All pictures are taken by the Author Matteo Stefani
I was born and raised in Italy; Milano, the capital of fashion and design, is as little as 35 miles far away from the border with Switzerland. When I was a kid, on Saturdays, was very common for people living in my city to drive up to the border, cross into Switzerland and do some shopping in another country. Fuel, chocolate and cigarettes were substantially cheaper there.
Crossing the border meant stopping at the customs, showing passports to officers and often being asked to let them inspect the car and look for illegal goods. Was a sort of a little adventure, annoying for the most, extremely exciting for me.
Switzerland, despite being only so close, is a completely different country. People speak a different language, houses look different, food is worse (oh my god… much worse)…even the streets and road signals have different shapes and there are different icons than the one we were used to. And all this as little as less than one hour driving!
Crossing borders has been relatively normal for my generation; especially for anybody living in Europe. Still today, while commuting between Belgium (where I live and work) and Italy, I cross at least 4 countries: Luxembourg, France, Germany and Switzerland.
Only one thing has (dramatically) changed: if we exclude Switzerland, which is an imaginary island in the European Union, there are no customs checks, no officers, no queues, no documents to show… most of the time the motorway crosses a border and a simple signal welcomes you to another country. Still today, in any case, languages are different, people look different, houses don’t look similar and food is worse (less than in the past) and… well… the European union has tried to harmonize the road signals.
Now is undoubtedly easy and practical to live and travel across Europe, pretty much as travelling across the United States.
But in all this, there is something missing… the magic and the feeling to be about to cross into another country, the thrill of not being sure to be allowed to access … today that romantic and nostalgic process is forgotten and is a memory of the past.
Why do I love borders?
It was August 1989 when, while being a guest student in Germany, the teacher has taken us to visit the border with the inaccessible former German Democratic Republic. A pole stood still and lonely in the middle of the forest showing the real border between East and West Germany. A couple of hundreds of meters ahead, the iron curtain stretched for miles and miles from south to north of Europe; a 15 feet high iron fence in the middle of a minefield. So terrible and fascinating at the same time… a border that I was never allowed to cross. Not yet.
I was 12 at that time; this experience, this short trip aimed to see a line I couldn’t cross, contributed to grow an interest for borders, especially for those not so easy to cross and for countries not too easy to access. And as some of you may recall, that year was a special one … history was made few months after. The Berlin wall fell and new perspectives arose for the two “Germanies” which in a couple of days become one again.
And the year after, an Italian guest student, again Germany… could eventually cross the border.
What was a scary non penetrable mystery became now something I could drive through and cross. And despite I was already used to go through borders, in 1990 I saw for the first time in my life a major difference between two countries that were finally one again. My love for borders and passion for discovering differences was born here, in 1990, crossing this human made atrocity.
Year after year, Europe became more unite and gradually east European countries got closer to the western ones by declaring independence from the former communist regime… travelling through these countries didn’t become necessarily easy but at least possible; This ease of moving was true with the exception of the huge Russia.
Russia appeared into my life in the form of a yellow road signal in Kangaskoski… a small dot on the map at the border between Finland and Russia. I was in a road trip with my parents towards North Cape (Europe Northernmost point - or better - the northernmost point reachable by car in Europe) when I realized on the map we were actually driving just alongside the Russian - Finnish border (oh my god, so thrilling!)
I begged my father to drive into the direction of Russia… we entered a small unpaved road… no sign of any customs building… only yellow signals until a tank started moving into our direction. I never saw my father driving back so fast, my mother shouting so loud nor so much dust in front of us. We managed to get back into the main road and avoid any bad experience… and I will never know if at that time I’ve managed to cross the border with Russia!
I have been to Russia many times in my life after that first experience, it is a very fascinating and incredible country. Russia is so vast that crosses 11 time zones and for this reason I ended up meeting the Russian border many time in my life… in the south while visiting Georgia, in the east while in Mongolia and in the north when I was looking at it from Estonia. Every time the people I met had interesting stories and adventures connected to the border with Russia.
As a teenager my desire to explore the world and cross new borders grew as much as the number of red spots…
Not yet 18, I found myself on a train departing Berlin towards Moscow (Russia, again). This time I was planning to stop in Warsaw, Poland. The idea was to travel in the night, spend 24 hours there and travel back to Berlin. At the border between Germany and Poland, polish soldiers come into the train asking for documents… and apparently we were stupid enough to travel with the ID cards and leave the Passport at home. We ended up being pushed (literally) off the train, questioned about the purpose of our trip and forced to wait for another train going back to Berlin. A romantic cold night in a no man’s land between two borders and two rail tracks.
I consider myself an experienced traveler: I have visited over 100 countries in 7 continents, caught over 300 planes in the last 4 years and I still feel the same stupid teenager I was 25 years ago. And despite being over 40 I found myself repeating the same mistake at the border with Poland… This time I haven’t read properly the visa requirements to access Belarus and again while in the train crossing the border between Ukraine and Belarus, I have been asked out of the train and back to Ukraine as I didn’t have the visa, required only in the case Belarus is accessed via train or car. Another night in an empty station in a no man’s land. But thanks to google maps, I can confirm I have been officially to Belarus (even though I didn’t get a stamp).
