I checked out and headed for the station to leave my luggage. A large sign indicated the ‘Luggage Room’, which turned out to be a big but very dark room despite the bright sun outside. A man sitting behind the desk took my bag and wordlessly tore off a ticket for me. I wondered how many hours of sunlight he got each day. Maybe his eyes had adjusted to the lack of light and were now super-sensitive.Another short metro ride back to the centre of the city, and I switched lines to the city’s park. Lunch used up most of my remaining florents at a restaurant near the national museum of culture. I’d had quite enough culture the previous evening and was feeling very poor, so I skipped that museum in favour of the transport museum, which cost just 150 florents to enter (about 40p, US$0.28).

The museum had a lot of train stuff, and I was beginning to think it was just a trainspotters paradise when I noticed the other sections. There were a few interesting bits of info to be gained, like a chronology of the Hungarian transport infrastructure through the second world war. In fact the whole network was almost entirely destroyed. I was also shocked to learn that Hungary has put a man in space, courtesy of the USSR, of course. Can’t remember if they brought him back but I imagine they probably did.

I got to the train station early, anxious now to re-enter euroland. After I picked up my luggage from the man who sits in perpetual darkness, I noticed that there were lockers, so I could have saved money there too. But while I was mentally chiding myself for missing the obvious, I noticed that someone who had found the lockers was now regretting it. A girl was frantically beating the locker to within an inch of its life (though by all accounts it was already within millimetres of its life anyway), and looked at me hopefully.

Our combined efforts failed to open the locker, and she explained that she absolutely had to get the bags out immediately because she was going to Venice. I was going to Venice, so why wasn’t I rushing then? I checked my watch, and confirmed that there was a good twenty minutes until the train left, so she didn’t really have to be panicking at this stage. I followed, interested, as the uninterested luggage guy was coaxed out of his realm of darkness to sort out the locker, which he opened with great effort, and then made a well-that-was-simple-so-why-did-I-have-to-come-all-the-way-over-here-to-show-you-how-to-do-it gesture, turned and stormed off back where he came from.

Laura (for that was her name) was a British-born Australian who also spent time in England and Ireland for reasons that were far too complicated for me to remember. We walked over to the train and went our separate ways – she didn’t have a seat reservation so we’d be travelling in different parts of the train.

Journey 5: Budapest to Venice
1 leg, 700km, 15 hr. Average speed: 46kph
Origin/Destination	Departs	Arrives	Carrier	My Rating
Budapest Keleti Venezia S.Lucia	18:00	09:00	TrenItalia

On the train, I discovered that my compartment was already full (except for my seat) and in fact the entire carriage was almost entirely occupied by a large group of Finnish civil engineering students on a field trip. Fortunately, they spoke English, but unfortunately they seemed to prefer talking in Finnish. I let them get on with the complicated discussions of bridge expansion theory, or whether their bum looked big in this, and went wandering along the train.

At about ten thirty, the train rolled silently into the border station of Gyékényes, where the platform suddenly sprang to life with immigration officials. In a scene reminiscent of the X-files they swarmed around the train with bright torches, carrying them loosely so that the lights danced all over the station. Each guy carried an old fashioned but very bright lantern-style torch (the sort with a handle) and a hammer on the end of a long pole. As they waked the length of the train, hammers clanged against the undercarriage. Were they trying to make a primitive musical instrument, I wondered? Didn’t they realise that we had a schedule to keep? Eventually they decided that checking passports would be a good idea, and once again two sets of officials, one Hungarian, one Croation walked down the train. Both had to stamp my passport, and the Croatian one decided to place his entry stamp right on top of one of my American stamps.

An international incident was narrowly avoided when the two sets of officials ran into each other in the corridor, and we finally pulled away from the station having spent over an hour being clanged and prodded.

The train left the border stop in the opposite direction, which meant that I was now closer to the front of the train than the back, changed tracks, and swung round in an arc that took us into Croatia.