Journeys by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris [Morris, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Voyages and Travels
ISBN: 9780735103610
Publisher: Replica Books
Published: 1984-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

88

n o t s o f a r

— o J o / o —

In the bare desiccated hills above Trieste stands the Yugoslav frontier post. I could see its lights up the road there, but it took me a good hour to reach them. Backed far down the highway to the city were the lines of Yugoslavs waiting to get home after the week-end. They had been to the great street market of Trieste, most of them, to stock up with jeans, radios, coffee or perhaps gold; they had brought their children and mothers-in-law for the ride; now they sat there, engines throbbing, sometimes lurching a few feet forward, sometimes getting out of the car to stretch their arms, waiting helplessly in the gathering darkness to get home again to the Peoples' Republic. The hills were dark and empty all around us: when I looked behind I could see the lights of the waiting cars fender to fender all down the hill towards the sea.

The Yugoslavs were used to it. It is always like this. Halfway up the hill somebody had set up a mobile canteen, and they were selling coffee and hamburgers from the back of a truck. Occasionally some know-all, scudding up beside us on the gravel, plunged on to a dirt track up the side of the mountain, never to be seen again. Once a pair of gigantic trucks, from Mostar, the old Turkish town in Herzogovina, forced their way by sheer bulk and judder yard by yard up the waiting queue, blocking all other movement until, with a hissing of air-brakes and roar of engines, they disappeared triumphantly over the crest of the hill.

At last I reached the frontier post. The lights were dim. An official with a red star on his cap beckoned for my passport without a word and slowly examined every page. Without a smile, without a flicker, with only a gloomy stare he handed it back to me.

"Cheer up," I said.

"Enjoy yourself," he morosely replied, and waved me into the dusk.

— ofO/0 —

Ah well, Yugoslavia is like that. It hardly offers a laughing welcome to its guests, but there is scarcely a soul in the country who will not respond to a little jollying along, and whose native surliness cannot be softened, given time and practice, into bonhomie. I drove down the grand Adriatic Highway, winding between the high limestone escarpment and the island-speckled sea, in a state of elation, playing Mozart all the way, stopping a e u r o p e a n j o u r n e y

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now and then for grilled fish and prosek, inspecting a church here, a castle there, until I reached the old port of Split, Spalato to the Italians, and there settled down for a few days doing nothing on the waterfront.

I always feel happy on the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia. It suits me.

I like its mean between simplicity and sophistication, between communism and capitalism, between the local and the national. I

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