benn:org

Belgrade once again! I arrived here last night on my way back to Berlin, coming from the Rainbow Gathering in the very south of Bulgaria. I’m staying two days at the People’s Global Action (PGA) conference. Here is a short summary of my journey:

2004-07-16
The party the night before was quite interesting. The independent party scene in Albania is just building up, so I talked to the first Drum and Bass DJ in the country and other music pioneers. On my last day in Tirana I visited the mosque at the main square. Small and pretty. I found a piece of wrapped chocolate on the nice carpets upstairs, holy chocolate – yum. I walked to the farmers market to get some food for the bus journey. Albanians say “jo” and nod if they mean “no”. “Yes” is shaking your head in a strange way and saying “po”. So buying some cheese becomes a funny adventure and needs as much concentration as a drinking game. In the remote corners of the market local fruits and vegetables are really cheap and you can get some free stuff that is rotten a bit. I went back to the National Gallery to pick up my stuff and say goodbye to some people. My bus left just before sunset and the way out of the city along slow and ruinous highways was tinted in warm colors. The empty bus went to the coastal town of Duerres first where it got filled with people. After some good roads the bus went on a busy small rocky path through the mountains. One time I woke up from my head banging against the window again and I could see some roadworks in the dark some 20 metres below me just next to the bus. Of course there was no barriers at all..

2004-07-17
I arrived to Tetovo in Macedonia near the border to Kosovo just after sunrise. The patrolling tanks with big machine guns on the empty roads added to the strange feeling about this unknown country. Ah, militant rebels have better things to do at this time of the morning.. I walked to the exit of town where after a few minutes a Macedonian man in a car from Berlin stopped and took me to Skopje. He was on his way back to Berlin where he owns a small pizza place. I walked a couple of kilometres into the centre of Skopje to the bus station. The ticket offices were on strike so it was quite hard to find out about the different busses going to Bulgaria. There was only busses in the afternoon. A Red Cross doctor from the south of Macedonia helped me to find a shared car to her hometown. People that go long distances with their car always go to the bus station first to collect people going the same direction. Usually you pay a price similar to the bus fare. After two hours through wine and tabacco fields I arrived to Strumica in the south-east of Macedonia. For a little more money the driver took me to the border. Another friendly passenger accompanied me on my way over the border and gave me some advice. I was about to leave all the advertising taxi drivers behind and hitch to the next town when I met two Japanese students speaking fluent Bulgarian. I took a photo of them doing strange poses indication “south-west Bulgaria”. They plan to visit all 4 corners of the country.. They had rented a taxi and we visited a small castle nearby and went on to Petric. They took a bus to their hostel and I got a lift by a truck driver and two women with their little daughters to Melnik some kilometres east. A man that reminded me of my father a bit took me to a small road that I walked along quite a while. It got a bit hilly but I passed through beautifully old and quiet villages and fields with fruit trees (yummy) and wine, and I had calming views over the Toscana like countryside. “Das muss ein schlechter Mueller sein, dem niemals fiel das Wandern ein, das Waahaandern!” After an hour the first car passed by and the two old men coming from their work in the fields brought me to the next village. Friendly villagers pointed me in the right direction and gave me vegetables and water. A bus stopped and took me a few kilometres further. At a stop patrolling border police checked my passport. I watched the life at the central square of the village that I arrived to. I tried to hitch on, but decided after a while to end the day, have a nice, cold beer in the bar across the road and find somewhere to sleep. But someone that stopped at the restaurant took me 2 hours further through the high uninhabited mountains to Goce Delchev on the other side. The driver did a delivery at a petrol station and brought me to the end of town. I put up my tent in a field near the road. That was a very long day.

