You meet the coolest people on trains

Hi all! This is just a quick little update because I'm knackered at the moment (I'll explain why in a moment), and I don't trust myself to type anything coherent about Krakow and Auschwitz tonight, I'll post that another day. I thought instead, I'd tell you about the most awesome peoples we met on the train to Prague today!

This morning didn't start off too well; we had a bunch of obnoxious people in our dorm (French I think) who decided that they'd get up at 6 effing 30 and have breakfast in the effing dorm, whilst talking in normal & raised voices. The previous evening we'd gone to bed late because we got talking to Carrie (the girl from Doncaster/Shef we met in the hostel), but we'd been as quiet as possible going to bed, and not talking. Why they thought it fine to carry on like that in the morning while there were other (sleepy!) people in the dorm, I don't know.

Either way, we got to the station and got on our first train. We got to the station and made our next connection. It was on the platform that Kim asked a random guy if we were on the right platform, and he said he thought so. He asked if he could sit with us, and we said yea. We found a cabin with just one guy in and so we sat there. These guys were awesome!!

They were both about 50 I think, but looked a bit younger, and they've both had some awesome adventures. The guy on the platform was called Ken and although he's an American, he's incredibly well travelled and polite. He loves Monty Python & Are You Being Served etc etc, stuff like that. He seems really... average, when first talking to him, but he told us about some of the crazy stuff he's done, like when he travelled through Africa and the group he was with bribed their way into one of the countries that was closed to tourists. Their truck was accosted shortly after that and a police man offered to go with them to their hotel to stop them getting into any more trouble, but when they got there they were arrested! They were told it was because they had bypassed road blocks, but they had a police man with them! Anyway, they got put in prison and had their passports taken from them, but their cell backed onto this first floor balcony, so one of the guys he was with, jumped down and ran for it. He told the guy at the gate that he was "just nipping out for a coke", and the guard let him go! He then ran to the American Embassy and asked for help (he was a Brit, but there was no British Embassy, and Ken was obviously with them, so the Americans could help). The American Embassy got them their passports back and got them out of there, so it was all good .

Ken had loads of stories like this, it was hard to believe that he'd done all this stuff! The horror stories he had about dodgy taxi drivers, and his trip through the congo (guns pointed at them almost everyday!)... its quite amazing he's still here! He's a Civil Engineer in the USA, but gets 4 months off a year because of the economy at the moment, so he travels.

The other guy, the one already on the train, we just call Dude. He is one of the founding members of the Netherlands chapter of Greenpeace and still works for the company with the fight against nuclear power stations. He works in Brussels 3 weeks out of the month, then goes to Prague to see his daughter for the other week. He too has done some awesome stuff, for example, he once went to a village, just inside the "safe zone" from the Chernobyl disaster to collect samples (soil etc I think) and told the authorities that it was still way too radioactive to declare it within the "safe zone". They didn't listen. So he and some friends broke into a government facility and put the samples in their office. If there was a problem with it being there, there is a problem with it being in the "safe zone" :P

He told us loads of incredible stuff about his life and just random facts and knowledge he had. Kim's got more of it written down, and I'm too tired to write it here at the moment, so check out Kim's next post to read more about Dude and Ken

Dude did save us from a rather confusing situation though. We got just outside of Prague on the train, when an announcement came on the tannoy which we obviously didn't understand. He translated for us, and apparently something was broken and would take half hour to fix, so we needed to get off the train and get another one to a random Prague train station. Dude showed us where to go and then took us to the metro station at the train station we ended up at before heading off to see his daughter. Ken then helped us navigate the metro lines here to where we needed to be.

Between them, they saved us a lot of hassle, confusion, and mild panic They also made a 6 hour train journey fun and seem a hell of a lot shorter Woop for Ken & Dude!!!