Looking for Miramare

TRIESTE. Although one rationally hopes for everything to go according to plan when traveling, it is often the case that the best experiences occur when those plans go pear shaped. So it was on my second and final day in Trieste.

I was quite convinced that nothing could match the serenity of the Rilke Walk along the cliffs of the Adriatic, in Duino, which I’d discovered the night before. But this didn't prevent me from visiting Miramare, a seaside town famous for its opulent 19th century castle.

It was a perfect spring day, and from the train the view over the Adriatic was postcard stuff, a cobalt slab all the way to the horizon. The problem occurred when, at Miramare station, the doors wouldn’t open. I raced through the carriage to the next door, only to find another guy standing helplessly before his doors, which also weren’t opening. A nearby conductor merely shrugged his shoulders at the both of us, and said something about getting off at Monfalcone, another twenty minutes away.

There were in fact two other guys in standing before the door. The one who had also tried to disembark was, judging by his accent, clearly an Englishman. We both agreed to hop off at the next stop, and try to make our way back to Miramare.

In this way, I came to be stranded in Auriviso - basically the middle of nowhere, a type of tumble-weed, one bar town - with absolutely no sense of how to get to Miramare... the next train was four hours away, at 3 in the afternoon.

After much difficulty, we found the town’s one bus stop, and also the strange ticket vending machine. During this time, a found out that my new friend, James (to be distinguished from by Kiwi friend James from Rome) had recently received his doctorate in physics from Cambridge, and was employed at the world famous International Institute for Theoretical Physics immediately beside the Miramare Castle. He specialized in models of heat transference, but felt under the pump to produce more results than he had managed in the year he’d been working.

James had heard of a mythical, ancient path, that apparently stretched from the next small town on the bus route, down to the ocean. Our search for the path was shambolic; we asked every single person we saw (about five) for directions, and each one of them mumbled words such as ‘lontano’ and ‘brutto’ – long and harsh / ugly / crap.

When we finally came across the long, harsh, ugly and crap path, we knew we were in the right place. For the first half, ‘path’ was too generous a word to describe the barest of impressions in chest-high grass and thorny briars. We came to a few divergences, clambered through barb-wire fences, across private property, olive groves and orchards. At one stage we narrowly averted what looked like some sort of large, rusty animal trap, clearly forgotten about in the long grass.

The whole affair turned into a matter of survival. We talked about the challengers faced by explorers; the possibility of a venture capital start-up that acted as an ‘angel’ for lost travelers; the ancient uses of the path. Eventually we spied the stone foundations of the path proper, in the distance, and upon reaching this, we saw the welcome sight of the sea.

(The 'real' path. I think I was too preoccupied to take photos when on the 'cattivo' path.)

Eventually we made it to the Institute. James pointed me in the direction of the vast gardens belonging to the castle, shook my hand, and went to work – two and a half hours late. As I turned and made my way, I felt strange about parting with this guy (we didn’t exchange emails), an absolute stranger a few hours before – for those hours were spent on a truly memorable adventure.

*

I mentioned that there were in fact two men in the train carriage at Miramare (where the doors failed to open). James was one. The other was a dark man dressed in a pair of blue mechanic’s overalls. His skin seemed olive or tanned, and dirty, as though he’d been hard at work for months. His closely cropped black her poked out from underneath an old blue cap.

The reason the image of this man has burnt itself into my memory is this: when James and I met in the carriage, we turned to him and asked if he too had been prevented from getting off the train. He didn’t reply, and obviously didn’t know English, but after further prompting, he simply shrugged his shoulders and showed us a piece of paper. On it was written two words, with an arrow from the first to the second. These words were, respectively: Trieste… Romania.

On seeing these two words, and the slightly baffled look on the man’s face, I realized in that instant that my own troubles (not being able to disembark at the station I intended to) were of absolutely no significance whatsoever.