Where We Once Belonged: International Travel in the Time of Covid

We are quiet. There are nearly sixty of us in line, by my estimate. We stand where the markings tell us to stand and we do not interact with one another. A cargo van idles on the road beside us. Taxi doors close in the distance as more foreigners arrive.

The young man in front of me turns around. His beard is long like mine is and wildly grasps at the fringes of his mask. He muffles forth a suffocated, “Do you have a pen I can borrow?” 

I pretend like sharing the pen is not the great sin that it is. I hand it over to him and smile though all expressions are now reduced to eyes over the tops of mask fabric. He uses the pen to write his name and address on the cards they gave us. When he hands it back I don’t know if he senses my hesitation. I touch what he has touched and now we have risked infecting each other—the violation is the closest thing I have felt to intimacy in weeks.

An airport worker corrals us forward. “Two meters apart, please. Two meters. That’s it. Stand on the lines.”

Representatives from the embassy wear neon yellow vests with paper American flags pinned on the back. They walk up and down the line, awaiting their chance to respond to questions we do not ask. 

When it is my turn, I leave my bags to the side and I go up to the mandatory hand washing station. Assistants in full coveralls and masks and goggles watch me as I lather my hands. I dry them and throw the paper towel into a bin with a biohazard sign above it. I return to my bags and then proceed forward.

Next is the man at the lectern. He stands behind plexiglass as if ready to give a lonely sermon: Book of Revelation, perhaps. 

“Your passport,” he says. “Pull down your mask, please.”

He reviews my face, the passport, and my face again.

“Ok, go ahead,” he says, crossing my name off of a list.

I cross the threshold and enter the open atrium of glass and steel. An infrared camera is pointed at me like a gun and held there for a three count.

“Hold on,” they say as they review the image. “Okay. You’re okay.”

I sigh. 

Inside I get in another line zigzagging up to the ticket counters. There are voices now coming from the lines, mostly American; conversations and questions that echo in the emptiness of the great hall. I drop my heavy backpack onto the ground and wonder which of the many surfaces I contact will be the one with the virus. This thought accompanies me up to the counter, as I receive my ticket, as I go through security and proceed to the only gate open in the entire airport. 

Beside a moving walkway another man in coveralls and goggles and gloves walks by a poster of a crystal clear beach extending from a rocky coast. Text on the poster reads: El mundo le pertenece a quienes lo recorren: The world belongs to those who travel it. 

We are leaving to hopefully return to places we once felt belonged to us, grasping at the idea that we can still connect to them despite being isolated for so long. My fear is that now those places are as warped as Bogotá is. Or maybe my real fear is that even without a pandemic, I had never had a place like that to begin with.

As we wait for the flight I can see that we have all prepared for this journey differently. Three members of one family are covered from head to toe in protective equipment. The parents sit the required two meters apart from one another and distract themselves with their phones. The light of their screens reflects off of the transparent plastic shields attached to their heads like welders’ masks. Their son cannot stay put and goes back and forth between them, reaching out to place his arm around their shoulders.

Others, including myself, only wear masks that cover the nose and mouth. An older woman with both a Coach handbag and carry-on has a mask with a faux-gold emblem of some other reputable brand on it. She takes out her hand sanitizer every fifteen minutes, rinses her hands, and wipes down the surfaces of her luggage. Then she takes out a small makeup mirror and ensures that her mask sits evenly on her face and that her hair is in order. When I look over at her she turns away as if gazes also carry risk of contagion. 

There in the waiting area for the gate we rest assured that our precautions have been sufficient. There is ample room and we can keep away from one another. But soon we march into spaces steadily more compromised: first the line past the flight attendants checking tickets, then the boxed-in gangway, then into the airplane cabin. By the time we are at our seats we wonder if the original precautions were all for nought. 

The flight attendants make announcements over the intercom exhorting the last passengers in the aisle to keep a safe distance from one another. When we are all seated she explains how the plane has been disinfected and how the air is clean and that we do not have to worry. Her tone is like that of a gunman telling hostages that everything is going to be okay. 

