This is a cautionary tale about how the best weekend of your life can turn into the worst. Even though what I am about to tell you was dangerous and horrendously frightening it will still never stop me travelling and I hope it won't put you off exploring either. Hopefully this will just make everyone aware of possibly one of the worst scenarios that can happen whilst travelling. I have learnt a lot from this experience and even though what happened completely sucked, I feel significantly wiser from it all.
So here we go:
After the festival finished Ellie and I hopped on the over night train back up to Zagreb to start our journey down to Greece to climb Mount Olympus. The south of Croatia is a bit of a dead end for transport, so to get anywhere else in Europe by train you have to travel back to Zagreb; the capital of Croatia. Ellie and I were in the sleeping section of the train with three other guys (whom we had coincidentally met on the train to the festival a few days earlier.) Our train room was 6 beds so there was a bed spare. The other guys told us that their stop was a few hours before Zagreb so they would be waking up at around 4am. The train departed at 10pm-ish and after a couple hours of chatting we all fell asleep. At 4am their alarm went off. I woke them up as I was the first one to hear their alarm (I am a very light sleeper, especially on a noisy train). This is where it all goes a bit tits up. The next thing I knew I was being woken up by Ellie telling me that we were at Zagreb already and... that she couldn't find her phone. I had completely blanked out and couldn't even remember falling asleep after the others left the train. I looked over to my bag which was on my bed by my feet and the zip was open. It didn't take me long to realise that ALL of my money had gone. The thing I found very peculiar was that as I said before I am a very light sleeper; the guys phone alarm woke me up, so I would have surely heard if someone had come into our room. After frantically double checking all of our luggage for Ellie's phone and my money we decided to approach the more-than-shady train guard, who simply shrugged at us and walked away. We got off the train not knowing what to do and just sat on the platform for half an hour. After the adrenaline of what was happening wore off we both started to notice that neither of us were feeling too great. I was feeling very groggy and confused, with a sore throat; most certainly as if we had been drugged... I mean what else would explain not waking up to the noise of someone going through all our bags in a tiny train room...
(I would just like to mention that the other guys in our train room had nothing to do with this. A few hours after everything happened I wrote an angry facebook status about what had happened to us and very soon after that I got a phone call from one of our train buddies; making sure we were ok and reassuring us that they had nothing to do with the robbing. We are good pals now and will hopefully see them at the festival next year :D)
Our train was sat at the platform for quite some while so it gave me a chance to go and ask the train guard for help again. As I walked along the platform towards him, he saw me and quickly scurried onto the train away from my reach. Honestly WTF? I'm not saying he was responsible for what happened (we will never know who did this) but really he wasn't exactly making any effort to not seem dodgy. It really gets worse from here: Luckily the thieves hadn't taken my phone (possibly because it's an old iPhone model and it is covered in scratches) so we were able to call home for help. Everyone told us to go straight to the police so we found the train station manager who could speak English and he called the police to the station. After being questioned by the police we were told to go to the police station to file an official report. After dragging our 18kilo rucksacks across town to the police station we were asked to sit in a room with some police officer and explain what had happened to him. He was wearing jeans and a scruffy t-shirt... not a very reassuring look for a police officer. Whilst he was typing up something on his computer Ellie said to me something along the lines of; "oh i'm so bummed I lost my phone and all the photos from the festival"! The police man clearly overheard, to which he replied jokingly "oh i'm sure they'll be on the internet in a couple of days". Not really the right thing to say whilst we were still distraught about what was happening to us. After the delightful visit to he police station we found ourselves back at the train station. We were meant to be getting back on another train which would then lead to another two overnight trains until we reached Greece. Nonetheless that was NOT happening. We were sat at the station for around 5 hours until we decided that the best thing to do would be to get to the airport to see if we could book a cheap last minute flight to Greece instead. We withdrew some money from a cash machine and jumped into a taxi to the airport. Once we got there we went straight to the booking desk. The cheapest flight they could offer us to Greece was around €500 each!!! That was our great plan ruined. Quite ironically the cheapest flight we could get our hands on was a flight to.... wait for it..... ENGLAND!!! Completely soul destroying but we had no other option. We took some time to think about whether it was worth returning to England or not. We also thought now was the time to access our rather forgotten about emergency money which was well hidden in a small compartment in Ellie's rucksack. This was when we made the heart crushing discovery that...dun dun dun.. the mother f***ers had found and stole this too. At this point I was just so done with it all that I said I could put the flights back to England on my debit card and suffer the financial consequences later on. Whilst we were both booking the tickets at the desk I received a call from the British Embassy who my Grandparents had kindly rang to try and help us out. Whilst talking on the phone to the kind Embassy lady I completely broke down in tears, which also set Ellie off. Suddenly we were surrounded by several lovely women working at the airport. (Our tears obviously appealed to their womanly nature). They booked us on to the plane back to England (which was in the evening the next day). They gave us water and chocolate and told us there were bed/seat things upstairs which we could camp out on until the next day. We went upstairs and prepared ourselves mentally for the 28 hour wait at the airport for our flight. The kindness kept coming after this. It was no longer than about 20 minutes until one of the nice ladies approached us and told us that she had managed to upgrade us to the earlier flight which was only 10 hours away (much better than 28). A couple of hours after that another employee came up and gave us a pack of wafer biscuits and then a giant box of drinks and snacks another hour or so after that. He then came back upstairs one last time at around 10pm and gave us a pizza that he had ordered for us. All of this kindness really helped in restoring our faith in humanity.