2004-07-18
I woke up by goats and cows being herded around and something big sniffing at my tent. A big old dump truck driver with his little son stopped right away and took me a few kilometres further. I watched the heavy horse and carts traffic in the village for a while and the lazybones of the village talked to me a bit. A man with his small son took me an hour further trough the mountains and picked up two more hitchhikers coming from the Rainbow. We got off in Dospat and crossed a big dam. They bought me a bottle of water and went home to Plovdiv and I went on towards the Rainbow, now only a few kilometres away! A man in his old Lada looking like some kind of farmer’s association official took me a village further. Here once again many Bulgarians in shiny western cars drove by without even noticing me. With only a few acceptions it’s always the simple country side people who stop. A big truck carrying many of the local “Devin” water bottles, mastering every bend of the narrow road with ease, took me the last kilometres to the small road that leads to Jagodina and on the Rainbow camp. In a small tunnel a taxi with other Rainbow people stopped and took me to the car park of the gathering. On the way we collected Roland from the Worldwide Peace Petition. There were about 30 cars and vans from Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Switzerland and Bulgaria. We walked 20 up the hills to the Welcome Home. We had our fist small “food circle”, rested a bit and walked up the hill another 30 minutes until we reached the main meadow, an area covering nearly a square kilometre with forrest, grass meadows, hills, a spring and a few small houses. There are many temporary structures like the huge central fire place, the big kitchen tent, tipis, flags and signs. And then there are numerous individual tents, tarp constructions and hammocks all around the forrests. We put up our tents on a hill overviewing the valley with the main fire and the kitchen. I had a wander around and met the first people. I helped in the kitchen and ate at the big food circle with all people sitting in a huge circle around the main fire. At that time there were around 300 people present. A sat at the fire a bit and went to bed early.

2004-07-19 to 2004-07-21
I dove into the world of the Rainbow family. Find more about what Rainbow gatherings are like at this Rainbow Family Homepage. I attended a workshop on edible plants in the area, went for a cold bath in the river, helped cooking, serving at the food circle, building a roof for the bread oven, cleaning up and rebuilding the fire place after the night, and had many inspiring talks and met good people. I’d like to mention here and say hello to Pinnih from somewhere in between Zimbabwe/SouthAfrica/UK, Maik and his girlfriend (sorry, forgot the name) from UK and Bulgaria, Hagai from Israel, Roland, Sascha and his girlfriend from Switzerland. It was a short stay at the 4 week camp but I’ll definitively visit more Rainbows in future.

2004-07-22
The people going with Gael’s van towards Belgrade gathered at the main fire early in the morning. A couple of hours later we had packed everything in the van and the seven of us took off towards Sofia. After a nice journey with many stops through the summery Bulgaria we arrived to Sofia and four people got off and Gael from France, Leo from Croatia and me went on to Serbia. After sunset we arrived at the border where all border staff obviously had a very good time examining us and the van packed full of all sorts of stuff from all around Europe very closely. Gael played some of the instruments in his car for the Bulgarian customs people in the garage. “Marijuana? Marijuana? – No, we don’t have any in the car, really!” and so on. Everybody thought we were a crazy, a little suspicious looking bunch, but let us pass after a while with shaking heads and a smile. After an hour we were back on the road looking for somewhere to sleep. We went down a small path just off the main road, tried to turn, but backed off into a ditch and could not move the van anymore. We’ll deal with that tomorrow we thought and went to sleep in a small apple garden with a lot of moskitos behind the ditch.

2004-07-23
A neighbour who heard what was going on the night before called someone else from the village with a tractor and after a little while we could go on. It was really hot but I had the back of the van for myself and could open the windows, lie down, sleep and read. The motorways were blocked through a miner’s protest, so all the holiday and cargo traffic coming from western Europe (every second car was German) was redirected through little towns and villages. A pretty ugly and smelly picture. After many, many hours we arrived to Belgrade and the PGA conference area around a primary school that is empty for holidays. I met some people from the TransHackMeeting in Pula, put up my tent and had dinner. I’m really just travelling through, so unfortunately I don’t have too much time to get really involved. I hitchhiked to the city centre to meet some of my friends from Belgrade. I tried to meet Ljubica and some friends of her, but unfortunately the arranged meeting point has been closed the week before and all signs had been removed. Until I found out about all this it was pretty late and so I’ll try to meet them again today. On my quest for the place that disappeared infront of everybody’s eyes I met Sanya. She just finished working at a kiosk and brought me to the closed down place and then we went on to the city centre. She showed me my bus station and we chatted a bit about her life in Belgrade. People are really helpful here.

Today I spent most of my time typing this here and now I’ll have a look around the conference and go to the centre again. Phew, it’s so hot. It feels good to be back here..