This is a so-called humanitarian flight provided by the US embassy. It is hard to glean the origins of the semantics. They charged me four-hundred and sixty dollars for the ticket and that’s only for the stretch to Florida. 

They remind us over the intercom that there will be no complimentary food or drink. “Not even water,” the flight attendant clarifies. “You must purchase any food or drink that you want.” Welcome aboard Spirit airlines. Welcome back to America. 

Before we pierce through the low grey clouds threatening afternoon rain, we fly right over my neighborhood and I can make out my apartment building and the four blocks that my life had been reduced to over the last sixty-four days. And then we get enveloped by the clouds and I cannot see anything, neither what lies below nor ahead. The plane trembles and shakes in the grey clouds and we hold our breaths and clutch our armrests. But then we break through and the skies are clear above us and the sun enters in where the small windows allow it to. It must have been that way the whole time, I remind myself. When I had looked at the grey from my apartment window I had forgotten that there were clear skies above. As the fuselage tilts northward, a beam of sun slowly lifts to my face and I bask in the warmth.

* * *

The arrival into Fort Lauderdale is marked by everything that is absent. There is no hand washing station, no infrared camera, no temperature check. There is no health assessment, no mention of quarantine, no question of where we are headed next nor what precautions we need to take upon arrival. Only about a third of the people I see are wearing masks. It is easy for me to believe that I have returned to some semblance of normality, easier still to let the guard down that I had firmly in place only hours before. 

My flight to Denver is not until the next morning. I must head into the humid bowels of Fort Lauderdale where I have booked a cheap hotel for the night. The reception desk is encased in thick plexiglass, a barrier erected long before the virus. The receptionist slips me a key card under the glass and I haul my bags to room one sixteen. A police car sits in the parking lot with two officers watching me as I go in. A boisterous couple argues with each other in the foyer. Down the hall there are broken women in short skirts and spaghetti-strap tops that eye me as I go in. 

A nagging weight has haunted this journey since the beginning. Every surface I graze, every suffocating space I squeeze into, and every interaction I have with another carries the risk of propagation—so I have been told and so I believe. If it is not true, then what have we been hiding from all this time? 

I have moved about for the last day with a perverse mindfulness that, should I make a mistake, the results will be grave. Reclining into the cushioned backseat of a taxi could bring future fever and chills. The holding of the hotel keycard may usher me to my mother’s bedside as she gasps for air. The accidental bump into an airport employee might be what triggers impossibly long nights in an ICU. Am I already infected? Have I been sewing a thread of infection that ties these disparate people and points of the world together: the man who checked my passport in Bogota, the woman who took my credit card at the Fort Lauderdale airport Chic-fil-A, the flight attendant that said goodbye to me as I left my flight in Charlotte, the guests staying in my mom’s house in Denver?

But what else is there to do? Do we hide away and collapse into ourselves awaiting the end of all this? Or do take advantage of the uncertain time left, time that doesn’t seem to stretch on toward the infinite like we previously thought? The old thought-experiment that we puzzled ourselves with before is less make-believe: What if this was your last week on Earth? What would you do? 

I would embrace, and caress, and pat on the back; I would bring you close and stare into your eyes and imbibe our conversation as a delicacy; I would run my fingers through your hair; I would stroke your hand and listen and smile and listen more; I would both hold tight and let go—what were we worried about anyway? I would be honest; I wouldn’t hide away anymore; I would go out into the world and sit in the sunshine with you and dream of that future that couldn’t be—but damn, if it could have been, it would have been bliss.

* * *

The freshness of the air is what is most familiar. The summer birds are now out in the ponderosas and their songs are like tunes of my teenage years. I used to come to this ridgeline then all the time and climb the boulders and sit and listen and watch the cars silently float along the highway far below. Now time seems to be playing tricks on me. Bogotá only simmers somewhere near the subconscious. The stretch of a decade from the last time I was among those boulders seems just a day. The uncertainty of yesterday dissipates in the breeze. Maybe we do have all that time ahead of us still.

For all its familiarity, it is bigger than I remember. It’s a place a soul can stretch out a bit and blend into the air and sunshine. There is nothing but cerulean sky overhead. Not a trace of grey to be seen. 

