Travel Photography, Writing and Photoblog from Matt Feldman

Welcome to Cannes, where the idle rich luxuriate and vaporize large sums of their money, all in shocking disregard for struggling backpackers. While beach chairs and umbrellas rent for €30 outside the Cannes Inter-Continental (€400 and above per night), the sand on the free slice of beach, with the backpacking, pasta-and-sauce eating, tap-water-drinking proletariat, is every bit as nice. Except for the old man, oblivious to the crowds, completely content with dropping his suit and taking a leak at the end of the pier.

Nice is everything I remember it to be: Insane. Bars where everyone is dancing on tables (Wayne's), hotel and hostel parties, beachfront lounging along the unfathomably beautiful French Riviera. More than most other places, this part of the world makes it very difficult to even consider the Departures board at the train station.

But after three days in Nice and Cannes, perhaps the only other place to go to see even more extreme expenditures of money is up the road in the two-square-kilometer mountainous parking lot dedicated to Mercedes, BMWs, Ferraris, Bentleys, Rolls Royce's and copious other exotic frivolity. This automotive xanadu is known to the rest of us mere mortals as the country of Monaco. Tucked into a corner of the Riviera between France and Italy, this Botox-and-Silicone playground is also home to some of the world's most extraordinary yachts (because crusing in the the Bugatti just gets, well, boring!).

I visit "Le Louis XV," one of two three-Michelin-star restaurants run by Alain Ducasse. He is regarded as one of the world's finest chefs and the only chef to have two restaurants reach the highest pinnacle of Michelin's critical acclaim. It's no surprise that the prices on the menu match — I estimate a typical lunch for one to cost a few hundred Euros. The closest I get is the interior lobby. With even the price of ice cream in Monaco approaching double digits, I'm content to raise anchor.

Backpacker Reality isn't far away, however, as the World War 1 Prisoner Camp-inspired Italian trains cars prove. Heading eastward, I move to Venice.

Italy lasts less than five hours (and yes, that goes for their football team, too). The lines long, the hostels full, the breakfast expensive (but still exquisitely delicious), I'm out of Venice in under 45 minutes, moving eastward again to Trieste, where a bus takes me across the border to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.

Its beauty is classic. Markets, bridges with sculptures, a mountaintop castle, abundant outdoor cafes on the banks of the river, Ljubljana is a treat. And so are these uniquely Slovenian orange-and-chocolate cookies, which I appear to be addicted to.

Set on an emerald blue lake, surrounded by the gentle mountains that mark the beginning of the Julian Alps, Bled has been a tourist favourite for decades. About a hundred decades, in fact, as the resort town of 5000 people is celebrating its thousandth year. And it's no surprise — after three incredible days (including one spent entirely inside, away from the rain — even that is incredible), I've taken close to 150 pictures of the tiny church atop the tiny island, of the roaring rapids and waterfalls of the impossibly green Vintgar Gorge and of the whole thing from a mountain perch.

Now, searching for something very different, I return to Ljubljana and roll the travel dice with my next train ticket.

T he first bombs fell about 10 pm. Their arrival was no surprise — journalists left the city two days prior. Residents gathered in Cold War-era shelters as the air raid sirens wailed and radio reports warned of the need for gas masks. The state-run television station blinked out. Explosions erupted around the city and the lights went black. Over the course of a few hours, key military and governmental installations here and around the country were struck by cruise missiles and satellite-guided bombs from stealth aircraft. In the morning, the city awoke to investigate the decimated hulks of warped steel and shattered concrete and fire-scarred trees.

That was five years ago and here now in Belgrade, much has changed. This is a capital city in transition. It is dirty, it is polluted, it is leaden with communist-era monstrosities of architecture: veritable odes to plainness, executed with unwavering zeal for copious amounts of gray concrete. But the economic engine of change is turning, albeit slowly, and moving Belgrade and Serbia toward economic and aesthetic prosperity of other European capitals.

Like the ruined military buildings that still dot the city, attitudes here, amongst a few young Serbs I spoke with, could still use some renovating. Talk of NATO — which launched the 78-day bombing campaign that would ultimately, yet belatedly, halt the genocide in Kosovo — or the Clinton administration brings harsh words of ridicule. The cruise-missile-installed air conditioning of buildings around town — many still unrepaired and crumbling — is still much despised.

"Look at what the Albanians are doing to us and our country," Katrina, an economics major at Belgrade University working at the hostel, told me. "They're making Serbs live in ghettos in their own cities," referring to Prishtina, in Kosovo, where under protection of NATO, the ethnic Albanians have begun to rebound. "We are only five percent of the population there and this is what they do to us." Did it matter that the Serbian five percent, with a brutal iron fist of repression, managed to largely exterminate an entire race of people? "They need to go somewhere else."

And what of Slobodan Milosevic, the man who brought the term "ethnic cleansing" into everyday lexicon? He's hated in Serbia not because of his brutal atrocities but because of the fiscal ruin he brought to the country. "We are poor and had corrupt government because of him and I am glad he is gone," said Katrina. That he ordered the killing of tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people was not even a factor in her dislike.

And as Slobo now stands trial in The Hague for various Crimes Against Humanity, his wife still lives just south of central Belgrade, refusing to move out of their official residence. Rallies in support of her husband still draw loyal thousands. I wandered the streets of their residential neighborhood, recalling televised scenes of both protest and backing for the former ruler.

It is in this neighborhood that the Historical Museum of Yugoslavia resides, near the grave of Marsal Tito, the revered Communist Party leader who controlled Yugoslavia after WWII. Here, the houses are large but the lawns are unkept and cluttered with foliage and assorted detritus. The park looks like a jungle. Kids bike down the dilapidated and cracked streets, past the armed guards with Mrs. M inside. In fitting allegory, an abandoned and rusting Yugo sits on the street nearby. Regular people, presumably, live in this area, too, and I'm curious to know what happens when their kids hit a baseball into the backyard of a brutal dictator. Foul?

The Historical Museum is open but deserted and spray-painted graffiti covers the steps and sculptures. Weeds grow high around the walls and fences and between the cracks in the sidewalks. At the entrance to Tito's park, a soldier is asleep, leaning back in his chair.

Alone in the park, I wander through the gardens and into one of two mini-museums on the quiet grounds. A U-shaped collection of glass cubicles, most of the contents of this strange building is hidden from view by dark curtains that cover the floor-to-ceiling glass facades. It's a bit like walking into the fish section of a pet store, but the contents of the glass boxes remain obscured. The one section with its curtains drawn is left open for more than display. An open and unguarded door leads to a re-creation of Tito's office with its plush carpet and rich burgundy hues. I look around the building and check outside the front door. I am still alone. The opportunity is unparalleled. I enter the room, sit at Marsal Tito's actual desk, in Marsal Tito's actual chair and proceed to order the invasion of my lunch.

Conqueringly yours,
Mattovic