Having boarded the night train at 17:00, we were preparing for sleep around 22:30, when the train made a border crossing stop. No problem we thought, I am from the UK and Hsin and her family all have Shengen visas. So you can imagine our surprise when it turned out that the border was with Croatia and the slight problem that Croatia is not in the EU. Thus none of us had a visa and we were all ejected from the train at some frontier town in the middle of nowhere.
No one mentioned Croatia when we bought the tickets!!!
So the next hour or so was pretty fraught. The Croatian police took our passports and told us to wait. We had no idea what was going on, when we would get them back, if we would have to pay to get them back, if we were going to be arrested??? Eventually after signing documents stating that we had illegally attempted to enter Croatia and wouldn't try to come back for 48hrs, we got our passports back. The Hungarian police then opened up the station waiting room for us. 4hrs of sitting on wooden chairs alternated with lying on the concrete floor got us to 04:00 and a train out of there.
After teaming up with similarly-fated companions a plan was hatched. We would need to travel back up through Hungary to the North, where it bordered with Slovenia, then through Slovenia to its capital Ljubljana, where a train could be caught to Venice.
After 11 trains and buses and 24 more hours of traveling we reached Venice!
Disappointment as compartment was not as nice as last time:
To be replaced with despair when we got thrown off!
Similarly ill-fated companions:
Sebastien:
Sorry I don't have a photo of Sharon!
Solomon:
Solomon's fate, was in a way, even worse than ours. He had purchased his ticket at the border station - and even they didn't inform him he would need a visa for Croatia. He attempted to get on the train and was stopped immediately and had his passport taken by the Croatian police for attempting to illegally enter Croatia. He didn't even make it on to the train.
Thanks again guys for getting us through this!
Hungry/Slovenia from train windows:
A big shout goes out to all the Hungarian people who helped us make it to Slovenia. As we travelled through northern Hungary it must have been clearly apparent that we had deviated from the normal tourist trail. In fact we may even have been the first tourists to visit these parts. The kind Hungarian people stopped charging us for tickets and just put us onto trains and buses. Capitalism has not completely taken over the world just yet!
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