Day Fifty and Beyond

The grey skies over Bogota these days remind me of home. The clouds blend into each other and crawl along a greyscale matte that covers the city. The grey forms a seal against the muted hillsides at the city’s edges and muffles what was once a busy metropolis. It is the kind of grey that would bring snow to Denver, snow that would alight on bare faces in tiny cold sparks, hardly noticeable, making one ask, “Is it snowing?” The kind of snow that builds in the quiet of the evening until the lawns and rooftops of Park Hill would be blanketed white, and the tires of the cars going down Colorado Boulevard would carry that styrofoam whir though streetlights, moving down south toward Cherry Creek and up into Englewood. 

It will not snow in Bogota. But the grey skies complement grey citizens in grey masks, framed in the grey mosaic of apartment building windows. The people are rubbing their temples and looking out into the quiet streets, the bluewhite penumbra from their televisions flickering behind them. 

We’re in day fifty now. The only color that seems to break the grey these days is a color that, here in the north of the city, we only hear about. In the south they are hanging red hand towels and red kerchiefs and old red t-shirts out of their windows. En esta casa se necesita alimentación, they are saying. “We need food in this house.” We do what we can for each other but, as isolated as we are, it is also easy to forget others. It is harder to empathize when we have our own clouds slowly enveloping us. 

By all material measures I have it good. I have food and clothing. I have a terrace where I can exercise and breathe the city air that has become strangely fresh. I have unlimited access to dull television series and films I choose delicately, lest they evoke emotions that I am not equipped to deal with anymore. 

As I was cooking last night, I listened to a podcast, as I have done every night for the last fifty. There was a story on about Iwate, Japan and the kaze no denwa, or “wind phone.” Iwate, just north of Fukushima, is one of the areas where the tsunami hit in 2011. It is very close to where I used to live and it is easy to imagine the countryside there, the coast and its people.

The podcast talked of a man whose brother died in the disaster. As a totem to reach out to his lost sibling, he put a phone booth in his yard. The phone line is not connected anywhere, yet the man picks up the receiver and talks to his brother as if he was there. This is how he copes with tragedy and how he grieves.

Others from the region who also lost their loved ones in the tsunami come to visit the phone booth. They spend their time calling lost husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, grandparents. They talk into the disconnected phone and tell those who have moved on that they are still fighting through their pain. Ganbate iru yo, they say. They tell them not to worry: Shinpai shinaide. 

As I listened to the story I was overcome with tears. I bent over and had to prop myself up with both hands on the counter. I sobbed. I have not cried like that in years. 

I don’t sleep well anymore. I haven’t climbed on my little climbing wall in days. I cannot make it through the forty-five minutes of meditation that I was doing before, nor can I focus while reading. My ability to write comes in erratic bursts.

The morning after listening to the podcast, I bought a ticket back to the US. Fortunately there are still humanitarian flights provided by the US embassy. The next one is ten days away, which will make my total more than sixty days in isolation. 

I’m worried about the me that will arrive back to Colorado. It is not the same person I was before this started. Strange that in protecting ourselves from the physical ailments of the virus there is a greater threat of mental deterioration. I have grown sick despite having avoided the virus.

I’ve learned that one can endure crisis if he has community. I had three clandestine visitors come by briefly in the last fifty days. Those days were beacons of light among the grey. But we do not know how often we can see each other nor do we know when we will be allowed to move freely in the city again. And so I will go back to Colorado, where, for better or worse, things are opening. I will stay with my family and climb in the mountains with my friends. I will heal.

I do not want to try and connect when it is too late; I do not want to talk to those I love through a phone line that will never reach them. 

El Aguacero

When the aguacero, a violent and sudden thunderstorm, came in four days ago, I was on my terrace, doing circuits on my little climbing wall, trying to distract myself. My mind has started to get fixated on different ideas daily: on the people I will see when this is over, on future plans to travel, on routes outside that I would like to climb, on how to build a life that does not result in being alone in times of crisis. Climbing keeps the fixations at bay, giving me relief from the chatter, at least for a few hours.

