Thumbs up!

Darkness. Dead silence. ¬Dreadful feelings. I take a look at my buddy Dan and wonder how the hell we ended up here – sitting on the bench at the bus stop in the middle of Bosnia & Herzegovina during the night…
Three days ago I packed my backpack rolling everything tightly so that I could have taken all the necessary things without hiring Sherpa and was ready for my first hitch-hiking trip. Dan and I planned the whole route from Warsaw to Dubrovnik and agreed not to stay over a night in Bosnia & Herzegovina as we heard lots of bad things about this place.
At the beginning, everything went smoothly. During the first day we managed to get to Ljubljana. On the next day we set off very early and three cars and five hours later we managed to get to the Croatian border near Slavonski Brod (the landscape there is similar to a desert)…and that was the place where the party started. We spent almost 3 hours in the scorching sun struggling to catch anything. We were about to give in and walk to the border (almost 6 km) when two elder women stopped just in front of us. My explosion of happiness didn’t last long, though. It was killed as soon as they said that I can go but Dan cannot. Suddenly, I noticed the rosary hanging on their rear view mirror. Giovanni Paolo Secondo! I started to shout desperately pointing at the rosary. Catholic! I pointed out to Dan. They jumped out of the car and gave us both a huge hug (religion is very important in Bosnia as the nation is divided into Catholics, Muslims and Protestants). After ca. 100km we were left on the bus stop. They wished us good luck and then drove away happy they helped us. Women’s car was the last, we saw that day.
I could have almost felt the increasing tension between my buddy and me. No one knew what to say as it was crystal clear that we would have to spend the night there, under the bus stop bench. There was no point in putting up a tent as it could only draw the unwanted attention.
I had to bite the bullet and face the new situation. Instead of being sulky, I put on warm hoodie, clasped the tear gas in my hand, dig deep in my sleeping back - very close to Dan and tried to fall asleep wishing that it would be the shortest night in my life…
This experience taught me two things. Firstly, you cannot neither forecast nor plan everything while travelling. And secondly, it’s not ours buddies’ fault that something went wrong. Get through bad moments together as your buddy is the only person who knows how you feel.