Some readers of this blog will be familiar with the Traveling Salesman Problem: Given any set of points, what is the shortest path to follow that will visit all of the points? This is pretty easy for a few points, but gets quickly difficult as we add more. Ants are good at solving this problem - they leave trails of pheremones on their paths and eventually the collective efforts of the whole ant colony will find the right path. Not bad for animals with no real brain. Train ticket agents in Budapest, on the other hand, do in theory have a brain. But, it appears, they are no good at the TSP.

Despite my repeated objections, my not-so-friendly ticket agent insisted that the only way for me to get to my destination in Slovenia was to travel through Zagreb. This is akin to travelling from Vancouver to Winnipeg via Toronto. Thankfully, I like trains, so the journey wasn't so bad. And I got to get my passport stamped five times.