I was not the only one with this idea to exercise. Many of us are trying to tame our demons. The city streets are empty, but rooftops are bustling. I could see others on their terraces too, running laps back and forth, doing jumping jacks, or jumping rope. Some did yoga, others dance routines. More than a few just paced: back and forth, back and forth. 

Between attempts on the climbing wall, I would watch these neighbors. In turn, they watched me. After a month in quarantine I feel like we have gotten to know each other, though they are far away and we have never spoken. The woman doing jumping jacks had bright pink hair at the beginning of all this. She wore lycra outfits that accentuated a body that, even from a distance, I could tell was not entirely natural. These days the black roots of her hair have grown and the pink is retreating farther and farther out. She exercises less and does not seem to care about what she is wearing. She and her boyfriend come outside late in the afternoon and spend most of their time now sitting and talking with each other.

Across the main road is another couple. They had lunch together every day on their rooftop terrace when this began. He would grill and she would make cocktails. They turned on the dangling Christmas lights above them even during the middle of the day. They would clink their cocktail glasses together and sit side by side and talk as they ate their meal. They have not been out for a few days now. The last time I saw them, they still sat side by side, that time working on their laptops and talking less. The Christmas lights remained off.

Their neighbor sometimes climbs atop the little building on the roof that accesses the stairs. He stands on it and talks with someone on his phone. He must use video, because he puts the phone out from time to time and pans around himself, showing whoever he is talking to his view of the hushed metropolis. He is there every few days. When he is not on the phone he stands pensively, unmoving, staring out at the city.

The aguacero sent everyone into their apartments. I have a little roof over part of my terrace and so I decided to stay and continue climbing. To be out of the apartment and climbing is always better. The first drops fell large and heavy and beat against the thin roof in staccato. At first, it seemed that the storm might be capricious, threatening only a little and then going away. But it was not so. After a brief lull, the staccato returned and grew into a deafening white noise, drowning out the music I was playing. Hail pounded the open area just beyond the climbing wall and thunder rolled in the distance. 

There have been full days during this quarantine where I have realized I did not say a word, days when there are no calls from friends or family, when I do not have to meet with my students via video conferences, when I can’t find the motivation to sing along to music nor to keep myself company with advise or, failing that, derision. But when the aguacero had reached its crescendo and the heavens were unleashing their deluge, I yelled back at it at the top of my lungs.  

My terrace filled with water, the rain still mixing with hail and bouncing against the pool that the drains could not release fast enough. I shouted and cheered and felt alive again. I continued to climb, more aggressively now, throwing myself at small holds, kicking my feet through the air. The water came in under the roofed area and threatened to soak my crashpad and so I had to move it to a corner. All the while I laughed and shouted and hoped the storm would never stop.

But the pool spread so much that I could no longer climb on the wall, and so I too had to retreat into my apartment like my neighbors had retreated into theirs. I ran to my stairway, getting soaked in the process, and pounced down my stairs, my chest heaving and heart beating madly.

At my window I watched the rivulets pour down the glass and distort the image of the street below and the apartments beyond. There, across the way, was a woman by herself, also standing at her window. The rain lashed down between us and our figures melted into something impressionistic. I watched her. She watched me. The storm flashed and boomed around us. Framed in her window, she became like everyone was becoming: a distant abstraction. 

The evening darkness seeped in and though the storm began to lift, I could not make the woman out in her window anymore. When the last clouds moved on, and a few stars appeared over the city, that familiar quiet returned: quiet enough for my thoughts to start creeping back. I stayed at the window, watching, and waiting to see who would return now that the storm was over. 

On Isolation -- Weeks, Months, a Lifetime

The early mornings are still immune. At least, they pretend to be. Asleep, I dream as I normally would have — of a classroom of unruly adolescents, of a day in the mountains, of Her. And when I awake, the dream-ether hangs in the air for a moment still; I exist in a world that, even though it was born from a dream, is more normal than the reality that awaits outside.

