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Adventures in The Great Wide Somewhere

Catching a Moment - Somewhere on Mount Cer

SERBIA | Friday, 19 April 2013 | Views [183] | Scholarship Entry

At least it wasn't raining. We may have been slightly lost and running out of daylight but at least it wasn't raining. As predicted, our maps had been slightly inadequate upon entering the mountains, and now it seemed unlikely that we would reach the village of Tekeriš by nightfall. A problem with Serbian mountains is that many of them are heavily forested and Mount Cer, which we were currently trying to traverse, was particularly leafy. The boys took a bearing and we decided it would be best to just head downwards and out of the woods. I said so we could find people; Richard said because of the wolves.
As we headed down, we met more and more unmarked junctions, so kept heading downwards. As the sky began to darken, we met a truck of foresters who in threadbare French helped us work out where we were and as expected it was nowhere near Tekeriš. Somehow though, we did not feel that disheartened and for the most part, I think this was due to our surroundings. On the other side of the mountain, we had left flat, rural Serbia, but here it was like we had wandered into a forgotten corner of somewhere old.
We carried on along the path, criss-crossed by a small, trickling stream, until finally, we saw a few buildings and a small, old woman feeding her hens. As my friends downed bags and started to debate what our plan of action should be for the night, I decided to try and speak to her. She was slightly shorter than me and her face was folded into a thick layer of wrinkles, which creased into a wide grin as I attempted to speak in my sporadic Serbian. I tried to explain that we were Scouts trying to walk 100 miles in 10 days but she had already sprung into conversation and I could hardly keep up. She pushed the phrasebook away when I offered it to her and I first thought this was due to the Latin not Cyrillic characters, but later wondered if she’d ever learnt to read at all. She talked of her ‘unuk’, her grandson who she said could help us. Indeed he would - later the next day, giving us a lift the 10 miles to Tekeriš.
She gave us cucumbers to eat, offered salt for our blisters and watched highly amused as we constructed our canvas homes in this beautiful, hidden valley. She came over just as night fell and pointed to the sky and then ran her fingers through the air in front of her. The sky looked clear enough to me but part of me trusted that she knew what she was talking about. And sure enough, once we finally tucked in for the night, there came the rain.

Tags: Travel Writing Scholarship 2013

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