Tales from nowhere

"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world."

Freya Stark.

"We've all been Nowhere. It might have been in the middle of Borneo or Beijing. It might have been in a Mayan mountain village, along a time-worn trail in Tuscany, or an isolated South Pacific island, or under a desert moon in Mali. Nowhere is a setting, a situation and a state of mind. It's not on any map, but you know it when you're there." Lonely Planet.

I'd made several crucial errors when I left Venice on a sunny Wednesday morning. Accustomed to purchasing last-minute train tickets to random destinations I decided to get on a train to Florence. I'd spent a day in Verona and a day in Venice and decided it would be criminal not to pay a visit to neighboring Florence, a mere 90 minute train ride away.

I love train rides. I love peering out the window and listening to music and marvelling at my location. I would happily sit on a train all day. It's so peaceful.



I failed to buy my return ticket until I arrived in Florence at lunchtime. To my dismay the only ticket left was on a three-hour overnight train that didn't arrive back in Venice until 1am. Which wasn't a massive problem- a long, exhausting day in Florence is a better day than anywhere else in the world- the problem was that the arrival destination wasn't Venice central. It was a half hour away from where I had originally left.

Me being me I decided I wouldn't worry about it until I had to. I figured there was a bus, or a cab. At 1am. On the outskirts of Venice. Surely.

Eerily beautiful, Pont Vecchio

 I was travelling alone for the first time in awhile. My contiki trips were brimming with people and I'd made several trips to Ireland and France with girlfriends I'd met in London. I'd nearly talked myself out of spending four days in Italy alone, before realising that moving to a foreign country alone was surely more frightening then travelling independantly for four days. Common sense prevailed. But I was still a little bored with nobody to talk to in Florence. Literally nobody, because I didn't speak Italian and the Italians didn't (or didn't want to) speak English.

I bought a map at the train station and spent the day meandering around markets, the magnificent Duomo, across Pont Vecchio to beautiful Giardino Bobolo where the freshly cut grass sent me straight back to New Zealand. Bizaarely, posters tacked around the gardens warned visitors that a young tourist had mysteriously dropped dead there the year before, putting an eerie cloud over the day.

By around 8pm it was starting to get dark and cold and after being on my feet for eight hours I decided to call it a day, have some dinner and head to the train station for my 9.30pm train. I had been weary about spending such a long day in Florence but I ended up marvelling at how quickly the day had gone and how well I had managed to do on my own in terms of ordering food and even managing to score a free glass of red wine and an espresso at two seperate eateries.

I was ready for bed though, and by the time I had found my platform at the station I was looking forward to another peaceful trip back to Venice.

I was taken aback when I boarded the train. It was an overcrowded sleeper, meaning most of the couchettes were beds, booked for overnight travellers. There were a few cabins with regular seating but they were so full that people had taken to sitting on the floor in the aisles. And then my second mistake of the day prevailed- my phone died, leaving me without my most revered type of entertainment- music.

I managed to find a seat in a couchette of six people. None of us knew one another and according to some ensuing phone conversations, Italian and French were the only languages spoken. The man sitting across from me took up most of the leg room but I was mostly aware of his iPad, wondering if I could summon up enough courage to ask if he had an Apple charger I could borrow.

The trip was long and boring. It was pitch black outside so I couldn't even admire the Tuscan scenery. The couchette was quiet and I didn't have a magazine. With little to distract me I began to disect the problem of how I was going to make it back to Venice once the train pulled in. It began to dawn on me that it was entirely possible that there were no transport links at that time of morning. Without my phone I couldn't even google the problem online.

While an Italian announcer would occasionally mention what stop we were due to arrive at, the pitch black night outside made the place names nonsensical. As far as I was concerned I was in the middle of nowhere, alone.



Alone in Florence, March 2011



Bologna at around what I guessed was midnight (no clock) and we stopped for what felt like twenty minutes. Scores of passengers left the train. It was quiet. And then the unmistakable smell of McDonalds. And voices speaking a familiar language. Thick accents cut the air as crudely as the smell of fries as an obsese American family boarded the train and found themselves in the same predicament I had been in two hours earlier- tiny couchettes, nowhere to sit.

It quickly became apparant to me that the foreigners I shared the couchette with understood English, as their lips started to curl up in tight smiles as we all listened, held captive, by the ensuing conversations in which the family (made up of two teenage girls, dad, grandpa Joe, stepmom Vicky and another married couple, apparantely a friend of the family's) set up camp in the aisle and began passing down bags of cheeseburgers and fries to each other as they cursed not having taken a flight instead of a midnight passenger train. Dad and Vicky went to painstaking lengths to ensure the entire family were comfortable, particularly Grandpa Joe, who at the ripe old age of about 70 should have been sitting on a seat, instead of the floor.

"We'll laugh about this one day," they chortled as the train took off again. The entertainment had apparantely arrived and I took great pleasure in observing a reality episode of Full House. They talked about their neighbour who had won the lottery, they talked about their vacation to date and their plans to fly to Paris, they talked about where in the heck were they anyway because it was so dark they couldn't make out any of the station signs that we were flying past. To my relief, eventually, they discussed how they were going to make it from the final train station to Venice.



We were in the same boat I realised. They didn't know it, but that dose of Americano in the middle of a midnight train to Venice was all I needed to realise that by no means was I ever travelling alone.