Memories of my early travels (1968)

Memories of my early travels (1968)

August, 1968 - Ankaran, Yugoslavia - (now Ankaran, Slovenia)

Zak and I had wasted five days trying to get our visa to cross into Italy on our way to France. When we went to the Italian consulate in Koper, little did we know that it would be closed for a few days preceeding and following "Ferragosta", the feast of the Assumption of Virgin Mary on August 15, probably the most popular national holiday in Italy. "Come back on Monday" said the Consulate doorman, "may be there will be someone to help you". Frustrated, we hitch-hiked back to Ankaran where we had been working in a youth hostel for two weeks, being paid in food, lodging and a few dinars of pocket money. We had already told our superiors that we would continue our journey after obtaining the italian visa, and since we had left a good impression, they accepted to host us back till our departure date. They did add though that we would have to pay for our lodging and meals...

 
I had met Zak through common friends in Beirut in June of that year. He was talking of his plans to hitch-hike from Beirut to Stockholm that summer and was looking for a trustworthy companion to travel with. 
Out of curiosity, I started asking him about dates, itinerary and length of his planned journey. Zak was an engineering student at Cairo University while I, having just returned from a lucrative three month job as a computer operator in Abu Dhabi, was unsure about my future plans. Beer helping, towards the end of that chat, Zak had found his "trustworthy travel companion" and I had scrapped all my Beirut summer plans to replace them by an out-of-the-blue hitch-hiking trip across Europe.
 
We arrived in Ankaran on the Adriatic Sea one month after leaving Beirut. At that stage we were around three thousand kilometers away from our starting point. The first  part of our trip was an unforgetable 60-hours ride on a short-of-breath train, painfully zigzaging from Beirut to Istanbul; definitely not the Orient Express, but surely a safer and faster option than hitchiking on Syrian and Turkish roads. The second part was a series of short hich-hikings across western Turkey, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia; sometimes a ten-minute trip from one village to another andoccasionally a full-hour voyage ultimately adding up to the 1500 kilometers separating Istanbul from that youth hostel by the adriatic sea, close to the italian border.

 

Tuesday, August 20, 1968 -  Koper (Capodistria for Italians), Yugoslavia.

It was raining heavily when we came out of the Italian consulate proudly holding our passports with freshly-stamped visas. Having spent the past month in countries we found rather drab, we were looking forward to diving in the exciting, sophisticated Europe we had dreamt to reach. I was mostly keen to be in Paris while Zak wanted to reach Stockholm where he had friends studying there. And though Italy was a forced passage anyway, I was keen to discover it. Contrary to Zak, I related to its popular culture, to its cinema and music and remembered the many photographs of cousins holding pigeons on some piazza. I also assumed I could understand the language since it was close to french, my mother tongue. I was proven wrong on that front... but that's another story.

 

We had been standing across the Italian Consulate for half an hour, drenched and desperate as the few cars passing were simply ignoring our hitchhikers' plea. As we were about to get a bus back to the youth hostel in Ankaran, a Mercedes stopped 100 feet from where we were standing. 

Surprised and unsure whether the driver was stopping to pick us up or whether he had reached his destination, we carried our backpacks and walked towards the car. The driver lowered the window on our side and asked "where you go?". I answered "France". In the ensuing conversation in broken english, we learned that he was returning to Germany where he lives, that he could drop us anywhere we wanted but that he would only take us if we could drive the car. As we looked surprised by his offer, he added that he had been driving non-stop for fifteen hours; he was exhausted and needed to sleep but couldn't interrupt his trip. 

 

I hopped behind the wheel, Zak next to me and the car owner on the back bench. He said he will sleep after we go through the italian customs and asked us to wake him up when we reach Venice. I couldn't help but ask, why must we stop in Venice...we thought you were in a hurry. His answer stunned us: "I promised my mother to bring her a Murano vase on my way back". 

Ten minutes later, we stopped at the italian border checkpoint, showed our visas while the car owner presented his papers and off we went. It didn't take long for the fellow on the back bench to fall asleep, allowing Zak and I to have a private conversation. My companion was quick to tell me that he would be very happy to drive with the car owner to Germany as it would get him closer to Sweden. Since that was not my plan, I simply said that I would get down at the nearest point to the french border and let each of us go his way. This conversation was followed by two hours of silence until I started seeing signs indicating Venice. Zak informed Asil that we were getting close to Venice (we knew his name by then) and he guided us to a large parking lot at the entrance of the city. He then suggested we could have a quick tour while he was shopping for his mother's Murano. Zak wasn't too enthusiastic about visiting Venice and wanted to stay by the car close to our luggage in the trunk. He told me he wasn't too keen "to mix with that hord of tourists getting out of the buses, flooding the parking and heading to the center like cockroaches". 

