Too rarely do we take the time to assess things from the point of view of the passenger. Ultimate power is possessed by he who holds the wheel. What he says, goes…which could incidentally make him the worst chauffeur, like, ever.
For once, though, I was glad to be a passenger, one of thirty five on this particular luxuriously appointed touring coach. I was in a country I had never previously visited, and was only too pleased to have the chance to gaze wistfully at the distant countryside without expending a thought about whether the driver was having fun.
This post is about the joy of being a passenger in an unfamiliar land.

The skies of Slovakia were clear and azure. It was about 30 degrees, a far cry from the overcast early-teens I had left behind in London yesterday afternoon, so both the weather and the environment were equally foreign to me.
Our coach heaved itself from the generic flashiness of our overnight hotel stop, through ever shabbier and less solubrious quarters of Bratislava, the ratio of grafitti to clean masonry swinging gradually from 1:10 to 10:1. Graffiti is graffiti, right? Yet scrawled in a foreign language it somehow looks more severe, more pointed. There’s also the mystery of what it means; am I reading a declaration of love or instruction to kill?
The locals pass these urban tattoos without batting an eyelid. It’s presumably the norm, in this part of town. We roll further, past brightly coloured blocks of high-density housing, until eventually the concrete fights with metal for dominance and the scenery becomes more industrial, as is so often the case on the outskirts. We’re roughly tracing the Danube, which evidently has its less chocolate-box stretches.

Eventually urban Bratislava can offer no more and succumbs to the countryside, and if anything the rural here seems even more different than the urban. Cities the world all over bear the same scars of decay, overcrowding, financial unsettlement and rushed gentrification, some in different proportions to others. But the look of a country’s countryside is dictated far more by tradition than necessity.
The roads are all running straight and true, as if formally planned from some huge blank sheet of paper. They rarely seem to follow the shortest geographical route from point to point, unlike England where the cities and towns are linked by arteries with villages stringed along veins and little roads to hamlets and farms spurring off as capillaries. A road atlas of Britain shows no discernible pattern overall, and this is what I have become accustomed to.

Slovakia feels far more like I imagine the vast, empty plains of Middle America to feel like. Whereas roads in England are often shaped to follow ancient farm boundaries and territorial limits, which tend to be all wiggly, these long, straight roads look to have been routed at the same time that the land was formally divided up. It all seems very organised, but a driver would surely yearn for more fast cornering opportunities.

Every now and again we cross a railway line perpendicular to our path and I want to know, where does it go and where does it come from? Does it carry ugly industrial freight or beautiful people heading to exotic resorts? How heavy are the trains? Some are single line and show no signs of electrification, others have two or more and are dappled in light passing through their tangle of overhead catenary.
I look both ways in the hope of a glimpse of locomotive, I want to see some throwback to the age of communist railways, but the tracks are clear.

Somehow the electricity pylons have a stark, militaristic look to them. They march confidently into the distance, their cables hanging heavy and glinting in the relentless sun. Then, occasionally you find the termination, or the beginning, of their flow in the shape of an enormous electricity sub-station. You know that somebody somewhere is using an awful lot of power, yet there doesn’t seem to be a major town on the horizon.
Is there some voracious industrial electrical consumer somewhere nearby? Is this a hyper-capable electrical distribution network? Or is this an aged infrastructure which looks as brutal as it does because it was conceived at a time when electricity was still a novelty? electricity sub-stations do not, it seems, look the same all over.

Villages, too seem to have dropped from the sky, with no major junctions, no river crossing, no topographical feature that would seem to have inspired their being. Perhaps, one day long ago, somebody just stopped walking and set up camp.
Neat little bungalows are being built everywhere. On the outskirts of (and sometimes nowhere near) the towns and villages, we frequently find a little copse of freshly grown dwellings, usually accompanied by a pile of tidily stacked aggregates, ready for the next housing crop to be sown. This is small scale development, but it’s happening everywhere. And al without anything of the everybody-on-top-of-each-other claustrophobia you get with the overpriced cluster
The houses somehow more functional and sleek than at home. Like they were really designed to live in, a rare thing to find back at home, where generous façades and big picture windows seem to have been dropped about thirty years ago. In fact, architects of newbuild housing estates in the UK seem so obsessed with fake period detailing that any major new housing development here becomes a pastiche of an era whose housing, ironically, was demolished during the slum clearances of the 1930’s. Why, oh why must England live in the past?
What was so great about the past, anyway?

Everything is different to where I come from, and it is hard to identify the new conventions until they begin repeating. I pass a farm with an alien looking water tower, a shining globe atop a thin column, and marvel at its novel appearance. But then, no sooner has it dropped out of view than I see another, and another, and it suddenly seems that everybody has them.
I enjoy when we meet crossings and T-Junctions, untrafficked and desolate. The road that meets us at 90 degrees spears off towards the horizon, eventually disappearing into a contiguous point, but with seemingly nothing between here and there. I ache to stop the coach and instruct the driver to go that way instead, see where it goes.
This is what I will do, one day. Forget the destination, just have fun exploring on the way to nowhere.

The scenery I’m passing through is totally different to what I see every day back home, yet there’s nothing remotely out-of-this-world to report. Just nuances and subtleties, but big ones if you see what I mean. Not volcanoes and waterfalls, just more space, differently shaped buildings, variations in materials and methods. Variety.
As a driver I spend so little time thinking about the journey; I see it as a series of objectives and waypoints which usually need to be dispatched quickly to meet a schedule. It strikes me that sitting here, letting the coach driver do the hard work, while being served a menu of changing vistas is a great way to experience somewhere new.
Yes, this is Robert Pirsig’s “Just more TV”, but at least it’s not just a rerun.
(All images copyright Chris Haining / Hooniverse 2015)