Quite many hours had passed since I woke up, concurrently with the sunrise, at that random field somewhere in southern ex-Yugoslavia. After enjoying a cup of coffee in the company of the world’s awakening, I set off pedaling right away. Many kilometers I’d covered and many hills I’d surmounted while defying the extreme summer heat throughout that day. And now, late afternoon, heat as relentless as ever, I was toilsomely pedaling along that long, straight road, ahead of which lay Lake Doiran, the Greek border, and the end of yet another tough cycling day.
Several hours must have gone by since noting the last signs of human presence. The entire surrounding landscape with me amidst it felt utterly desolated. It was then I discerned what I first took for a single black dot, and then for two – a taller and a shorter one – moving figures at my vision’s diffracted ken.
I was moving slowly towards them, and they even more slowly towards me. We were only a few meters short of our ways meeting when I finally could distinguish them clearly for what they were: a man and a dog.
We stopped by each other. “Hey there,” I said. The man greeted back with a Slav-accented “hello” and the dog with a curious, intent look, a slight snort, and a delighted waggle.
During the half silent minute or so that followed, we got to examine each other while catching up with our breaths. The man was excessively tall; dirty and drained; with a long, frowsy beard and a serenity-radiating countenance; wearing a torn and unwashed-for-weeks set of black clothes; carrying an enormous backpack with a tent and a mat attached on the outside and cooking utensils hanging out from it. The dog was an all-black, phlegmatic Miniature Boxer carrying a pair of panniers loaded with stuff seemingly as heavy as himself.
“Where do you guys come from?” I initiated the talk.
“From the Czech Republic.”
“Where are you coming from, and where are you heading too?”
“We started from home four months ago. We walked to Istanbul through Slovakia, Hungry, Romania, and Bulgaria. We are on our way back home now through Greece and Yugoslavia.”
That was pretty much all we said. We stayed there silent for a few more seconds, wished each other good luck, and resumed our ways in opposite directions… I, pedaling; they, walking.
The story you’ve just read is part of my Real Stories of Real People collection, where I recount encounters with remarkable characters I’ve met on the road. You can read the whole series on my blog here. And if you’d like to take them with you on your e-reader or as a physical book—and support my work—you can get the book on Amazon for the price of a coffee.