Albania is wild, man, wild! I’m in Tirana the second day now. At the moment I’m in a TV/media building in the city centre. I will go on later today to Skopje/Macedonia and south Bulgaria. Here is how I got here from Pula:

I got a lift of my friends Virna and Tatjana from Pula to Rijeka. At the last minute I jumped on the ferry to Dubrovnik where I met with Barbara from Pula who got the tickets for me. It was evening and we found a nice spot for our bags and matrasses on the outside deck where hundreds of people had already prepared their camp for the night.

Arriving in Dubrovnik the next afternoon we saw the opening of the 55th annual theatre festival. The mayor handed over the key of the city for one month to the artists in a big ceremony with fireworks and all. I slept in a crack in the rocks at the beach. The nearby huge abondoned hotel was too scary and I didn’t dare to put myself there.

The next day Barbara and me spend all day on the island Lokrum near the city, sunbathing, reading and swimming. Barbara dived for some things on the ground and I saw a sea cucumber for the first time. What an ugly thing, yuk! At night I met some fire juggler’s from Rijeka in the streets and I stayed with them in the storage room of a club in a former hospital.

I started hitchhiking to Montenegro the next morning. Village by village people took me closer to the border 30 km away. A kinda funny Hungarian couple in a pickup took me over the border and 100 km to Kotor. From there I to the bus to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. I walked around the city centre looking for a place to stay. Their main roads in the centre are car-free every evening from 5pm! I started raining a bit and I ended up in the students resident house where a warden, after some haggling, let me stay on the couch in the lobby. He took my passport as a refund..

The next morning around 6am I walked out of the city towards the Albanian border. There are no busses, trains or even signs to the border, hmm.. For a small fee someone in an old Lada took me and the guy standing next to me to the next town. This is the common way of public transport here. Just stand at the road, looking at the drivers passing and someone will stop and ask you where you want to go. In a bakery someone paid for me because I did not have the small change for the stuff I bought. Everybody pays in Euros here btw. An Albanian driver trading some goods took me over the border for a little money again. At the border I met a young couple from Berlin in a shiny yellow car. They were on their way to Greece and took me all the way near Tirana. We were passing through chaotic towns with all sorts of funky stuff happening beside the very bad roads. There were car wrecks every 50 metres, burned out and picked to pieces, some with many bullet holes.. On the road pigs, goats and cows were doing their animal thing, standing around, grasing, looking. The further south we got the better the roads and everything around got. It is said that governmental forces have not yet regained full control of things in the north after the riots in the nineties. Starting early this day paid out and so I arrived to Tirana at noon in a local minibus. I called Claude, a friend of a Danish guy that I met in Pula, and stayed with his family and met his friends. Claude’s father is a well known Albanian painter. He showed me some of his work in the studio ontop of their flat and I fixed a small thing on his computer.

The next day I met many different people at the National Art Gallery, where Claude’s friends meet. Also Martin and two other people from Denmark arrived. They are on their way to south Bulgaria as well, unfortunately the car is more than full. I helped Elisabeth from Berlin to prepare her radio show today on Oxygen FM, a local free, low/budget music station. I will also talk in the show about the Transhackmeeting in Pula. I will go to pick up my bag now, come back to the radio station, go to an opening at the gallery and then take the bus. I think I’ll be offline for two weeks or so – read you then! =)

[Update:] I just decided to stay another day in Tirana to see the opening and be at the big party afterwards tonight. 🙂 My radio interview went well. It talked about the Transhackmeeting, my travel route, sustainable development and free software. Let’s go party!

Hah, three days ago Alex, a close friend and travel partner of mine from my hometown arrived! It was quite a surprise as I totally forgot that he was planning to visit me. There he was knocking on my door in the morning. Funny. We had a lot of fun exploring beaches and the night life of Rojc and Pula. Now he is gone back to Germany and he forgot his fancy hiking shoes. Ah, well. Last night’s concert at the Ethno Jazz festival in a village some kilometres away from Pula and the after party with pool and many DINKs (Double Income No Kids 😉 were a nice experience. Alex, me and another guy from Pula started the interesting part of the party by jumping into the pool naked and with a lot of noise. People were filming and taking pictures – haha! Today I’m off to Rijeka, where I will take the boat all along the coast to Dubrovnik in the very south of Croatia. From there I might go over Albania and Macedonia to Bulgaria. Ahhh, really excited already!

