Balkans day 1: From Z to Z via zzz

From Zurich there’s a sleeper train that weaves its way through the Alps to Zagreb, traversing five countries in the process: Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. What better way to begin this vaguely ludicrous trip than with this vaguely ludicrous train?

The ceiling of the Brasserie Federal in Zurich station

I made my way from Konstanz to Zurich in the early evening of the first of March, armed with a rucksack and a half-price Interrail Global Pass that I picked up last year for the occasion. It’s nineteen years – pretty much to the day – since I last went interrailing, in February 2004. These days I’m older, richer, fatter and more cynical, but one thing I share with the me from half my life ago is a love of train travel and seeing new places. Hence this trip.

Well, that’s not all there is to it. Another thing I share with eighteen-year-old me is a penchant for setting myself ridiculous completionist goals. Right now, believe it or not, I’m trying to visit every country in Europe – without flying – before my fortieth birthday. A mission, to be sure, but by no means impossible. The Balkans provide a cluster of small countries ripe for the visiting. Hence this trip!

Taking in six countries (admittedly somewhat notionally) before it even really feels like the starting gun has been fired is nice. I woke up nice and early (as to the quality and quantity of the zzzs, YMMV) as we were going through Kranj in Slovenia.

View of Kranj and mountains from the train

The stretch from Ljubljana, in Slovenia, to Zagreb along the river Sava is stunning – I remembered this from my previous trip to Croatia. I was fully expecting the train to be several hours late (as on my previous trip), but it wasn’t, so I could go and visit a part of Zagreb I hadn’t seen before, including the Nikola Tesla technical museum, before making my way back to the station in time for the six-hour onward train to Split on the Adriatic coast. And that’s the train from which I’m writing this. Not a bad first 22 hours!