 

In his flowery language, Zak had expressed my own first impression. After the slow pace of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, this sudden noisy crowd was too hard to face. But beyond the excitement and buzz of the huge parking, beyond the nearby station with trains exiting on a large esplanade where tourists and local passengers, boatmen and water buses swarm, my eyes travelled to a striking backdrop of Renaissance architecture to which I started walking like a robot. I had never seen more beautiful facades, more grace and harmony. Suddenly I became aware of the distance I had travelled in this dazzling state and decided to go back to the car. I agreed with Zak that he could stay by the car while I would go for a quick half-hour tour and that I would be back before Asil would return with his mother's Murano vase.

 

Venice the wonder.

My sensory short tour was enough to convince me that with or without my dear Zak, I wasn't going anywhere before living this city-jewel to the fullest. From alleys to bridges, I was running like a maniac attracted by the mysterious alchemy between urban and marine. Then, running back even faster, I reached the car and told Zak of my decision: "you can continue without me if you wish. I'm staying in Venice a few days...it's just too beautiful". 

Zak was a bit of an artist. When we were still planning the trip in Beirut, he showed me some sketches he had made of sea and mountain views which I felt were of a fine quality. "Germany and Sweden can wait" I told him. "There's plenty of material for you to paint here. And though I saw little of its marvels, I sense that this city is very inspiring". 

I must have struck the right chord because when Asil returned holding the Murano vase, Zak told him we're staying. He added, "my friend seems to like this city, I have to accept his decision". 

 

Walking with our backpacks across streets morphing into alleys and alleys into passages, climbing bridges over the canals, crossing one piazza after another, we barely felt the weight of our loads. Our eyes marvelled at those churches, theatres, palaces, squares, bridges, doors, bells; beauty and grace were everywhere. We didn't talk much, didn't have to. Everything was concentrated, extravagant, often majestic in its totality, staggering. It was probably that unreal mixture that made this place so magical and our immersion in this beauty dispensed us from commenting and stating the obvious.

We checked into an Ostello della Gioventu, got lucky to find two beds in the same dormitory, dropped our backpacks and went back out to the earthy paradise. By the end of our first day, we had gathered a good understanding of this complex city where apart from its lovely alleys, piazzas and bridges, everything else was channels, sea, lagoons, islands and docks, all functional, yet all bathed in a pink sky light like no other.

 

Epilogue

We spent ten wonderful days in Venice. The youth hostel required its residents to check out daily no later than ten o'oclock in the morning and check back in before ten at night. All were required to make their bed and store their belongings in assigned locked closets. This austere timetable had the advantage of forcing us to be out relatively early and back sleeping not too late, thus benefiting from a full day of touring different areas of the city, crossing to the islands by vaporetto and finally understanding and appreciating the archipelago's complex structure and that of the city. Sometimes after lunch, I would borrow the guitar of a fellow hostel resident and sing Jim Croce's ballads on a street near piazza San Marco while Zak painted Venice scenaries with colour chalks on the ground. There was nothing wrong in getting tipped for our "art" and the liras we earned went straight towards a nicer hot meal and a beer or two.

We continued our trip across northern Italy through Milano and Torino, then headed for France to Grenoble and reached Paris two weeks after we had left Venice. Zak never went to Sweden and continued part of the trip with me. On our way back, we parted in Greece where he decided to get on a boat to Alexandria while I spent some time in northern Greece, in Thessaloniki. The last leg of my trip took me to Istanbul by bus, and from there I caught a train to Beirut. But exhausted by the unconfortable train ride and its slow pace, keen to finally be home, I decided to get down in Aleppo and finished my trip in a taxi to Beirut.

 

Of all my travels across the years, this european hitchiking adventure remains truly special. It was rough. At times frustrating; often exhausting. Yet, it was an experience like no other. 

I slept in the garden of the Istanbul Hilton and was awaken by a turkish soldier's shoe in my face. The guy was bored and just wanted to talk. So he did. And for two hours, while Zak remained sound asleep, I had to stay awake and listen (in turko-arabic) to how the turkish army could re-conquer its lost ottoman empire in less than three months. 

I also slept on a street bench in Belgrade and across an agricultural material dealership on the ouskirts of Torino. 

I spent a night in a mosque in Edirne in Turkey and another night drinking some sweet liqueur with workers on a construction site in Nis, a large city in Yugoslavia, now in Serbia. 

I sold half a pint of my blood for fourteen dollars in Thessaloniki because I thought my wallet had been stolen. The hostel receptionist handed it to me when I came back from the blood donation center. Someone had found it under my bed. 

And if I could - but I know its illusory - relive those experiences again, with all their discomfort and  hardships, with all their dangers, but also with the joy and wonder they provided, I would say yes; definitely yes.