There is the 10th “Puf” theatre festival on at the moment. Many of the events take place in and around Rojc, so in my courtyard. It started off three days ago with a performance in the huge empty part of the building. Around 20 large rooms have been cleared out and transformed into sets of various acting scenes. Each show was 5 minutes long and has been repeated 9 times. The audience was scattered all over the building and had exactly one minute time to walk from show to show. So during the breaks, starting and ending with loud ringing tones, there was hectic rush on the corridors. Shows ranged from audience participation over classical acting to singing and dance performances. Each room had its own atmosphere through music, light and set. Very inspiring.. The next day I went to a show of The Forgotten Fish Memory Orchestra in the Monteparadiso Austro-Hungarian fortress a few minutes from Rojc. Again it was several short shows with a small audience. The set was done with a lot of love to details, the costumes and music were flawless. The Forgotten Fish people live in Rojc and I met them some times before. It was funny to see them all dressed up and really living their performance. The best thing about the theatre festival is that all shows are free of charge! Last night I went to a neo-hippie type jugglers in vans wedding with lots of bongos, fire acrobatic, food, drink and smoking at another old Austro-Hungarian fortress. I met many familiar faces and ended up sleeping wrapped in a big kitchen cloth ontop of one of the watch hills..

Two days ago Barbara brought me to a cave near Pula’s Stoja. It was absolutely amazing! We went in.. You can only reach it from the sea. So you swim into the rocks along a small corridor for 30 metres or so. It’s getting darker and darker around you until you can’t see anything anymore. It’s so scary, but you are too curious to return. Waves are moving you up and down. After a while you can hear a little shore further inside the cave. Now even when you look back you can’t see anything anymore. THAT is scary! It’s only you and your fears in the cave now. Guess who needs to leave? Finally you get to the little beach and you have reached the end of the cave. It’s getting cold, after some minutes your eyes get accustomed to the dark and you see the shapes of the dome surrounding you. You move your hand through the water and the algae glow! I won’t forget this so soon..

The hackmeeting is over. Have a look at the THK photos to get a little impression what it was like. I definitively had a lot of fun! To my surprise the crowd was not too techie, actually many people spent most of the day at the beaches. =) Many media activists and artists were around, still Linux was by far the most popular operating system used. A lot of people moved around with their laptops enjoying the wireless freedom in the shade outside or somewhere around the building. A pitty that my battery is broken. The self-organisation of the meeting went pretty well, but still I ran around a lot to see if there is anything on fire. My workshop about “sustainable computing” was quite a success I thought. Fifteen people showed up and in the end there was a good discussion going about how to use your machines in a sustainable manner. I’ll post the minutes soon. Uh, another one of those promises.. 😉

The meeting has started, some kind of a routine has come to the daily chaos with meals, tasks, meetings and people arriving. I went for a swim this morning and when I arrived back to the Rojc barracks there were already people sitting with laptops everywhere around the building. So far around 100 hacktivists have arrived. I’m pretty involved in the organisation of the meeting, so that’s why I’m not writing many e-mails at the moment. Next week I will have time to catch up.

More and more people arrive for the TransHackMeeting. We are having meetings, are cooking, planning stuff. Everybody is very motivated to create a functioning meeting and auto-organisation works great!

Two days ago we arrived to Pula. We were a little exhausted and so it was good to stay in one place for more than a day. Seppel is going to stay here one more week for the TransHackMeeting, I’ll probably be here some more weeks. Here is the report of our hitchhiking tour through Croatia and Bosnia – again a lotta text. Do people really want to read all this? I’ll try to keep it short (haha), but there was just too many things happening:

From Pula to Rijeka (2004-06-11): Our last odyssey in mind we had mixed feelings about this route. We started quite late in the afternoon, but everything went well. From the roundabout in the centre of Pula we were taken by a young man in his tuned BMW to a crossing 15 km outside. Like many pupils here he used to hitchhike to school a lot. After a little while a construction engineer took us to a motorway crossing near an emergency lay-by. From there a professional basketball player living in Berlin and running a little tourism business in a town nearby took us all the way to a service area just outside Rijeka. We stood there for a while and walked on along the motorway a bit until a young breathtaking woman just finishing her psychology studies picked us up at a drive-up and took us some kilometres around Rijeka. Spellbound we got off the car, walked a bit on and because it got dark we looked for a little green near the motorway, put up our tent, had dinner and went to sleep.

