A Journey In Slovakia, From The Eyes Of A Passenger

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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)

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  1. dukeisduke Avatar
    dukeisduke

    What’s that thing in the first picture, with the red-and-white antenna on top?

    1. Rust-MyEnemy Avatar

      The Bratislava TV tower. Pretty impressive. There’s a revolving restaurant up there, but it could be a revolting restaurant for all I know…

      1. dukeisduke Avatar
        dukeisduke

        Well, I meant the skinny diamond-shaped thing in the first picture.

        1. Rust-MyEnemy Avatar

          Yep, that’s the one. TV tower with a restaurant in it. Badly want to go up there. Maybe have a TV Dinner…..

  2. Jeff Glucker Avatar
    Jeff Glucker

    I stare out the window when I’m in a new place as well… I enjoy the van ride to and from destinations because it gives me time to eyeball my foreign surroundings.

  3. Tanshanomi Avatar

    “Slovakia feels far more like I imagine the vast, empty plains of Middle America to feel like.”
    You do know you have a standing invitation to come find out for yourself, don’t you?

    1. Rust-MyEnemy Avatar

      Just checking it’s still valid!

      1. mzszsm Avatar
        mzszsm

        I can show you a lot of flat land too if you ever end-up near Chicago. That concrete housing, that’s much what I spent the first four years of my life in.

        1. Rust-MyEnemy Avatar

          I love the idealism of the “cities in the sky” concept. Sadly, it only ever really worked for the well-heeled, who were the opposite of whom the concept was intended for!

          1. mzszsm Avatar
            mzszsm

            Right, when Dorota returns on the bus from the meat market to cook dinner wondering if her husband is already drunk again, the form gets more depressing than uplifting.

  4. Batshitbox Avatar
    Batshitbox

    I wasn’t a passenger, but when I first rode my motorcycle out of New England and out across the plains of all that stuff between the Appalachians and the Rockies I had the same sort of bewilderment as you express. New England’s roads are all curved and most go over a rise so you never see more than a half kilometer at any time. Maybe on the Maine and Massachusetts Turnpikes, but not really.
    The water towers were the focus of much fascination, it’s true. Flat America has these hilarious ones that look like a cartoon speech balloon; and they always have the name of the municipality they feed written on them. It looks for all the world like the countryside is saying, “McMinville!”, “Potrzebie!”, “East Techumsebumsqueag!”

    1. Sjalabais Avatar
      Sjalabais

      It’s fantastic to drive in exotic places…in 2008 I spent an entire summer in Canada, and I still remember it so fondly! Weird straight roads in Alberta, massive infrastructure projects through the Rockies, signs that warned drivers of “incredibly dangerous road, pay attention, stay awake, be kind don’t die”-style twists and turns were just like the better roads here in Western Norway. And the Icefields Parkway…most stunning scenery I know of, even if the road is way too good to be an engaging drive or anything like that. Waiting for the kids to be big enough to go back.
      http://s26.postimg.org/n5ex6pld5/P1000999.jpg
      http://s26.postimg.org/6mr6dvxwp/P1010054.jpg
      http://s26.postimg.org/7b00wtwmh/P1010195.jpg
      http://s26.postimg.org/dans0hhex/P1010200.jpg
      http://s26.postimg.org/u9wqfqsmh/p1010229.jpg

    2. mzszsm Avatar
      mzszsm

      I lived in the city for four or five years and it always amazed me when I took the Metra out west, stepped-off, and saw horizon again. Biggest skies I ever saw though were out in TX. Some of the old water towers are funny, like painted to look like a basketball to commemorate a HS state championship in the ’50s or what not.

  5. Sjalabais Avatar
    Sjalabais

    It’s a long, long time ago I was in Bratislava last, something like 20 years actually, but what I remember are the precast concrete slab houses so popular east of the iron curtain:
    http://www.martinspies.de/album/bratislava10-3/FOTO16.JPG
    Going there only a few years after the fall of communism, there were a lot of weak cars on the road. The few Volvos I saw for instance* were piloted by very proud drivers.
    *Yes, I have been a Volvo guy since I was a little kid…consistency is good, right?

  6. needthatcar Avatar
    needthatcar

    Brilliant post! One of the best I’ve seen here in a long time. Thanks, Chris.

    1. mzszsm Avatar
      mzszsm

      NTC, I was sort of bummed on Sunday cause I made it in to HPR for a bit during a family road trip, but I never saw you though I looked around, cheers.

  7. CapitalistRoader Avatar
    CapitalistRoader

    Slovakia feels far more like I imagine the vast, empty plains of Middle America to feel like.

    Your imagination is spot on. Traveling through Slovakia reminded me of traveling through rural Minnesota. Well, except for those crazy TV antennas. And until you hit the Tatras.

    1. Vairship Avatar
      Vairship

      The mountains or the cars? 😉