could see that two of the officers had asked both him and another man to open their bags. What they were looking for, I had no idea. As his bag was only full of stinky clothes (hey, we’ve been travelling for nearly nine months, ok?), the officers waved Scott on his way and the train set off to the Romanian border.
Not long into the journey, I heard a loud, crinkling noise, much like when you are over-zealous with the sellotape when wrapping presents at Christmas.
It sounded like someone was wrapping a bag up in plastic tape. I thought nothing of it, but after it continued for another ten minutes, I pointed it out to Scott, who proceeded to tell me that he’d seen some women “taping up their legs, under their trousers”. Now it had started to get interesting.
We spotted the aforementioned women sitting not far from us, at the back of the train, looking very shifty indeed. They kept furtively glancing down the train at the conductor and whispering to each other, all the while still doing something unusual with a large roll of sticky tape. At this point, my mind was running wild.
Then I saw it. A huge stack of cigarette cartons, which they had apparently stuck to their legs before they boarded the train (in a ridiculous attempt to fool the border officers, no doubt) and which they were now wrapping up into large oblong shapes.
Even though it was now dawning on us that these women were illegally trying to smuggle a large quantity of cigarettes into another country, we still couldn’t figure out how they would get away with it at the other end. Surely the border patrol would stop them in Romania?
Apparently not.
Just as we crossed the border into Romania, the women (who, I should have mentioned previously, were an unlikely group of overweight middle-aged Mum types) suddenly flung open one of the train windows and threw their huge packages of cigarettes off the train and into a grassy verge.
Not long after, we pulled up at the border crossing station. The women scuttled off and started running down the tracks, before the patrol officers had even reached the vehicle.
It was one of the most surreal things I have ever witnessed. Particularly from a bunch of the most unlikely-looking smugglers you’ve ever seen. But it also made me more excited about visiting Romania and the crazy characters we could encounter there.
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We spent the night in a pretty city called Timisoara, not too far from the border, which was where the Romanian Revolution began in 1989. I wish I could say that we got to explore the place properly, but we were there for only a few hours overnight, during which time we managed to eat some terrible pizza and drink some delicious Romanian wine.
The whole crazy train episode was the start of our exciting adventures in Romania, and although I was already missing Belgrade, I had a feeling it was going to be a fun couple of weeks.
Photo credit: Timisoara
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