War!

Lush house beats thump heavily over the end of the deserted beach just before the Albanian border. Blissful people dream tiredly of dancing on sand. I’m in the middle of it all and somewhere else entirely, all I want to do tonight is write, write until the battery on my ancient mobile phone runs out. Write until I’m finally empty and calm.

Montenegrin wine is good, and it flowed more than abundantly today. The local house party coke dealer reacts with almost pitiful disappointment to the modest rejection of this white-bellied no-pat. His sales are guaranteed today, the crowds are clamouring to forget nothing, while I desperately try to remember how we got here.

The journey was long and arduous, but as always: a worthwhile one. Mercifully, TomTom added another three hours of perma-pothole-riddled, single-lane, sheep-garbed mountain tracks through the Croatian hinterland at night to what should have been a 12-hour journey from Graz. Arrival in Ulcinj after 15 hours at midnight.

Our hosts are good people. A bottle of wine at check-in. The son drives us to the football-watching Kitewoldwide coffee-driving zombies. The only “extreme” thing about these “sportsmen” is their expenses. Their beach loungers cost non-members more than our rooms. We are happy to pay, decadence is rarely so amusingly subversive to substitute.

We hitchhike two kilometres to Stoj, get a pizza chef to drive us four kilometres to the wrong beach and, as Hanseatic/Bavarian travellers, are invited by Bosnian/Serbian kite hippies for more wine around the campfire. We make our way through the thicket to the next beach track, only to barely survive the drive to the end of the world in the Renault of a very drunk Montenegrin rally couple. We are there. Wherever. I’m going dancing.

-exeunt-

I’m standing in the car park. Waiting for a ride back. I’m really wondering whether I should perhaps walk six kilometres after all. Firstly, Montenegrin alcohol checks seem to have the same frequency as Halley’s Comet and secondly, they always go in favour of anyone, however justifiably accused.

Three o’clock. I mistakenly walk two kilometres in the wrong direction to the Albanian border. Just as I’m about to hurl a rather mean-spirited “FUCK YOU!” into the world’s now rather bleak-looking face, two dense lads from Montenegro/Serbia drive me home from the end of not-yet-Europe.

I wake up my Hanseatic wife in search of the “Danke-Stiegl” in the fridge. Two hours later, the two brothers “Beam me up Scottiy” are a little less fit to drive than before, but are guaranteed to have mastered teletransportation from the FF. Five o’clock. Maybe we learnt a bit more about why hate against hate is always shit. That should be enough.

The next few days are bleak. We used the six days of calm for a big tour around Lake Skadar on the Albanian-Montenegrin border. The wind is only good here every day from three upwards, the launch sites are challenging at the very least, and all of them are guaranteed to be difficult to reach.

No crowds of people rush across the border, they all stay on the eastern Balkan route. Here, people are concerned about other things. 20% unemployment and an average income of €300 a month may be less harsh than in countries where life costs four times more for the same income. But a history that has been discreetly labelled “complicated” for centuries, with one war after another, gives birth to other necessities.

A Swiss kiter working for the UN in Bosnia adds to my travel story: €9,000 a month to track down corruption and war criminals seems like a lot at first. Perhaps the real corruption is even on the side of those who claim to be fighting it. Nevertheless, who should care if neither the victims nor the perpetrators feel any motivation to do so? How much have we taken, and above all: how much have we taken without anyone ever realising that they should actually pay for it?

Both Milošević and Karadžić, both children of Montenegrin parents and more than suitable candidates for Hitler’s adoption, would have been sentenced in The Hague because of Europe’s search. Slobodan died of a heart attack in prison in The Hague. Radovan remains a defendant even after years in controversial circumstances. The search for both of them cost several million euros. If we hadn’t paid them, neither of them would ever have been charged.

There’s a loud knock on the window. At first I think for a while that Hansa and Switzerland want to drink more wine with me. But the truth is simpler. Someone has locked the front door. I don’t know who it was, nor do I know why. The only thing I know is that I got pissed off because the “window-knockers” wouldn’t shut up, while I just wanted to write my story to ProPain bludgeon metal. I swore loudly. Whoosh: war. It’s almost like Yugoslavia in the 90s. I was able to save our war. War happens quickly, and often without anyone understanding the reason. Sometimes there simply isn’t one. The only thing that always stays the same? Children cry before they drown.