One wall of my apartment is entirely made up of glass. Six stories up, I can look down on an avenue and watch its quiet abnormality. If I am still waking, I can fool myself back into that dream-mind. Let it be like it was before. But then a lone Bogotano will appear below, walking his dog, a facemask secured over his nose and mouth, surgical gloves on hands holding the leash. And then the dream-mind must let go, leaving my true mind to face the realities of isolation.

* * *

A month ago I had one of my best days in Colombia so far. I went climbing in an area not far from Bogota. We had been spending every weekend there in order to make progress on the hardest route I have ever tried. On that day, I did the route, achieving a life goal of mine. There was a crowd there and when I came down, there were hugs and cheers and high-fives from friends I have made over my last nine months here. How easily we embraced then. How simple the pleasure.

That night was my friend Santiago’s birthday. Many friends gathered to celebrate and again we sat close to each other, greeted each other with hugs and kisses on the cheek. We joked about coronavirus then, all sat together eating lechona and drinking beer and being merry. 

A week later they closed the climbing area. Then they put up controls leaving the city. And then the quarantine went into effect. 

Photo: Juan Sebastian Riaño

* * *

It’s been fifteen days. They say the quarantine will go on for a month, but even now they are hinting at an extension. In all likelihood it will be at least two months. There is a chance it will be three.

I live alone. 

The ocean of time ahead of me is hard to fathom. On a call with my mother — I call more now — she reminded me, “At least you have spent a lot of time alone before. You are used to it.”

She is right. I’ve been spending time alone since I was young. When I was twelve, I spent three days camped alone in the Canadian Rockies, a rite of passage designed by my father. (He was camped nearby, though out of contact, and was ready to rescue me if I ran into trouble.) By the time I was eighteen I took a year off before college and traveled the U.S. alone, living out of my truck. In adulthood I have taken international trips alone, climbing in Asia, Europe, and South America, traversing the Himalayas on a motorcycle — I even named the bike “Solivagant” on that trip, which means “to wander alone.” I’ve written magazine articles on the pleasures of solitary trekking in the mountains, the peace that it invites. My career for the last twelve years has involved me questing out alone into one foreign country after another and adapting to the challenges of new schools, new languages, new customs. It has been a professional life that is often isolating, and yet I have made it through, I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve called it adventure. 

But to equate those experiences with what lies ahead is false. On my travels, there were always new people to meet, new places to explore. Travel invites the potential to move from isolation into new and exciting communities. There was also always the physical challenge and reward of climbing and hiking in these new places. There was fresh air and vast landscapes, aspects of the experiences that were fulfilling and good. And even that twelve-year-old who was restricted to a small camping area for his solo had something that I now know is a great luxury: an end. He just had to make it three days. As lonely as he got, he had a number to count down from.

I’m counting up now. Fifteen days today. To what number I am counting to, I know not. And though I do not know when this will end — none of us do — I know that, having finished one more day, I am that much closer to the end, whenever it may be. Knowledge of that forward progress offers some reprieve. It has been my mantra, in fact. At the end of each day, I tell myself: You are one day closer. You are one day closer.

If nothing else, this time is teaching me about my pride. I once felt so successful in my ventures alone. For being the archetype of the loner, I would pat myself on the back. (Who else would there be to pat me on the back anyway?) In December of 2016, after a year in a remote part of Bhutan, I wrote, “This part of my life, I feel, is a great story. But the theme continues to elude me. Is it about abandoning the materialism of America? About finding spirituality among Himalayan Buddhists? Is it about adventure and challenge? About loneliness perhaps?” Now I must face that question with new eyes. I’m also aware from my experiences that for those of us who are known for our independent resiliency, there are less check-ins, less calls. He’ll make it, they believe. He always does. 

I continue to tell myself the same thing. You’ve weathered other storms. You’ve known the darkness and have beaten it back. You can do it again. Loneliness has been your companion more than once. A lifetime of lonely adventures has given me so much good. And those experiences are an advantage for the challenges to come. But that life has also led me to the way in which I must now face this challenge: alone.

January of 2017, the next entry as I left Bhutan and set off on my motorcycle toward Nepal: I wrote, “as is the plague of the wanderer, other existential questions have started to arise ... What purpose does this adventure serve? When will I grow up, settle down, commit to something stable? What is the effect of such long-term loneliness?”

