Sleeping on a tree-house
Cycling from Maribor to the eastern stretches of Slovenia was just a great ride. It started with a fresh 2 hours cycle following the banks of the Drava river: fresh shaded greenfields & hills, fresh legs and a fresh mind, after the nice evening spent socializing with Mojdana'a cousins and their friends...Arrived to Ptuj, I afforded a generous break at the city's castle with a nice lunch & some great views on the red roofs of the town and the whole surrounding plains. Then back in action for 10km along the edge of Ptuj's lake and through agriculatural plains up until Ormoz.I then was entering the hilly region of Jeruzalem where wine crops played the lion's role and views were lovely but not too dissimilar from those of my beloved Langhe. After a short parenthesis spent trying in vain to find a train for Hungary, I am rolling again in the evening hours crossing the Croatian border and receiving a loooong look and a through ID card check by the Croatian border police.The landscape is flat again with nice Croatian villages separated by cornfields until I take an offtrack detour along a river, then the detour of the detour..in search for a place away from civilization where to hide for the night. And there I see it. a majestic hunter's hut 6 metres high from the ground, hidden at the utmost corner of a field: that's my cozy little house for tonight! Wooooa!...I'm Peter Pan! And I camuflage my bike into a bush and run to my house, haunted by swarms of hungry mosquitoes, which had started eating me alive. However, my expectations on the hut's comfort turned out to be over-optimistic...
As soon as I got into it, I realized this was no 5 star hotel. Bird shit was smearing the entire floor and dusty cobwebs were to be found in abundance. Thankfully, the basic windows could be closed and there was a chair and a clean wood log where I could sit and consume an unpretentious meal based on chickpeas, tuna and onions. After getting in, I closed the trap door behind me to test the bunker's inaccessibility from potential human and animal attackers... but I realized that I was now locked in! The panick did not last, as I found out the door had a nail on its back to enable opening from the interior..I can breathe again. But, wait, what are these scary tribal sounds? loud rhitmic beats come from the forests behind...panic & then thinking there must be a disco in what I had tought was the middle of virgin territories. I can relax..but Ohhh my God, I hear a loud motorbike noise..the local murderers are coming for some white foreigner meat...I hide in a corner..but the sounds get farther..just a local kid doing some random motocross...however the spiral of fear had started...a healthy, primitive, instinctive fear that sometimes needs to be reawakened in the anesthetized risk-free world we live in...and it's a fast spiral of fear, treating all stimuli from the outside as potentially mortal threats....first came the self suggestion with the bird flu due to the poor hygiene of the place, then it was the bear attack driven by the food residues I had thrown from the window..and finally i had to exorcize a much more critical danger: a massive spider that had came out of his hole after sunset. Fat ugly spiders moving so fast drive me crazy. "Mors tua, vita mea". with a fast movement I attempt squeezing the unwanted housemate with piece of cloth, but realize, in a bout of raging panick, that the bastard is fast as hell and has managed to protect himself within a crack,from which he's peering with his cruel eyes, ready to attack me at any point in the night. He must be furious and eager to punish me! and God knows how many friends and relatives he's got in here! I am moving frantically with my torch for 10 min trying to elaborate a strategy to defeat such a skilled adversary. Fight or flight?... then rationality takes over...and, putting myself into his shoes, I realized that he must be definitely more scared than I do given my sheer size (probably about 30,000 times his.. I am the monster) .We are at an impasse! He won't attack, as he's too busy saving his own ass. I can sleep(?) sweet(?) dreams. At the crack of dawn, I say a cordial bye, pull off a hundred snails from my bike...and I am finally rolling in the direction of Hungary.
