Where Lines Cross

Day twenty-four, Montenegro. Four days here and I am only now arriving.

„The Namaste is a free place,“ says Alda, the manager, lighting a mosquito coil. It rained all morning and the mosquitoes have come back. It is unusually hot, even for here.

„In a normal hostel people walk past each other,“ he says. That doesn't happen here, and nobody seems to organise it.

Martin arrived this morning, a Cuban with a smile out of a toothpaste advertisement. „The energy is good. The Namaste is my home,“ he says. He keeps coming back through, like Sergej, who travelled for a long time and then decided to stay and work. Camilla has found a home here for as long as she needs one. Last night Bruno turned up, a Brazilian from Munich who rode the whole way on a bicycle. Tonight two Danish women are coming, staying one night and then going on with their packs.

Seher is from Turkey. She sees the place as somewhere lines cross. „Nowhere else would you meet all these different people at once,“ she says — as if the universe were weaving people together out of the chaos with threads you can't see.

She is going back to Istanbul soon, and she offers to show me the city if I come through.

I say yes. I am afraid of Turkey, and I say yes.