Escape from Venice

Venice has its medieval charm, which is lost when you need to get out. 

Neither of us wanted to leave Venice, but there were jobs and responsibilities back in Budapest, so we had to get out. But if you want to get out of Venice you have to manage your time.

We started with the water bus, or vaporetto, which took us to the stop near our hotel. We walked to the hotel. The hotel manager eventually buzzed us through the gate remotely. We collected our luggage and walked as briskly as we could with hulking backpacks to the water bus stop. Then we waited.

When it arrived, we boarded the water bus, which leisurely took us to the train station for the tiny monorail that would take us to the bus station.

The water bus route creeps along the Grand Canal. It’s a beautiful ride, but we were watching our watches, not the scenery. We reached the docks and ran frantically to the station. We paid quickly, boarded the monorail train, which has only two stops.

As we reached the final stop, we saw a bus with our carrier lines’ name written on the side. It might have been ours, but it could have been another one. We got off and waited. As we waited, as the realization that we missed our bus to Budapest sank in.

This was not good. It was after 8pm, we had to work in the morning, and, save for restaurants and bars, Venice shuts down in the evening.

Everything was closed, there was no way we could buy a ticket anywhere to board a night train, so we found a hostel, rented two beds in a dorm room and slept a nervous sleep.

In the morning, after a few hours of train station waiting and negotiating with travel agency people, we figured out our journey. We take a bus from Venice to Villach. From there, we catch a train to Vienna. We debark at a remote, Viennese suburban train station and hop on the night train to Bucharest, which was making a stop in Budapest.

Monty Python couldn’t have dreamed of a more ridiculously topsy turvy trip.

To our gleeful surprise, the bus to Villach was an Austrian double decker highway coach. We got seat on the second level and spent most of the ride enjoying the view of the Alps as we crossed from Italy into Austria. Next, we got a comfortable Austrian train to Vienna.

Things seemed to be turning to our favour.

We packed a lunch of proscuitto, olives, cheese, and bread in Italy for the journey, but ran out before Vienna. There was nothing open around the train station, so we decided we could afford some overpriced train food, no matter how suspect it might seem.

The sounds of our hopes crashing when the train arrived could have deafened people around us. The train looked like it arrived from the 1970s East Bloc.

It was old, with peeling paint, faded upholstery and reeked of stale cigarette smoke.We managed to get a compartment to ourselves, but could not get comfortable enough to sleep.

There also no dining car, so the final leg of our journey was spent with grumbling stomachs, which we sated at a McDonald’s in Budapest after we finally arrived, almost 18 hours later than expected.

The Alps, from our Austrian double decker bus.