The 7:00 service from Zagreb to Vienna takes seven hours, has a proper restaurant and affords some amazing views.
It was worth the 5am start – no really – to get there on time, and as we took and Über (my first ever) to avoid any Sunday-morning tram complications, we had plenty of time to get to the station and say one final goodbye to Croatia.
Glavni Kolodvor is a glorious station.
It has cafés and ticket offices and everything you need, but it’s just nice to look at – especially in the morning sun. From the front, there’s a view past the trams to King Tomislav Square and the Art Pavilion behind it, with the cathedral and the mountains taking their rightful places in the backgound. It’s lacking the super-whizzy-amazing everything-you-need of somewhere such as Paris Montparnasse, but redeems itself by the simple fact that it isn’t Paris Montparnasse. As anyone’s who’s tried catching a train from Montparnasse will know, no number of escalators and shiny shops can ultimately distract you from the fact that Montparnasse is a concrete shithole.
Even though we arrived with an hour to spare, our ÖBB train was already waiting on the platform – minus its locomotive – yet the guard was more than happy to manually unlock the doors and let us on. The extra time gave us the opportunity to poke around the station, discover an old steam engine, and buy some breakfast.
The 07:00 Eurocity 158 to Wien Hbf left on time, and before long we were trundling back through mountains and glorious countryside wondering what time would be acceptable to go to the restaurant car for lunch given we’d woken up at 5am. Our passports were dutifully stamped in Dobova by border officials who humoured our requests, and then we gave in to hunger at about midday – somewhere near Kindberg Bahnhof – and started on lunch as the train snaked its way alongside the river and up into the mountains.
7am is a horrific time to catch a train but I had deliberately chosen this one for its restaurant car. I had Kalsbrahmgulasch mit Spätzle (veal goulash with spaetzle) and companion had the Paprika-Kokos Cremesuppe. Once we’d had our coffees and Nusskipferl, we got chatting with the waiter and a girl who was a regular on the line who gave us the heads-up whenever anything spectacular was about to come past the window. And spectacular, it was. We’d noticed an extraordinary number of little churches perched on hillsides – and hilltops for the fanatically devoted – but nothing could really prepare us for the views as we got closer to Vienna.
In Vienna we did very little except rehydrate in the ÖBB lounge and get our seat reservations for Wednesday, before getting on the 14:42 Intercity 45 to Bratislava. This train also had a dining car – which I think might’ve looked a little bit better than the one on the train we’d just alighted from, but enough of that – but we were too full to try it.
We watched Austria go past the window – there are many wind turbines – then got off at Bratislava-Petrzalka which despite being a rather uninspiring station, had lifts and turned out to be only a a stone’s throw form our Airbnb.
Judgement is still out on Bratislava. We got on the 83 bus with our 0,70€ 15-minute ticket and rode it until the end of its validity, then got off in the middle of nowhere, decided it was rather dull, and bought a ticket back in the opposite direction. We got tantalising views of the cathedral and the castle but nothing else appeared to be in any way interesting. Our defeat was somewhat mitigated by the discovery of a bar at the bottom of our socialist tower block, called the Golf Club, that served pints of Budweiser – the real stuff, not the American shit – for less than 2€ a pint.
Jury’s still out on the rest of the place, though.
