We didn’t realise it at the time, but our last night in
Poland was also the last night we would camp on this trip. We found a good spot
in a pine plantation which had become one of our favourite camping locations as
they usually have all the prerequisites of a perfect spot: a good network of
tracks to drive on, the ground will be relatively flat, always plenty of
firewood, and other than a couple of trucks every couple of months, no traffic
whatsoever. It was a bit bitter sweet crossing the border to Germany, passing
the old buildings that are now empty but not so long ago would have been writhe
with guards and officials, police and military. On one hand it was a relief knowing
we wouldn’t have to worry about the bureaucracy involved in border crossings
again, but actually we have greatly enjoyed the challenge of playing the game that
these crossings are, and knowing that we had none more between us and Scotland
brought home the feeling of the end of the trip.
We got straight on the autobahn heading to Berlin where we
would stay with Edgar, who along with his friend Andreas, we had met many
months ago now in Uzbekistan. We spent a small amount of time one evening with
Edgar in Samarqand, but it was amongst a group, and it wasn’t until we stumbled
across each other in Tashkent a couple of weeks later that we got to know them
much better and realised that these were blokes we definitely wanted to be
friends with. We hadn’t made very specific plans before arriving in Berlin, but
Edgar knew we were coming and we had his phone number. Unfortunately we just
didn’t have a phone to contact him on, so our first hour or possibly more after
arriving in Berlin was spent trying to get in touch with him.
First of all we searched for wi-fi, hoping to get in touch
with him via the internet, but after wasting a bunch of time trying to log on
to various servers, and waiting whilst horribly slow connections ate into our
afternoon, we decided just to bite the bullet and look for a pay phone. We were
pretty cynical about the chances of just stumbling across one, but fortunately
we passed a couple just after deciding to look. We rang Edgar, really unsure of
whether this was going to work out, and in the two minutes of conversation
before the €12
we’d scrounged together in coins had run out and we were cut off, he gave us an
address, but we didn’t manage to establish anything else. We went straight there with no idea of when he
might come to meet us but hoping it would be soonish, and couldn’t believe it
when he was already there. After all the hoo-ha and our concern for lack of
planning it all worked out perfectly. Andreas wasn’t able to host us, but
between Edgar and his friend who lived around the corner, they were able to put
us up and we couldn’t have had a better time with them.
The thing about meeting people when travelling is that
whilst you may get on like a house on fire, you might see eye to eye on every
subject you can think of, you never want to stop talking to them and you
consider them to be good friends, it is much different to getting to know
people when they are amidst their real lives. The reason we used our short time
in Europe as a chance to visit a few of the people we’d met on this trip wasn’t
for free accommodation or because they were necessarily on our way, or even for
the reasons that we like to use Couch Surfing. Our purpose for visiting these
people several months after having met them in various “exotic” countries was
to solidify the friendships and move them from the category of “some cool
people we met travelling” to “really good friends”. The peculiar thing about
this was that whilst they had been home and had resumed their lives several
months ago, we were still a group of rogue travellers who had been on the road
ever since. This was funny to think of from both our point of view and theirs. Another
interesting thing is that whilst we have now witnessed their regular lives and
seen how they go about their day to day business, their impression of us still
doesn’t include that aspect of who we are.
After Edgar and Andreas in Berlin we headed to Nurnberg to
stay with Chrissie and Daniel who we met in Cambodia (Blog Day 59 - Seven guys in a car). From there we shot through to
Amsterdam, stopping in Aachen on the way to have lunch with Farnas, an Iranian
girl who we met at the bazaar in Shiraz. In Amsterdam we stayed with Priscillia
who oddly enough had never met Trevor before as we met her in the Philippines
whilst he was being shipping to Malaysia. During our days in Amsterdam, Sven
who we met in Belgrade, bumped into on the streets of Budapest and spent New
Year in Prague with (Blog Day 281 – Youdon’t always get what you pay for), made the journey from his nearby
hometown to spend an afternoon with us in the city. Our next stop was Gent in
Belgium to visit Josje and Remco who we picked up in a remote village in
Kazakhstan, travelled through the desert for a week with (Blog Day 138 – How an afternoon searching forflamingos became six days in the desert with some hitch hikers), and met up
with again a couple of weeks later so we could explore Kyrgyzstan together
(Blog Day 148 – Beer and shashliks on thebeach gone wrong and Day 152 - Life as a nomad).
No comments:
Post a Comment