Slovakia

Refusing to be ill and sit home, I did what you are never supposed to do: hitchhike while feeling poorly. Probably a fluke that the third lift I got after leaving Paris was one straight from somewhere in Southern Germany all the way to Slovakia. Feverish, I rode these 100s of kilometres, lapsing in and out of sleep. The last thing I remembered in Bavaria was a radio announcement that deer were on the motorway, then I snoozed all through Austria and when I was finally shaken awake, it was to the familiar hiss and lilt of a Slavic language.
I couldn't resist and celebrated the arrival in the new country with some zmrzlina quickly snaffled from the roadhouse café. A great word for a great thing: Zmrzlina means ice-cream. Listening closer to the language spoken around me, intelligible tatters of speech wafted over to my ears, some of them sounding like archaisms to the Russian-speaker's ear.
I was on the northern fringes of the continuum of mostly southern Slavic languages whose conspicuous absence of vowels inspired a nineties Onion article about Bill Clinton airlifting A's,I's and E's to the area since they were obviously in dire need of them. In reality, it is the letters "R" and "L", semi-vowels in English, function as full ones here, I was told. That's how you get people with names like Vlk Trlin, which I would like to pretend was the name of my next driver, but that would be taking too much literary licence.

It took me three rides to get across the country, lengthwise. Each driver turned out more forthcoming than the precedent one. The first bought me coffee, the second bought me lunch, the third one dinner and drove a 80 km detour to drop me off at the border. Some 20 kilometers before it we sailed past a war monument. A first sign of the real East. "Russia is not very far from here", the locals said when we chatted with them at the garage where we stopped for tea. It was not without a certain degree of pride that my driver, a very knowledgeable man, sub rosa informed me that the country's actual name was now "Ukraine".

The penultimate small town before the border was called Lúcky. And that's how I felt.

We sit like Platon's ideals in front of our fickle, monstrously distorted shadows, projected behind our backs by the force of a single frail flame of a candle propped up in the sand at our feet. The thick traces of soot on the ceiling melt and morph like shapeshifting ghosts when you put your head in your neck. When you stare straight ahead the vault of the sky stretches white with starlight out from under this fuliginous arch.
Mars is laboriously slowly making its way through Taurus. Along the frayed edge of a neighbouring mountain ridge a first corner of grey augurs the idle advent of the following day.

The inside of the cave echoes with the music produced by Pedro on his Hutsul dulcimer. There are no words for this beauty. These are the most wondrous, fairy tale-like sounds I've ever heard. Vasya sits beside Pedro, blowing the Jew's harp.

I absolutely wanted my new friend Vasya here with me when playing stone age in the cave city Mangup. With his long scraggy dreads that reach down to his waist and his wild, tangled beard which right now hangs seperated in two braids of different sizes from his chin, he looks the closest to a paleolithic man I have ever seen.

Livadia

Livadia - Where the sea is the distance, and lies unreal, softer, softest, under a livid sky.

Under Quarantine

Wies is 22 and still lives with his mum and dad. It may seem strange at first, but when you see how he actually lives, you understand. What he calls his home is a massive complex of houses, with a beach just at the back of his living room. Squatted in the early 80's by a group of hippies among whom his parents, the lodgings have been constructed in the 1920's as a hospital complex immediately opposite the international harbour Rotterdam. The idea was that sailors staggering onto land with their heads in the clutches of fevers brought about by vicious tropical diseases could be stacked away immediately from society at large. The street is up to this day called Quarantaineweg and neighbours are few and far in between.

What a luck that the day I made it there, I just happened to come down with swine flu. Perfect place to cough and sneeze and feel miserable.

The symptoms could be excrutiating: At every breath my aching lungs rattled like a beat-up toy car sent to lumber round the model race track one last time. The air wheezed in and out of my respiratory tract, crackling and going through my clotted windpipes like sludge moves through a sieve crusted with dried mud at the end of a long day of sifting for nuggets of precious metal in a silty river. And indeed the search would yield: From time to time my dried lips would part and spit out an half-liquid and amorphous marble of gold.

Whenever I decided I could get up now and drag my body two steps across the room, the plan was foiled at once: I'd have to turn round, plunge back into bed from instant exhaustion, and sleep would crash back over me in cold waves of fever and fatigue. Again I'd be paralysed in horizontal position, stapled to the bedsheets.

By means of finger on world-map, we travel. We imagine the house we are going to move into in Kirgistan, imagine the fruit we are going to pick from trees along the streets in our village, imagine ourselves cook large pots of гречка for our house full of hungry hitchhikers. We push on the months by pure willpower and already follow the road we are going to hitch down to Tibet. Mountains tower up higher and higher before our inner eyes. Ultramarine blue lakes plunge deeper and colder between their tops. Our fingertips travel on and on, cross borders at random, get lost in Indian jungles and so rainforests are made to grow straight out of those Himalayan slopes, volcanoes appear in their place, rivers waver and whirl, become waterfalls, become a sea we sail across, and -clink- we are celebrating next new Year's Eve at the Equator. Our fingers retrace their path. Pages of my passport flash by and fill themselves with visas - long hours waited in queues at embassies, money, stamps, stickers, signatures -all here and gone in a flash.

