Sweat is my credentials, wisdom I do speak, if you wanna travel tough, you gotta listen to me!

The Slavnik tour de force

At my departure from Istria, the objective is to reach the town of Ilirska Bistrica, where I need to catch the only daily train to Lubjliana at 13:20. Googlemaps brings me on roads that become smaller and steeper every minute, as I need to climb the Slavnik mountain , standing at about 1100m above sea level...most roads are impracticable and very landslidy, so that pushing my loaded bike up becomes a Titanic effort. For 3 long hours I feel like a Sisiphus, but modernized with an additional timetable constraint.The climate is hot, the air still. My sweating out of control as never before. As I get to the top..a quick look and then time to rush down. Steep paths in the woods. Fucking horrible macadan, as they call it here. My brakes and front rack are suffering the blow. Miracolusly I am down with no breakages, back to the tarmac, now in a race with time. Pushing it like hell to cover 30 km in one hour, not knowing if the final stretch would be uphill..making all my efforts vain...That feeling creeping in, of having a variable out of your control..and gaining little by little the information you need... always on the verge of giving in.. but then you see the goal and you keep eating the road at maxumum power.Feels good. I get to the station 15 min ahead of train departure, in time for the ticket, for finding a fountain nearby and a guy giving me a hand in loading the bike on a very tall train. What a neat ending for such an extenuating adventure!

The Young Swedes in in Interrail

Sven went back to his seat after helping that weird man lifting his bike into the train and started chatting with his girlfriend. A couple of minutes later, someone is hopping in their cabin with an unusual agility. The man is here, with his hat on. "Hello!" There is an aura around him, something makes him different from the rest. His shirt, half-open, is showing white salt halos, souvenirs of an epic sweating day. The deep look from his eyes makes Sven uneasy. The "lived" face of someone who's awake since the early hours, someone who has tamed the mountains and the woods to the brink of exaustion. Sven quickly looks at his girfriend and can notice, not without some resentment, that her jaw is fully dropped since the stranger came in.

"Bike trips are at the right pace, you see everthing, you absorb the landscape , you conquer it...leaving no trace, you don't forget a face" the man is whispering " and walking is too slow. So bike is the way. Except if you need to rush for a train..then is a nightmare"...the young Swedes are now listening attentively as if a spell had been cast on them by that modern-times sciaman. They cannot help but ask questions.

"...you do small roads..with no traffic?..."

" Today, even too small"

"you need money to travel like that. Ourserves, we have finished it"

"Time and money are two sides of the same coin. We use money to buy time, to get there faster, to make things more hurriedly. When you take your time, you almost need no money. Money is nothing but an illusion"

"Do you camp outside?"

"I go to hostels too when I am in the cities to socialize a bit. I camp when I am off the beaten track (often, I must say). You just wait till the sun is almost down and pitch your tent".

"and why do you go with this small bicycle? It's more tiring"

"Once you define the essence to the trip, details of the How do not matter, what's important is to leave. The donkey is just a means to an end. It will take you to the house of inner&outer discovery, but then you need to get off the donkey to get in".

All the answers are carved in stone, crystal clear, reduced to their simplest term and yet full of significance, as those coming from the mouths of wisemen. They tell you the truth straight in your face, sometimes an obvious truth..but Sven could feel that every word was in the right place..because the stranger had lived what he was saying, mastering it to perfection.

The man stopped talking to enjoy a warrior's rest. Sven closed his eyes. The seat near his was now empty. " Coincidences are God's way of staying anonymous", a writing on a wall he had read a couple of days before, kept popping into his mind. For some reason..