So all in all Ellie and I lost around £800 in cash, one iPhone and about £500 in bookings which we couldn't attend due to our untimely return home. (Luckily 2 weeks later we were able to fly out to Italy to continue our trip).
Also after doctors visits and researching similar cases on the internet we can confirm that we were actually gassed on the train.
Croatia is still beautiful despite what happened...
(I would just like to mention that the other guys in our train room had nothing to do with this. A few hours after everything happened I wrote an angry facebook status about what had happened to us and very soon after that I got a phone call from one of our train buddies; making sure we were ok and reassuring us that they had nothing to do with the robbing. We are good pals now and will hopefully see them at the festival next year :D)
Our train was sat at the platform for quite some while so it gave me a chance to go and ask the train guard for help again. As I walked along the platform towards him, he saw me and quickly scurried onto the train away from my reach. Honestly WTF? I'm not saying he was responsible for what happened (we will never know who did this) but really he wasn't exactly making any effort to not seem dodgy. It really gets worse from here: Luckily the thieves hadn't taken my phone (possibly because it's an old iPhone model and it is covered in scratches) so we were able to call home for help. Everyone told us to go straight to the police so we found the train station manager who could speak English and he called the police to the station. After being questioned by the police we were told to go to the police station to file an official report. After dragging our 18kilo rucksacks across town to the police station we were asked to sit in a room with some police officer and explain what had happened to him. He was wearing jeans and a scruffy t-shirt... not a very reassuring look for a police officer. Whilst he was typing up something on his computer Ellie said to me something along the lines of; "oh i'm so bummed I lost my phone and all the photos from the festival"! The police man clearly overheard, to which he replied jokingly "oh i'm sure they'll be on the internet in a couple of days". Not really the right thing to say whilst we were still distraught about what was happening to us. After the delightful visit to he police station we found ourselves back at the train station. We were meant to be getting back on another train which would then lead to another two overnight trains until we reached Greece. Nonetheless that was NOT happening. We were sat at the station for around 5 hours until we decided that the best thing to do would be to get to the airport to see if we could book a cheap last minute flight to Greece instead. We withdrew some money from a cash machine and jumped into a taxi to the airport. Once we got there we went straight to the booking desk. The cheapest flight they could offer us to Greece was around €500 each!!! That was our great plan ruined. Quite ironically the cheapest flight we could get our hands on was a flight to.... wait for it..... ENGLAND!!! Completely soul destroying but we had no other option. We took some time to think about whether it was worth returning to England or not. We also thought now was the time to access our rather forgotten about emergency money which was well hidden in a small compartment in Ellie's rucksack. This was when we made the heart crushing discovery that...dun dun dun.. the mother f***ers had found and stole this too. At this point I was just so done with it all that I said I could put the flights back to England on my debit card and suffer the financial consequences later on. Whilst we were both booking the tickets at the desk I received a call from the British Embassy who my Grandparents had kindly rang to try and help us out. Whilst talking on the phone to the kind Embassy lady I completely broke down in tears, which also set Ellie off. Suddenly we were surrounded by several lovely women working at the airport. (Our tears obviously appealed to their womanly nature). They booked us on to the plane back to England (which was in the evening the next day). They gave us water and chocolate and told us there were bed/seat things upstairs which we could camp out on until the next day. We went upstairs and prepared ourselves mentally for the 28 hour wait at the airport for our flight. The kindness kept coming after this. It was no longer than about 20 minutes until one of the nice ladies approached us and told us that she had managed to upgrade us to the earlier flight which was only 10 hours away (much better than 28). A couple of hours after that another employee came up and gave us a pack of wafer biscuits and then a giant box of drinks and snacks another hour or so after that. He then came back upstairs one last time at around 10pm and gave us a pizza that he had ordered for us. All of this kindness really helped in restoring our faith in humanity.
So all in all Ellie and I lost around £800 in cash, one iPhone and about £500 in bookings which we couldn't attend due to our untimely return home. (Luckily 2 weeks later we were able to fly out to Italy to continue our trip).
Also after doctors visits and researching similar cases on the internet we can confirm that we were actually gassed on the train.
Croatia is still beautiful despite what happened...
This website is good to have a quick read over, for similar travel stories and advice.
H x
.JPG)
