Lifetimes ago, straight out of South African Christian National Education, a friend and I climbed on a TAP flight and headed to Europe: 1980, pre-internet, no cellphones - it could have been Pluto. White waiters, buildings older than Johannesburg, colours all together including rainbow.
We separated in Dover; he headed back to London, and I set out across southern Europe on foot, hitching, aiming for Albania and the wildly evocative Accursed Mountains, chasing James Michener’s Drifters dream of an unknown future wrapped in a careless Balkan ideal. I got as far as Brindisi in Italy before falling in love, missing a ferry and making do with warm chinotto, an aromatic scirocco and a promise to cross the Adriatic, one day.
Fast forward 35 years and that day arrived. This time, older, wiser, I had driven down the Balkan Peninsula through Austria, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro and crossed the Montenegrin border into Albania at Grabon, a new entry point in the middle of the Accurseds.
It was a 1
