Budva, Montenegro

hike~

Take it to the mountain. Walk it off, walk it out. Follow a thin green line on your phone screen, walk and taxi and walk again, not sure quite where the line leads. But it's somewhere, somewhere to be.

Your feel your feet on the gravelly ground. Lizards with no legs skitter pasty, and furballs with no heads scratch in the bushes, and your journey becomes intertwined with theirs, counted no more in cities and borders, but in trees and stones. The scale of your A-B becomes infinitely smaller, and yet vastly more epic. Nothing could be more totemic and ancient than pressing on, through whip-crack branches and humming undergrowth, from the sandy beach to rocky outcrops high above.

You clamber over dry-stone walls - or are they the exposed stone of the mountainside, tumbled and piled up without the aid of a human hand at all? Tadpoles sit in the mud, waiting for metamorphosis. You trek up behind the empty farmhouse, the abandoned millstone leaning in disrepair. A marvellous friend crosses your path, totally unexpectedly - a wild tortoise. You try to feed her a nearby fuzzy caterpillar, but she isn't hungry. Maybe that's her friend. She hurries to hide from me under a bush (taking her two minutes to travel approximately zero metres, of course). You leave her be.

The Adriatic pops up through the treeline, sapphire and light. You found somewhere to be. You were there.

~ from water...

The water has gone, disconnected:
the pristine enclave runs dry,
cut off from showers,
cappuccinos, everything.
You wash and drink from a bottle,
in a walled desert island unto itself,
while luxury tourism consumes,
metres away, unabashed,
with boats bobbing in the marina.

"The thing is, having no water really is a bit of a bummer, isn't it?" - plummy British tourist

...to wine ~

The drought breaks -
glorious flow restored.
An apology in red appears,
"Sorry for the disruption"
"Enjoy this free wine on us."
Suddenly the lack of water
Is forgotten - click, pour.Read more