Roadside romance
The living room is a sub-zero climate zone. Your warm breath transforms
into semitransparent strings of dripping frost in mid-air. Nevertheless, under
the coffee table, sealed with a thick blanket, the heat, generated by a small built-in
stove, keeps the rest of your bodies in a more semi-tropical environment.
As usual, she has drifted off, cuddled in your arms. All around the living room, darkness is invaded by a flickering bluish hue, animating the various Winnie dolls and Pooh figurines, giving the whole scene a demented teenaged feel. On the telly, your favorite Japanese director is playing a fool’s fool to a bunch of half crazed presenters of a popular local game show. They ignorantly scream and shout, hop and dance, to what is actually the theme of an Israeli folk song, and you decide to give up and turn the whole thing off. Continue reading... 33
At two o’clock sharp, you met up with the girl outside the Tourist Information office, and the two of you spent the day in and around Białowieża’s only currently open café. While you did your very best to manipulate the situation in your favor, desperately attempting to create even the slightest of romantic sparks, so as to ignite a mutual flame of passion, her hearty stove remained unstirred. As a drafty night began to set, and with a fireplace as yet unlit, you gave up on romantic pretense, grabbed her plum-like waist and pressed firm lips against her own. She gave in to your embrace, but broke away after a few seconds and, pulling you behind her, began trotting down a patch of meadow. You followed her queue, tripped when she ‘accidentally’ tripped, rolled with the role, tried your best to follow the directorial notes, and even managed to appear somewhat surprised to find her back in your arms, though the shallow slope left you with very little rolling momentum. Continue reading... 20
By the time you choose to eject prematurely in mid-course of your Italian exodus and make your way back to the Prague, retaining whatever little savings you’ve got left, summer has already purchased a timeshare in a resort condominium unit down in Bora Bora and is busy packing. All of a sudden, it feels like all roads should lead away from Rome. Traveling the rural south of Italy has been proving less accommodating, not as informative and all together pricier and more taxing than you’ve expected, biting into your motivation to be sliding all the way down to Sicilia. On top of all that, though by, large and loopy you disfavor backtracking, some old sweet song seem to keep Prague on your mind. Shortly after your wanky homecoming; after you’ve crawled right back into the open arms of this temptress and unpacked your bag in her cozy womb, and you happen to hook up with a precious young thing at a jazz joint on Malostranská. Only seventeen years of age, she’s passionate about older men, crazy for jazz and just plain nuts most of the time. Continue reading... 37
The wheels of the Taurus tear at the open road at about a hundred mph, making its swift journey clockwise, along the temporarily vacant M25 ring road. With apparent haste, it circles gargantuan London, raring to reach its destination. Soon enough, this busy beehive would spring into action, and swarms of workers would be making their wearingly meticulous ways back home, bringing traffic all around the metropolis to a standstill. Nevertheless, by that time you should already be making your way unhurriedly down the A10 and into Hackney. Not much traffic on the A10, since nobody in his right mind would be all too keen on driving into the East London Borough of Hackney. The reason for this aversion is the number of shootings that took place on its central Upper and Lower Clapton Road in recent years, which earned this stretch of road the nickname Murder Mile. Clapton Road, however, is exactly where you are headed. The reason you're willing to risk the journey along the infamous Murder Mile you met a few months back. The first night you shagged was practically an Olympic event, as it took place in Olympus, a village made up of treehouse style bungalows in the Turkish Mediterranean province of Antalya, and was quite an event. Ever since that initial fling, however, you and that rosy-cheeked deity; goddess of prurience and spunk, have been deeply and utterly in-lust. Continue reading... |
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Over eight years have passed, since you first set foot in the Latin American continent, but the journey has yet to have come to an end. Traveling has turned into participating; partaking into investigating; learning into escaping; migrating into drifting, until vagabondage became more natural to you than anything else. That’s when you become a professional bum. The wind of change has swept you away from England, where a secure income has been abandoned for the sake of the open road. It lead you across Denmark, through green meadows, yellow towns and gray piles of stones, pale remains of once Viking dwellings, until you find yourself in Copenhagen. Luckily enough, you are still using the very same journal you started eight years before, which, needless to say, you are not using all that often. In the back of that journal, you now find the address and phone number of a certain lady, who was briefly also a lover so many years before, and curiosity kicks in. Therefore, you decide to give that remnant of the pre-Internet era a call. The person on the other side of the line opens a pathway, which leads into a long and obscure hallway. Eventually, you emerge on the other side of it, onto a terrace café, made luminous by a sunny mane of spiky, yellow hair. Continue reading... 13
You stumble out onto the bow for a breath of fresh air, giving yourself freely to the soft breeze, as it carries the fumes away from your vodka soaked mind. Above, countless stars are scattered across the obscure sky, illuminating it like fire, frozen in mid works. Below, the Yenisei River steadily flows, running into a sea which is never full, for unto the place from whence this river comes, there it returns again. You lean against the railing and light yourself an Opal cigarette, glad to get away from the festive main deck for a while. At thirty years of age, this is but one of countless boat rides you’ve experienced, yet not a moment of it is a monotonous one. A three day journey from Krasnoyarsk to Dudinka, due north and across the Arctic Circle; three whole days of nothing but the constant flow of vodka; the pure essence of life around these parts. Continue reading... 28
Half a day’s ride in a local, steaming and suffocating chicken-bus sure does wonders in reacclimatizing a bunch of happy-go-lucky travelers, who has just survived a chilly night in paradise, only to gracefully fall back again early the next day. As the sun begins to slide down from its meridian throne, the bus comes to a halt at its final destination, and a whole bunch of excited travelers jump off, backpacks and all. Before your eyes, stretches the municipality of Porto Seguro de Bahia, the promised land of post-carnival, beach-side dance parties, where Bahia's popular Axé music is played day and night. One last push along a muddy path and through a thick forest leads you to an isolated little village, quietly resting against the backdrop of a white sand tropical beach, kissing an aquamarine ocean and riddled with palm trees, rocking in the gentle breeze. Then it hits you, with all the might of a utopian prophecy, that this is precisely the kind of place you’ve imagined the two of you living together in perfect harmony. Continue reading... 39
On the bus to Sofia, you meet a strange bird and an even stranger fruit. The girl is from the faraway island of New-Zealand, and seems to be a typical Kiwi if there ever was one. All the way, it’s all about ‘shagging this’ and ‘drinking that’, while you’re simply content with the idea that the two of you are going all the way. The rest of the seats are occupied by short, somewhat neurotic looking locals, occasionally stealing a quick glimpse at the two loud foreigners seated at the back, before sharply resuming their fixed stare at the road up ahead. Once you reach Sofia, you follow her to a hostel of her choice. The choice of hostels makes very little difference to you, since your plan is to spend but a single night in the Bulgarian capital, before heading out for a hike in the mountains south of the city. As the dormitories offer very little prospective for getting very far, and none whatsoever for going all the way, you ask her whether she’d like to join you for the hike the following day. Surprisingly enough, she gladly accepts your invitation. Continue reading... |