Warsaw to Bratislava

Glazed, speckled floors, hard orange seats and a brown arched roof. Next to me, surrounded by their luggage, an American couple were breaking up. "I always thought you were a special person." "What are we gonna do about the hotel?"

I must have fallen asleep on the train because I was woken by doors sliding open and the light clicking on. Wearily, I handed my passport over to the Slovak border guard, then sat by the window watching dawn break as we rolled into Zilina.

Later that afternoon, we took a tram to the end of the line and hiked two and a bit hours up through the woods to Devin Castle. It was closed, as the briefest of glances at my guidebook would have told me from the start.

It wasn't our day: on the bus ride back to town there was a sudden rumble and the skies opened up. We hid under a concrete bridge for half an hour while the rain lashed down. Cars forded the main road and the castle was barely visible up on the hill, hidden under diagonal streams of rain, like dust falling down a mine shaft. It stopped as unexpectedly as it had begun.