For those of you who have stayed put but have cultivated communities around you, have built families, have fallen in love — I envy you. To spend this time in quarantine with others is a blessing. I spend more time than I’d like wondering how much easier this would be if She were here. And if you have Her next to you (or Him), as much as She might be grinding on your nerves these days, know that you are lucky. Don’t take Her for granted. 

* * *

I am not beaten. Not yet. I have convinced myself to slip into something like a monk’s mind. In the mornings I meditate. I built a small climbing wall, and I use it almost daily. I do the perfunctory work I need to get done for my virtual classes. I cook new recipes and hone them for the day when I can share the meals with friends again. (You will eat well, my friends. You will eat well.) I read. I write.

And I continue to examine those existential questions on loneliness. I weigh what it has given me and what it has taken. There is now time to reflect on a whole life that has led up to this moment. My hope is that by scrutinizing these questions with this monk’s mind, I may now start to arrive at answers. And if not, well, at least I successfully distracted myself for another day. Then, before going to bed and returning to the normality of dreams, I can say again to myself, You are one day closer. You are one day closer.

New Routes in Skaljari

*I'm no longer in Montenegro. This is an article that I intended for a climbing magazine, but it never got published. So I offer it here.

Leo on "Vertical Gardener" (7a+ (5.12a))

Our pre-climbing routine in Škaljari, Montenegro goes like this: put on harness, clip draws onto gear loops, get the rope out from the rope bag and settled at the base of the first pitch of the day, do some shoulder warm-ups and stretches, and take out the phone to send the local paranoid schizophrenic a text message:

Charlie. We’re up at the climbing area. Please don’t come and bother us.

You know, standard stuff.

* * *

The climbing scene in Montenegro is still relatively unknown. Even on his Balkan foray, Adam Ondra skipped over the country entirely. He went from the now well-known Drill and Chill festival in Bosnia and Herzegovina straight over to Albania, where impossibly long tufas awaited his banshee screams. I don’t know if he drove through Montenegro, but if he had I am sure that he looked around in awe; here is a country that is almost entirely composed of limestone mountains replete with canyons, caves, and new crags to develop for generations. 

I have been living in the town of Tivat for two years now. My arrival brought the local climbing community numbers to three. By local, I don’t mean the town; I mean the entire country. Nobody climbs here. Those of us who do are foreigners—a Bosnian, a Turk, and me, the American. A few others dabble, but only on occasion. In a country known for its advent and subsequent victories in “The Lazy Olympics,” it should be no surprise that finding Montenegrins who are willing to put in full days at the crag are few and far between. Many of those who feigned interest in joining us find it hard just climbing out of bed before noon. 

This dearth of climbers has left most of the potential crags untapped. There is only one primary area near the capital city of Podgorica, called Smokovac. It is the original and still most-developed area here. It is a kind of Frankenstein of development, bolted ad hoc over time by a variety of climbers passing through from various countries. On most days, its nearly seventy routes sit unclimbed, a ghost crag populated intermittently with itinerant passersby.

When I arrived to Montenegro, I was far from Smokovac. In search of a community and a place to spend free weekends and afternoons, I followed some cryptic Mountain Project beta to a large amphitheater of limestone just fifteen minutes from, and overlooking, the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Kotor Bay. In 2005, some other wandering climbers—Austrians and, surprisingly, a few Montenegrins—bolted four routes there. The rest of the wall, which had room for a comfortable one-hundred routes, was left untouched. I didn’t find a community, but I did find a way to spend my free time.

I went to work, believing in an if-you-build-it-they-will-come kind of scenario. I theorized that what was keeping Montenegro back from growing its climbing community was simply a lack of infrastructure. If I could bolt this beautiful crag, with such convenient access for those around Kotor Bay, surely people would start coming out.

Lonely bolting. But what a view.

