The Berkshires to Istria, and back (1/2)

Terminal San Basilio

If you travel with any degree of awareness, you realize how inconceivable many of the things we take for granted would have been not a generation ago. You can buy a ticket to pretty much get anywhere you want on earth, at a shockingly low price if you think about it. Then you are zipped around in the stratosphere over oceans that once took weeks to cross, and think so little of it you fall asleep. 

For my grandparents, Venice was a place where rich people sometimes saw, but was nothing more than a thing in books, movies and legends. Istria was completely off the map, a neglected, poor, sickly forgotten part of the socialist bloc.

I say all this as a preamble because what follows will look a lot like complaining, and I don't want to leave the impression that I don't appreciate being able to get around. I sure do.

Yet there are trade-offs. This was the first year of the four that I've gone to Croatia that I went from the U.S. and not from Russia and Croatia (I wrote about last year's trip here). And now I realize how vanishingly rare it is to see another American when I'm there. Getting there and back was something of an odyssey, especially coming from Williamstown. The first leg was a five-hour bus ride on Peter Pan from the center of town to Port Authority, then a night in New York. I was trying to do things in an affordable manner, which meant that none of the times lined up neatly, meaning a lot of dead time.

This year, I ended up with tickets on Turkish Airlines, which had by far the cheapest fares over the Atlantic this summer. It was a pretty grim year for ticket prices to Europe, and it took weeks of searching to find the right price. I'd heard on travel websites that Turkish was luring more North American business, trying to turn Istanbul into a hub, so that explains our brief burst of luck.

I first left the country in 1999, and have done so quite a few times since, and each time seems to usher in a new era of discomfort and nuisance. On the plus side, Turkish Airlines leaves JFK earlier than most other European flights, so you avoid the late afternoon / evening crush that makes getting through security an ordeal. But the planes keep getting more and more absurd. I realized this time with alarm that the exact distance from the back of your seat to the one in front of you is the same as the distance from my tailbone to my knee. So, for anyone an inch taller than me, you're talking about physical impossibilities. As it is, this distance is too small for what we remember as a standard tray table — now you have these bisected mini-ones, which are perfectly useless if the guy in front of you has his seat back. The one thing that has gotten better are the new entertainment systems newer planes have rigged up for each individual seat. These are pretty cool, and if you are lucky create a kind of cocoon experience that can make a long trip bearable.

I landed in Istanbul, and had a few hours in Ataturk International Airport, where I had coffee and read Jan Morris' The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage once again. Then a short flight up to Venice. Air travel is so cognitively disruptive if you graft it into a historical context. In Venice's best days, its wealth and fame and riches relied heavily on managing the treacherous trade from one city to the other. The republic was the direct product and inheritor of Byzantium's Roman heritage, its overseas empire was born by conquering the city in the Fourth Crusade, and after the Turkish Conquest, this was the epicenter of all sorts of existential terror. That's a lot of history flowing back and forth over that distance from point to point, and in 2013 I jumped from one to the other almost as an afterthought, in a two and a half hour flight over the once-formidable Balkan interior.

The one part of this whole voyage that made me nervous was finding my way from the airport in Venice to the ferry terminal. I know that the great fun of Venice is allowing yourself to wander and get lost amid the campi and the ponti. But getting from Point A to Point B with a big suitcase and a time limit made me nervous. I studied the route on the map ahead of time, and made my way along with lots of self-doubt from Piazzale Roma down Fondamenta Cazziola to Fondamenta Cereri Dorsoduro to Fondamenta Rossa to Fondamenta Briati to Fondamenta San Sebastiano to San Basilio. And I made it with time to have a sandwich and check my email.

The ferry trip was a product of the necessity of timing. The usual way to get over to Istria would be to take the train to Trieste, then catch a bus down the coast. But my flight arrived so late that I would miss the connections, meaning that I'd have to spend a night. It was cheaper to spring for the ferry. I secretly really wanted to do this, because it sounds so romantic and proper — one really should arrive and leave Venice by the sea. The reality of the modern voyage was not so charming. The ship was more like an airliner than I thought. The windows were filthy, so you couldn't really see out, and the air conditioner was blasting far more than necessary. But it gives you a sense of the scale, that it is three hours of motoring over the open sea before you reach what was the heartland of the Venetian overseas empire.

My wife was waiting at the pier, with the owner of the flat we rented who had driven to give me a ride. That was very welcome.