The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
They did say they wanted a revolution...
Will Hide recreates a rail journey he did 30 years ago through the countries behind the Iron Curtain
Quite frankly, I’d hoped for more when I crossed the river Oder. The last time, 30 years ago, there’d been visa inspections, Alsatian dogs, fences and menacing East German border guards. Now, most of my fellow passengers on the Berlin to Warsaw Express just snored, watched TV on their phones or had their heads in trashy supermarket-checkout magazines. There was no visible border and no fanfare as we passed from Germany to Poland.
I was on a week-long journey from the German capital to the Czech one, passing through three Polish cities, recreating part of a trip I’d done exactly three decades before as a student when the Iron Curtain still divided Europe.
In 1989, my friend Tony and I left St Andrews University and headed off to Turkey, snaking our way down through Eastern Europe.
We weren’t the only ones on the move that autumn. We got to Berlin just as East Germans started marching in the streets of Leipzig and hundreds were taking refuge in the West
German embassy in Prague.
In Poland, we struggled to spend any money at all. There was nothing to buy in the shops and not much food. Our go-to were zapiekanki: half baguettes with a liberal squirt of watery ketchup, mushrooms and tasteless cheese, served from a hole in the wall. It took us two hours to buy a Warsaw-Krakow train ticket that cost just 25 pence. Once we left, an elderly man, on discovering we weren’t German, stood up and shouted across the carriage in
English: “God save the king!”
In Prague, for 15 pence a night, Tony and I camped in a park that was crowded with East Germans who, it turned out, were not on holiday but were waiting for their chance to flee, too. I remember some of them staring one morning, slightly bemused, at my electric razor. Downtown, under red stars and propaganda posters, we asked locals for directions, but they just turned on their heels looking mildly terrified.
Later, in Budapest, we went to Hungary’s first McDonald’s shortly after it opened and the imperialist ketchup was not at all watery.
And now I was back, to amble by train again, people watching and staring out of the window at pine forests, wheat fields, unpronounceable villages and leaden skies.
It would be easy just to say “gosh, hasn’t it all changed in 30 years” but, gosh, hasn’t it all changed in 30 years? Back then, my journey had involved outings to embassies for visas, bag searches, impenetrable fences and a sense of Cold War danger. Going from Prague to Vienna, for example, the train passed through several moats of barbed wire. Guards with mirrors came on board to check under seats and above luggage racks. Now I had my ticket on an app, and the GPS on my phone told me my exact position.
This time en route to Warsaw I paused in Lodz (pronounced “woodge”) for a night, to the bemusement of London-based Polish friends who, it seems, treat the city in the same way as some people regard Hull or Milton Keynes.
“If you want to see Poland’s past, go to Krakow, if you want to see the present go to Warsaw, but the future is in Lodz,” I was told. I liked it. You can see its history in its dilapi-chic neighbourhoods, which are only just starting to up and come. The “Manchester of Poland” has plenty of old industrial red-brick buildings that are being repurposed into hotels, museums, apartments and shopping centres. It’s also home to a famous film school. In the Second World War, the Nazis created the country’s largest ghetto here but now, on pedestrianised Piotrkowska Street, I ate vegan Israeli food at a café called Tel Aviv. “Do you speak English?” I asked the young waitress, who looked at me as if I was slightly doolally. A Polish teenager… of course she did.
Nearby, I drank flat whites and window-shopped for T-shirts at Pan Tu Nie Stal, whose name translates as something like “you weren’t standing here, sir” a wry nod to queue-bargers in Communist times. My hotel, the Puro, would not have been at all out of place in Brooklyn, with a lobby that doubled as a co-work space, a spa and a cocktail bar with a man-bunned mixologist behind the counter.
The next day, a commuter train dropped me off in the bowels of Warsaw Central station. Despite being smartened up for the Uefa European Championships in 2012, the underground platforms are still a bit grim, just like when Tony and I turned up here at 1am three decades ago and the train conductor, taking pity on us, let us sleep on his living room floor for the night. This time, I emerged to a billboard for Poland’s version of Love Island and adverts for the latest smart phones. Gleaming new skyscrapers sit alongside the Palace of Science and Culture, a Fifties gift from Stalin that’s nicknamed the Russian Wedding Cake.
If you want to find new Warsaw, it’s in the Koszyki food hall where locals come for sushi, burgers, tacos and oysters. I plumped for Polish food at Warszawski Sen and for the equivalent of £5 had a lunchtime special of split pea soup, chicken breast and potatoes, salad and cake, which was all delicious. “The Communists trashed traditional recipes,” a diner at the next
table told me, “because a lot of products weren’t available. In those days, you ate at state cafeterias and it was about sustenance not the art of cooking. No one is nostalgic for life before 1989, no one.” Directly opposite was Cma – meaning moth – which caters to the city’s night owls and is open 24/7. It has a menu that advertises dishes ranging from pierogi dumplings with duck, cranberry and apple to beetroot carpaccio with goat cheese and pomegranate.
I didn’t have time to wander in the Old Town or around any museums this time, but I did enjoy meandering in the boho district of Praga where there are museums dedicated to both vodka and the neon signs that used to light up the grey days of proletariat victory.
My onward train to Krakow was a super quick Italian-designed Pendolino Express with a bulbous nose, decked out with a mint-green interior, overhead TVs and Wi-Fi. The fare included free coffee and I purred into the central station in just two hours and 20 minutes.
Krakow’s buildings largely escaped the horrors of the Second World War, although the Jewish inhabitants of the Kazimierz district certainly did not. Trams glide cheaply over much of the city although it’s very walkable and at some point you’ll cross Rynek Glowny central square, which manages to be impressive and touristy at the same time, as is the hulking Wawel Castle.
I spent several days just wandering the streets, poking my nose into
numerous churches – the golden murals in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the stained glass in St Francis’ Basilica are particularly worth a detour – and snacking. I chewed on sesame-crusted obwarzanki bagels, which are now protected as “only from Krakow” under EU law, and on pillowy paczki doughnuts filled with cherry jam and cream cheese. And in Plac Nowy I found good old zapiekanki too, which seem to have gone decidedly la-di-da: as well as your traditional basic, they now come topped with anything from sausage to pineapple, bacon, salami and jalapeños.
My final city was Prague, reached by overnight train. There’s still something rather alluring about a sleeper and I pictured dinner-jacketed spies in the
dining car and elegant women in evening gowns puffing on slim cigarettes. My reality was a carriageload of Americans from Green Bay, Wisconsin, a bickering Australian couple and two snoring strangers, with the heating stuck on full and a window that wouldn’t shut.
Still, it was an adventure and I must have had more sleep than I thought by the time we rolled into the Czech capital’s Hlavni Nadrazi station the next morning. I was met by my charming guide Vlasta, who shielded me past the most touristy sites where international coffee and sandwich chains rule. Instead, we walked over the Vltava river and then nipped on to an old tram to explore neighbourhoods such as Holesovice, where one café only accepts payment with Bitcoin and the lumberjack hipster look is in full swing. Lunch was a hunk of gooey, deep-fried cheese with potatoes and mayonnaise. We crossed back over the timeless river on a tiny eight-man ferry, then wandered around
Bubenec admiring pre-war villas and eating ice cream.
We talked about Vlasta’s favourite illicit UK bands from the Eighties and pondered on life then and now as we hopped back on another tram. In many ways, it’s hard to remember the Eastern Europe of 30 years ago. What I can recall, though, is the sense of adventure the journey that autumn instilled in me. There have been momentous changes over the decades since, but no one has yet come up with a cure for the travel bug.
In the boho district of Praga there are museums dedicated to vodka and neon signs