That first winter of bolting what would become known as Škaljari (after the neighborhood it sits above) was long and lonely. Most days I went by myself and fixed ropes during various intensities of rainfall. Since the crag is primarily overhanging, many of the lines stay protected and dry. On days when the rain abated, I tirelessly cleaned and bolted the easier slabs and vertical faces, knowing that if a community would arise from this crag, they’d need to start on beginner routes. 

The base of the crag was littered with the decaying carcasses of a variety of animals—goats, a fox, tiny and fragile bird skeletons, bleached turtle shells. There was a Saanen goat skull there with perfectly-preserved horns spiraling out of it like wrung towels. I hung the skull at the base of the wall and dubbed the still-unnamed sector “The Boneyard.”

In three months of going up to Škaljari on weekends with an old, borrowed Bosch, I put up twenty new routes. When they were finished, I reached out to the aforementioned dabblers in the area. They dabbled, as one would expect, but then faded away again, finding excuses that prioritized coffee at the ubiquitous seaside cafes over a day at the crag. 

My salvation came eventually in the form of Austrians. Valentin Sattek, a psychology student from Vienna, got ahold of me about the development I had been doing. He said he was coming down and looking for crags that he could bolt.

When asked why he chose Montenegro, he said, “I saw a picture from Smokovac somewhere on the internet and got hyped. Then I started some Google research about climbing [there] and realized that there is not much climbing going on but probably lots of potential. I always had the idea in mind to start developing a really good remote area which is not on everybody's list. And it basically all worked out.”

He came over with a small group of friends and I was finally able to try out a few of the climbs I had bolted. I had an idea about how good the rock was, but to be there with the freedom of a belayer and the support of a psyched crew was pure bliss. We all joined up in doing the first ascents of some of the most tantalizing lines: “The Awesome Osim” (7a+), “Midnight Macabre” (7c+) and, eventually, the stunning “Oligarchs in Existential Crisis” (8a+). 

But Valentin didn’t want to merely do FAs nor add bolts to an existing crag. He wanted to start a whole new area. After leaving me with a new 8a project whose crux turned out to be pronouncing the name—”Ich mach dich gesund, sagte der Bär”—he left for uncharted territory.

For Valentin the problem wasn’t finding new crags, it was choosing from the many obvious options. He asked for help from the other foreign climbers and they all told stories of undeveloped walls with easy access and room for hundreds of lines. He finally settled on two.

Ersin Bas, the Turk, told Valentin about a crag in the beachside port town of Bar. From there, you can see both an Orthodox church in the distance and towering minarets from a Mosque whose speakers call devotees to prayer. The crag also overlooks an old fortress and settlement whose history is as stratified as the limestone outcrops that surround it. First it was Roman, then Venetian, then Ottoman, then Austro-Hungarian, then Serbian, and now Montenegrin. The coincidence did not go unnoticed: here a Turk told an Austrian where to bolt lines for Montenegrins (in theory) to enjoy. The collision of worlds continues. 

Valentin and his friend, Lukas Schmutzer, went for a closer look and were enthralled by the potential. They spent a week there and then returned the next season with Valentin’s girlfriend, his father, and another full crew of uber-psyched Austrians. They established a total of twenty routes and now Bar is one of the best difficult crags in the country. 

Valentin getting the first ascent of one of his new routes in Bar.

But Valentin confronted an oh-so-hard existential crisis of his own. He loved yet another untouched crag near Podgorica. In the idyllic Cijevna Canyon, following a cerulean river near the Albanian border, there was, again, enough rock for a lifetime’s worth of bolting. He had heard tales of this place from the other local, a Bosnian named Srdjan Lecic who has lived here ever since the war in the 90s, and from Kleman Becan, the Slovenian hardman who came through a few years ago and bolted two routes there. They all said the crags go for miles down the canyon. One need only park along the canyon road and choose a wall that looked good.

What is a motivated developer to do? Keep at the overhanging, thuggy routes in Bar? Or spend time developing the technical orange faces in Cijevna? Woe was Valentin. 

His answer: develop both. Again a crew of drill-toting limestone aficionados came, and again they left the place with thirty-six routes ranging from 5s to 8s. 

