July 25, 2012
Drinking coffee and playing cowboys: Resna - Rubezi
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BY MORNING we had drunk or washed in almost all the water. We needed more. Half an hour after our start, therefore, we stopped at a tap by the road and Steph turned it. Nothing happened.
We were on the edge of a typically straggled village. Our road was wide enough for a farm cart and from it, at right angles, ran an unpaved path that rose through grass and stones. A middle-aged woman was 50 metres down the path.
"Voda?" she shouted.
"Da", we called back.
She beckoned us over. By the time we reached her, she had been joined by a tiny woman dressed in black, her face wizened by years of tiredness or widowhood. Her skin was brown except for her bare arms, which were of a disturbing crepe, skin hanging like a melted candle. She watched us, half fascinated, half resilient to any more surprises after what her lifetime had shown her in Yugoslavia.
The middle-aged woman, her daughter perhaps, didn't lead us to water. Instead, she took out a mobile phone and began talking. When she had finished, 40 seconds later, she motioned for us to continue down the track.
We pushed our bikes, not sure where we were to go. And then out of a low cottage set sideways to the path and behind an enclosure in which a calf was taking no notice of anybody there came a small woman with a bright, tanned face and, to demonstrate that is was she we were to find, an empty bottle of water. She turned back to her house and waved us to follow.
The door was in the centre of the long wall. A room to the left had a low, unmade bed. To the right, where we followed,
was a simple kitchen with a wooden table in its centre. The woman talked excitedly to us and we didn't understand a word. Nor could she understand why we couldn't understand a word. Everyone else she met spoke Montenegrin perfectly well. And, that being so, she didn't find it necessary to gesture, to mime, to improvise.
Steph guessed, intuitively but also with a deep desire to keep this torrent of words manageable, that she was asking why we were there. She showed her the map of our route, which produced some interest but also further hints that she had perhaps not often left her village.
Eventually we understood that we were being offered coffee. So we accepted. We mimed, well we thought, questions about her husband, her children, all the things you don't really care about but which make up civilised conversation with strangers. None of it meant anything to her, nor her replies to us. Not for the first time, I wondered how much more worldly travellers actually understood people when they stayed the night in Mongolian yurts.
And then came a breakthrough. We were just leaving with the water and our thanks when we saw that the once peaceful calf was running about its enclosure in distress. The woman saw it, too, but she understood it. She smiled for the first time and waved for us to stay where we were, blocking the open entrance to the pen, where our resting bikes and their bright bags had seemingly upset the calf.
We knew none of that, though, and we waited puzzled as the woman ran off surprisingly nimbly in her wellington boots and disappeared behind a farm building. And then reappeared, going in the other direction, with a brown cow on a rope.
"I think she's going to milk it for us," Steph said.
But, no. The woman reappeared at the far end of the enclosure and tugged the cow into it. The calf was reunited with its mother and peace returned to the farmyard.
It was, as you'd imagine, the highlight of the day. Not least because the thunder and rain returned an hour later and for a while, in the brewing town of Niksic (Nick-sitch) and its vast and abandoned Tito-era factories, we considered opting for a hotel. But then the sun shone again and we rode on up a steep valley out of town and pitched our tent in a meadow overlooking the mountains.
Through the small gap that led to the road we had left, we saw another touring cyclist, a man yellow panniers. How close we travellers come to each other without meeting.
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