Ukraine is home of one of the world’s most famous disaster; today, almost 35 years after the Chernobyl explosion, it is possible to access the city of Pripyat and walk back in time among abandoned buildings that the citizen of this small city left behind while leaving by bus. Borders are not necessarily between two countries…there are no passport control through this buffer zone between the past and the present but it is the only border in the world where you have to pass through a Geiger counter which checks the radioactivity level of your body. There are other famous buffer…one of these hosts a famous blue barrack with a famous table: while sitting on a chair of this iconic building in the de-militarized zone between **** it becomes very obvious that you are in the world’s most militarized zone. Crossing this border is not possible, but you can visit it both if you are visiting ****( or if you are brave enough to experience few days of ****.
The same cold winter days around New Year 2016, when an american young citizen was captured and jailed in ****, I was visiting the country. The tension was high because of the international crisis around the arrest of ****; **** was threatening the western world and proudly testing his first Nuclear weapon: I was on a train towards the border with China, trying to get out of the country.
I love taking pictures, video and time-lapses. Even in the countries where it is actually not allowed to do so. And for some inexplicable reasons, I had decided to attach my gopro camera to the window of the train and make a (very sad) time-lapse of the trip. Unfortunately I arrived at the border and forgot to remove my installation from the window of the train. It’s not been easy to explain to the **** officers, what I was trying to do. But I eventually made it through and finally entered China… I never loved this country so much!
Many iconic borders carry with them terrible and sad stories: a journey between **** and ****, via **** implies a series of line crossing which make you forget where you are and where you are entering into. Abandoned buildings, full of stories and home of people who had to look for a refuge some else, mark the transition between one world, one religion, and another.
There are also borders up in the mountains, as the one between Peru and Bolivia. Above 5000 meters of altitude, people who live at on the shore of the Titicaca lake often cross this border to trade anything they can; sometime however they get caught with illegal goods and they are not allowed to cross anymore. Officially at least. My tour guide was one of this and he couldn’t officially cross the border with me. So he dropped me off at the customs, and inexplicably appeared at the other side of the border a couple of minutes later.
Even in the countries where Google Maps Navigation is notavailable I found very helpful to download the offline version of the map and follow my position. Directions work and it is possible for google to bring you wherever you need. What I found out is that, especially in some countries, google tells you the shortest road and doesn’t specify the conditions of the road itself… and this is what happened between Georgia and Armenia where actually, migrating cows ended up faster than me.
Yes, I am counting the countries and territories I am crossing. Nomadmania is a website which offers you the possibility to keep track of the places you visit and publishes a world travelers ranking. There is a long way to go before I can be at the top of this list however I am often inventing road trips that help me visiting a high number of countries and crossing a lot of border… what about an exciting tour across the Balkans that enable
you to feel the thrill 9 times in 10 days? Welcome to Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania, **** , Macedonia, Bulgaria and Serbia. Have you ever driven 2 hours toward a border which was accessible only to local citizen? Actually I did… my friend had a flight to take and there was not really any option to go back a chose another route. Luckily officers can be very nice and kind people! Balkans are home of one of the few Bears’ world reserve… maybe the only one. In the former Yugoslavia was very common for restaurants to hold bears in captivity and display them to the customers. It was so common that a swiss NGO has decided to create a protected park to host this animals that are still being found in cages around the balcans. Few hundred miles north of the Bear park in Kosovo, a country recognized by all UN member except Serbia, if you want to drive between the small Moldovan country and Ukraine, you need a special permit to transit through a country that does not exist. Transnistria is a country which is officially only recognized by Abkhazia… for being a country which doesn’t exist, it has a pretty tough border control, its own currency and parliament. Visiting the country that doesn’t exist is not as nice as exploring the impenetrable forest between congo and Uganda. Home of hundreds of Gorilla and much more dangerous Elephants it is possible to cross the borders many times while tracking gorillas… you cannot be alone… you need at least an expert tracker, a park ranger, a guide with a machete to open the way and at least a couple of guys with a rifle to protect tourists from Elephants.
The world is home to many contended borders as the one between South Africa and Namibia, where the water of the Orange river is a precious resource for both countries.
As you can see borders are always home of stories and adventures. Borders can divide two countries, two zone or areas. Most of the time are man-made.
Hawaii is home of a border I love… the border between destruction of creation. We saw how lava has been able to erase houses, roads and bays from the diligently build google map… at the same time you can sit and stare at lava flowing into the ocean and constantly create new land in a never-ending fascinating process .
Borders are there waiting for you to cross them and make your unique story and adventure for the others to be inspired and never stop.
What is your favorite border? What is your best border story?
Never stop crossing
Matteo
Matteo
