It’s not everyday that you find yourself in a tiny boat on the Danube, squashed by the borders of Serbia and Croatia, with five libertarians, a future diplomat to Liechtenstein, and a self-proclaimed cannabis shaman, on your way to the newest (self-proclaimed) country in the world: Liberland.
It was just one kilometre upstream. An easy trip, right?
Wrong…
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We’d been in our Cape Town Airbnb for all of fifteen minutes when my friend, Nick, walked into the living room shirtless. “I’ve got a Tinder date for tonight.” He said.
Was this how quickly dates were made now? I was single for the first time in nearly a decade. I knew nothing about dating apps. “That was fast.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you . . . erm . . . exchanged a lot of messages?”
In the northwest of Indonesia is a crocodile-shaped island called Sulawesi. In its jaws is an unspoilt, rarely visited, really odd region called Tana Toraja.
My tour of it began on a narrow, twisting path. My guide, Samuel, stopped at a point where it widened below high chalk cliffs. “You might have heard the expression ‘life is expensive, death is cheap.’” He laughed quietly. “Well, in Torajaland, it’s the opposite. All our lives we save for our deaths.”
“It’s like The Truman Show fucked The Twilight Zone.”
When the rusty Iron Curtain finally collapsed, a narrow, wonky strip of land called Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (or Transnistria, to most) found itself sitting in what was now calling itself Moldova. Moldova had decreed its official language would be Moldovan. A linguistic inconvenience for the mainly Russian-speaking Transnistria.
As Moldova looked west, Transnistria glanced forlornly east, towards Mother Russia. A cultural tug of war ensued. The white arts of diplomacy tried to fix it. They failed. The dark arts of war stepped in. Bearing in mind that Transnistria only had a population of half a million, and is, at some points, just a few kilometres wide, it was a war that should have ended by lunchtime of that same day, with Transnistria waving white flags and issuing humble apologies for having got ideas well above its station.
That was not what happened. Instead, those half a million plucky Leninists called home to Moscow. Moscow was probably flattered. Of course Moscow would send weapons. Lots of weapons.
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