“No moon in Croatia” – end of January 2004

Welcome to Croatia

“There’s no moon in Croatia” – end of January 2004

“There’s no moon in Croatia.” That’s the first thing Stephane noticed as we crossed the border. The bright moon from Hungary had disappeared. We had left the Terminator house early in the morning and cycled through an icy wind, up and down hill, up and down again. We finally came to the border patrol as darkness was settling in, and I was worried that we might be held up, but we passed easily enough. We biked for a long time, trying not to notice as the trucks passed too close for comfort. It was dark, very dark. “There’s no moon in Croatia.”

We had heard too much about the mines in Croatia to be foolish enough to camp in the wild. So we kept going. At the first sign of habitation, we stopped. It was a farmhouse we came to – broken-down and falling apart. Part of the roof was caving in, the windowpanes were broken or missing altogether. There was no running water.

Katarina answered our knock. A short woman about 50 years of age with dark, curly hair, she spoke excellent German. So it was in German that we communicated. She was welcoming, and we had a drink with her by the fire. There was no place to sleep inside, so she showed us the barn, where we could put up our tent. She was surprised when she saw the bikes – she thought we had come by motorcycle!

There were two rooms in the barn: I was in one, taking the Ortlieb bags off the bikes and inflating the mattresses, and Stephane was in the other, preparing to set up our tent. All of a sudden, he appears out of the dark shadows, waving a skull in my face. And a minute later, a long leg bone, which he had found under the hay where we were to sleep. Thank God they were animal, and not human, bones. We wondered what kind of animal they could have come from, and finally settled upon it being from a lamb. We thought it kind of odd, anyway, that an animal should be let there to decompose, without taking care of it. What was the history of this place?

A few minutes later, as we were setting up the tent, my headlamp fell over my eyes, and I let out a scream, imagining I must have run into a pile of bones, or that one had somehow fallen from the ceiling and hit me in the eyes. My imagination must have been working overtime. Stephane got a great kick out of it all. He set up the skull on the windowsill, perhaps to guard over us or to protect us from evil animal spirits, I don’t know which one. I found myself hoping that the whipping wind wouldn’t whistle as it blew through the open eye sockets.