The night train: Budapest to Prague through Slovakia
We boarded the train around 10 p.m. on October 11, 1998… our one year wedding anniversary. It was about a 300 mile trip, scheduled for 7 1/2 hours.
The train was no great shakes, an old hard-working train with tons of character. We had a tiny sleeper car–a bunk bed, a shelf, and a window. We bought paprika pork-rind looking chips and cokes, lit a candle and settled into a quick game of cribbage before retiring.
We weren’t asleep long when the train stopped and there came a loud pounding at the door. “PASSPORTS!” (more like “PAHS-PURTS”). Sleepy and a bit shaken, we opened the door, showed our passports and watched as one of the uniformed border-crossing guards squeezed into our car to lift our bunks and have a look beneath. There was a lot of motion as the guards flipped pages in the passports and stamped. And then they were gone. We crawled back into our bunks and fell back to sleep to the cradle-rocking motion of the train. But this episode repeated itself again…and again…and again over the next few hours.
We ended up with 4 passport stamps that night. I was so exhausted, I don’t even remember the order of the stamps or the places we passed through. There are two with the date of Oct 11–SZOB and MZ STUROVO and two with the date of Oct 12–CZ KUTY and CR LANZH. It was like a weird dream–the border guards, the rocking train, the fresh smell of fields from the window, and every now and then seeing the lights of villages go past…the brilliant essence of travel.
Later I could piece together that we left Hungary at Szob, and a few miles later must have passed through the Štúrovo, Slovakia side of the border crossing. We left Slovakia at Kúty and entered the Czech Republic at Lanžhot. Best I can tell. We arrived in Prague around 6 a.m. at Hlavni Nadrazi station.