From Rijeka to Bihac/Bosnia (2004-06-12): Our spot to start was quite bad, because we were on the motorway already. We walked up the road a bit and back because we didn’t find anywhere where cars could stop and see us long enough beforehand. After two or three hours a Bosnian guy on his way to near Bihac picked us up. Actually we were going to go to Zagreb and on to Serbia, but why not Bosnia? After three hours drive we stopped for food in the first town in Bosnia. Our driver was a bit in a hurry and went on. When we were going to pay the waitress told us he already had paid for all of us. What a sincere man! We walked on through the town a bit. Bosnia feels more like Serbia than Croatia. The war has left its marks on the people, the buildings and the economy. When we started hitchhiking the second car stopped and took us two villages further. Waiting for half an hour and a window maker in a small Dacia with no English at all stopped. Trying not to break any of the wooden laths in his car we went some more kilometres and stopped at a little cafe-bar place. He insisted on paying for our beer and let us off in the next village. From there we walked a bit trough the Alp-like countryside. People bringing in there hay all around. Then Elvira, a young woman on her way to a town near Bihac stopped while talking to someone on the phone. With her still talking on the phone we went on. There was water in the petrol of the car, so the engine kept stopping. She could not speak much English, but she obviously was delighted to have so strange passengers onboard. We got off and a shady looking guy brought us into Bihac. He was very friendly and in a good mood. We had a little walk through town and crossed the river Una and bought some food. We went to the road to Banja Luka and after a very short time a car stopped with squeaking tires. We got into the car and the young driver speeded up. He said he is doing a race and he overtook before bends and hills at a very high speed. Also I had the feeling he is not fully aware of everything that’s happening around him. [..] We were telling him we are very afraid, he replied that he is, too.. Panic!! After begging him and his girlfriend for a while they would eventually stop and let us off. Pretty shocked we decided not to go on. We found a small camping ground near the river and went to bed after a little dinner. It started raining at night.

From Bihac / Bosnia to Sarajevo (2004-06-13): We walked from the camp ground to the small road to Banja Luka and waited in the rain infront of a tiny bus stop like shop only selling one type of cigarettes and one type of beer. It had no customers in the hour that we waited there. Were we scaring away the people? A man took us in his old Lada the windy path with many rocks on the road to a town 20 km further. We warmed up and had some really cheap and rich food in a muslim fast food place. While walking to a good spot to go on we noticed a big jeep of an German aid association. We thought they would give two Germans some aid by giving a lift but “nix!” accompanied by a shaking pointing finger was everything we could get out of the Bosnian driving crew. We tramped further though the rainy town until a young man picked us up and gave us a lift to the next village. No car stopped and our clothes were soaked so we decided to stop a bus to Banja Luka. We had a little tour through town, it was still cold and wet. We went to an Internet cafe and found out that if we go south a bit lovely sun and high temperatures are waiting for us. We discarded our Serbia plans and took the bus to Sarajevo late at night.

From Banja Luka to somewhere near Metcovic / Croatia: We arrived to Sarajevo early in the morning. After another little rainy city tour trough the cute city centre with medieval shopping streets we took a bus to Mostar. We stepped out of the bus at high noon. There it was, burning sun and tropic temperatures – yes! 🙂 We walked through the city, passing by houses, lampposts, gates riddled from bullets of various sizes coming from all sides. We had a small meal, observed the summery street life and circled the city along the bypass road. At the end we got our first lift from a truck driver on this tour. It was a farmer with a small lorry carrying vegetables. He pointed to some ruins along the road and told us Serbs used to live there. He himself was Muslim. He left us at a wide crossing near the Croatian border. From there an older French smokers couple in a rented car took us to the road towards north Croatia. After some walking and waiting for lifts on the quiet road an older man coming back from cultivating his garden brought us some kilometres north towards Split. He let us off at his village. It was dark now, so we looked for a nice spot for our camp. There was a beautiful lake not far from the sea. [photo] Listening to the frog’s drowsy chant we fell asleep.

Still more text to come, please check back later..

We are moving up north along the Croatian coast. It is really sunny and the coast is great! We arrived to Zadar yesterday. Now we are off to Rijeka and back to Pula. It was a crazy tour so far. We will post a detailed report later..