* * *

Meanwhile, back in Škaljari, I continued for a second winter of bolting. This time however, I was able to climb my routes right away. A colleague expressed interest in climbing the summer before and I took her out to give it a try. Ćina was one of those with whom climbing took hold right away. Before long, she was leading, projecting, and even did a first ascent of one of the lines I bolted. And what is perhaps even more surprising: she is a dyed-in-the-wool Montenegrin. We head out to the crag three to four times a week now, often with her prompting the decision. That is to say, she wouldn’t fair well in the Lazy Olympics.

Cina on "We Will (We Will) Rakija" (6c+ (5.11c))

It would have all been rosy had it not been for Charlie (a pseudonym). Kotor, though famed for its quaint Old Town and stunning bay, is also known as a haven for the mentally ill. The mismanaged local government and inept police force have done little to quell the conflicts caused by those afflicted with mental illness. Unfortunately, in going to the crag so often, we became embattled in one such conflict. 

The heightened “activity” in Škaljari was noticed by a man who held strange delusions about the area. Charlie made claims that the land was his. We checked with the municipality, the neighbors, and with Charlie’s family—it’s not. They all verified that we had every right to climb there. They also explained that Charlie, infamous in the area, had some issues discerning fact from fiction. He also claimed that the goats in the area were his. One day he came up to the crag in a fury, yelling that we were eating the goats, which kept him from getting the milk that would cure his stomach ulcers. They were “holy animals,” he said, while making violent threats against us. He said we were killers, not only of his goats, but that our presence there was slowly eroding his and his family’s health, giving them tumors, stomach cancer, and heart palpitations. 

I’ll admit, the goat skull that I had hung at the base of the wall didn’t help. Nor did the “Boneyard” moniker I had ascribed to it. 

There is no doubt that Charlie is suffering more than us. But he pushed our limits too when he came to the crag on another day wielding an axe. His bad day became our bad day then. He took out a knife and cut the handlines we had set up between precipitous sections of the approach. He smashed the bolts that the lines were anchored to with the butt of his axe. And though he only yelled at us, and never put a hand on any of us, he left us there trembling with fear and rage.

But this story has a happy ending...sort of.

After countless months of dealing with his threats and tirades, we finally went to the police, Charlie in tow. As expected, the officers were useless, doing nothing more than competing with him in one shouting match after another. However, upon leaving the station, Charlie gave us a glimpse of hope.

On the side of the street, after another diatribe about god knows what, Charlie was graced with a moment of lucidity. “Why don’t you two just send me a text message when you go up there. You can say, ‘Charlie, we are up in Škaljari climbing. Please don’t bother us.’ And I won’t.”

We were flabbergasted. Nearly at our wits end, he gave us this clear and easy solution. 

* * *

Today Škaljari has a total of forty routes. Last winter it did not rain much, and temps were perfect for projecting and sending. Ćina ascended the grades bit by bit, and I finally got back into a consistent climbing routine. 

Charlie, for the most part, has kept good on his word. Though to approach, you still have to step over signs he stole and posted that say “Private Property”, and then walk past a rusty barrel painted in blood-red with the words “No Pass Zone.” But other than that minor detail, Škaljari has become a legitimate climbing area.

Few Montenegrins have come out to climb there. But the greater international climbing community has begun to notice it. We have come across Croatians, Germans, Norwegians, and French, among others, on days when we went up expecting, as usual, to be alone.

Me on the first ascent of the aptly
named "Lunatic Enthusiasm" (8b (5.13d)).

When one German came through, he said, “This is great. You have so many options. We could go to Škaljari, or Smokovac, or Bar, or Cijevna. You could do a whole climbing trip just in Montenegro.” Two years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case.

I’m leaving this year. Off to my next job in Colombia. But Valentin is still motivated and has already made plans to keep returning every fall and every spring. His friends have put up pictures and videos on social media and interest is percolating around Europe. Now with locals like Ćina and Srdjan at the helm, Montenegro’s nascent climbing scene also has a pulse. Hell, even Charlie has given some support. His last text message back to us said:

Ok. Be careful, buddy. Have fun. 

He even ended it with a heart emoji.




FULL TOPOS OF ROUTES ARE HERE.