The night train from Prague was a test of endurance and dare I say if I had not been the seasoned traveller that I am now, it could have been downright intimidating and alarming. Not that anything bad really happened, but the nightly service from Krakow – Prague is not known for its luxury.
In fact when you read up on the Internet, there are a lot of people who will warn you off it. For starters, never lose sight of your belongings, and if possible, make sure you are not in a cabin by yourself, as you have nobody to look after your stuff if you need to pop out to the dunny or something. On chat forums I read about incidents of ‘gassing’ whereby you will wake up afterwards with your luggage having been ransacked. There’s also the odd story of the couple who were shagging in the couchette all night, keeping the entire carriage awake and amused. The trains themselves are old rattlers that really need to be replaced. I think they might have been state-of-the-art back in 1950. When it rolled up top the platform, every carriage was a different size, shape and colour, and strung together it was like a row of licorice all-sorts. Normally I’d give this a thumbs up for character but the noisy journey, buzzing lights, tight corridors and shithouse dunnies (pardon the pun), plus the reputation of the service, all added up to an exhausting trip. To top it off, nobody who works for the Polish Railways seems to speak English (I mean for heavens sake, in places like bloody Estonia, Croatia or Slovenia people speak more English. Whyat happened to Poland?). And I was dog tired still from all the Polish vodka I’d been consuming.
Anyway, I was at the station dismantling and packing my bike when the train arrived. Shitting myself because I thought I’d miss it (with all my bits scattered all over the platform) it was just arriving early, thankfully. Which turned out good because getting my bike plus six bags of crap on board was going to be a bit of a struggle. I don’t know what the minimum standard size for a corridor width is on European trains, but whatever the minimum width is, this train had it. I could barely squeeze my bike through the corridor at all, and getting it on the train was troublesome too. They need those ‘mind the gap’ messages like on the London Underground, because I found a gap and nearly went tumbling underneath the train with my bike, until somebody came to the rescue!
I managed to find the right carriage and then a cabin all to myself, which is what I wanted due to the amount of crap I had to carry. Due to the lack of a storage compartment for bikes or general luggage, I filled 3 seats by leaning my bike up against one wall of the cabin, and in the back of my mind I was hoping that I wouldn’t piss too many people off if the train became overcrowded and people were looking for spare seats. After I’d stowed my bags and taken a seat myself, there was barely room enough for maybe another two people at most in a six person cabin. Eventually two French girls filed in and they were good company because they spoke a bit of English and were also going to Prague, so we could all get off together.
The journey began, and my fears of having a bunch of dodgy passengers in cabins around me were allayed a bit with the presence of a bunch of young pilgrims or churches in two of the cabins adjacent to mine. I figured that there would be no trouble from them as they seemed to just want to be sober and merry and sing songs, and if there was going to be any trouble from elsewhere, they were going to be the natural targets for it, not me. It didn’t take long to figure out that you could buy beers ‘unofficially’ from a couple of people that were wandering the corridors flogging cans of piss for not a bad price. So that kept me in a heightened mood.
Two hours later, we crossed the border from Poland into the Czech Republic, and the train crew changed. Up until now I’d managed to slip under the radar with my bike, not really picking any attention. But the new Czech ticket inspector lady seemed to think it was a bit inappropriate that the bike was in the cabin. I’m sure she meant well, when she indicated that I could probably store it in a mail/luggage compartment that had been locked until now, but the language barrier was proving difficult. So off we went to see the train manager, a big fellow that reminded me of the Fat Controller from Thomas the Tank Engine. He couldn’t really speak English either, but they had a long discussion whilst I looked on, then the Fat Controller came to our cabin to see the bike sitting in the middle, then there was further discussion, and finally the attention was back on me.
We established that I didn’t have a bicycle reservation (they don’t sell them for the night trains, you have to bring it as general luggage which is why it was dismantled and wrapped up in a tarpaulin) and then the lady kept repeating to me ‘check money, check money?’ I didn’t understand it at first, but then I figured it out; she wanted to know if I had any Czech currency on me – Czech crowns. And I suddenly found myself in my first situation where maybe a little bit of ‘baksheesh’ – bribe – would have been expected. Unfortunately I had not had a chance to visit an ATM to withdraw any Czech crowns. “Only Euros” I replied. But clearly the conversation was draining for them, my ability to converse was limited and when they found out I had neither Polish or Czech money on me, eventually I saw the facial expression that I was looking for – a sigh of resignation and a wave of the hand as if to just drop the matter as it was too much hassle. And so I went back into the cabin, explained to the French girls what had happened, we all got a bit of a laugh and finally some sleep. Not much though, as a short while later, a number of other people on the train that were also heading to Prague started spreading the rumour that the carriage we were on wasn’t actually going to Prague, and that we might have to either change at a station, or move to a different carriage. The French girls seemed to be able to converse with the people to find out what was going on, and eventually after they stuffed around for about ½ an hour, I checked for myself for peace of mind. There was no need to change, it was just a bunch of people who had no idea. The board on the carriage definitely stated that we were on the right part of the train to be heading towards Prague.
Thankfully I was sleeping light, because we pulled into Prague station about 45 minutes early, and had I waited for my alarm to go off, I probably would have ended up somewhere near Stuttgart!