Travelling with a large fish

Hitchhiking came in the shape and colour you usually get it in Muslim countries: lifts within the blink of an eye, out of their way helpful and friendly drivers, quick kidnappings for improvised barbecues.

The roads were better and the donkeys alongside it not as beat up as those in Morrocco, or neighbouring Algeria.
The presence of well-fed and handsome odd-toed ungulates must surely be "proof that trickle-down economics really work. Even the lowest layer of society is reached!", as John remarked.

As far as tourist touts go, I learnt to say "no, thanks" in as accent-free an Arabic as I could master pretty quickly; John just professionally stuck to the old axiom that "silence is the unbearable repartee" (G.K. Chesterton said it first).

Despite his often eloquent pronouncements, travelling with a thoroughly monolingual Englishman is best likened to travelling with a large fish.
Whenever a local talked to him John just helplessly goggled with his mouth agape like a herring on land.

And although there were some pleasant moments on sandy hilltops (the things they call dunes down there) it can't be a compliment to Tunisia's natural sights when I say that I thought that the best bit of our trip was the night when we drunkenly snuck into the dinosaur park to have our pictures taken with nocturnal brontosauri.

Jebel-Al-Tariq

After a snog goodbye at la Linea bus-station with that handsome Scottish lad I had befriended two days earlier, I was left to my own devices again and out on the streets another time.
The same afternoon in the marina I ran into a fashionably shabby looking guy with a backpack, one look on whom sufficed to make out that he was on the same mission as I -another someone trying to hidrostop out of Europe. Turned out he was Czech and lived on one of those squatted farms around Utregg and we had shared acquaintances. From easy chatting, it was thus an easy step to hospitality and I was invited along to join his camp, out on some sort of rubbish dump on the windbeaten side of the great rock whose foot we clung to. Czech boy had been there for two days, at first alone, then with an English bloke whom he met on the backside of Saypheway's, both of them bending over the bins to see what was being chucked away that evening. During the conversation all three of us had around our campfire that night, I got to find out "English bloke" was an ex-hell´s angel. Since hitting people over the head with iron-bars was part of the deal, he had done something like 8 years in prison. He had five daughters, from three or four different mothers, and because of his love for his offspring, he had, somewhat late in life, become a repentant Christian. Rarely do a wooden cross around one's neck and a facial tattoo go together, but here they did.
We ended up talking from moonrise to sunrise that night. The moonrise was blood orange red and sawtooth edged like a bad sign, the sunrise kitschy pink like the dawn of a new day.
Surrounded though by dead tyres and other rotten car-parts we may have been, these were for the moment shrouded in embellishing obscurity, and we felt we were truely in a beautiful spot, perched upon this ledge of rock jutting out over the sea with the waves crashing under us. In any case we had a grandiose view over the freighter strewn sea stretching from the Spanish coastline receding beyond the horizon to the outermost tip of morrocco vanishing in the haze.
As things came, we were to stay in that spot another four days more. And at the end of them our little crowd of three would have become a real party : our number augmented to five, night after night another person joining our little congregation by the bonfire which kept us warm.
On the evening of my second night (or Czech boy's fourth night) we were joined by a student from England. As I saw him in the darkness over the uneven territory carefully make his way over to us, carrying his bike on his shoulder, all this without shoes on, an alarm bell rang in my head: "uh-oh - hippy alarm!". Dunno if this was for the better or for the worse, but it actually turned out he had just had his 500 Pound shoes stolen as he was taking a shower, so he was in fact a perfectly gentrified type of lad. We chatted another night away and it turned out he was of Egyptian Coptic origin and on a trip biking from Hove to Senegal.
The third evening (on Czech boy's account that would have been the fifth) a Polish guy happening to amble past saw the glimmer of our cigarettes lit and came over to ask for a fag. He was on a hitchhiking trip from Warsaw to Swakopmund, if I recall correctly. We chatted among each other and we all got along jolly well.

We were nearing the end of the third week of December and the next day, we found a little christmas tree to put up in order to lend to our improvised camp a homely seasonal allure. Yes, you got it, happenings were getting just a little bit too outlandish and it was time we left.
And so that day, just in time for kismet to strike, Czech boy found an embarcation for both of us on a 30 metre Australian yacht sailing all the way to St. Nevis. On our last evening our bonfire was violently whipped to rags by the nightly wind and we figured it was going to be an uncomfortable night. But the worst surprise was in the morning because as a proper storm was breaking lose, we were awoken not by the soft blue light of dawn tickling with cool fingers on our eyelids as we had been the other mornings, but by the icy crush of ocean rollers breaking on the rock we slept on and swashing all over ourselves. We were drenched and each of us knew we couldn't stay there another night. So while Marek and I moved to our bunkbeds in the marina which were tiny but nonetheless dry and even sported crisp white sheets on the yacht, the other three adventurers set off to find a house to squat. Apparently they were lucky quickly, because they found an abandonned villa that day, with still some dry matresses and the ashes of their predecessors in it.
For Marek and me, the real trip began now : We were sailing the Atlantic.