Our stay in Bajina Bašta led us to meeting many people. Amongst them, a few let special memories, and this is about them. Trust me, you do not want to miss Père Castor, last in the article but certainly not least.

Igor

Igor is the first guy we met. He is from Belgrade, where he had some difficult times with the local equivalent of suburban mugglers. This led him, amongst other things, to stopping his studies at 16, and taking a bullet in the leg. He then decided to go live a better life, far from this mess. He is a cool dude, always willing to help, not to mention he has the best English of all people we met in Bajina Bašta.

We also met his wife Nada, who tries to set up a regular theater course in the town, and his 10 years old son, Victor. Both of them speak really good English too.

Aleksandar, aka Raka

We met him on our second day their. Good friend of Igor, he is from Bajina Bašta. He loves nature, especially the surroundings of the town. At the moment, he is trying to cumulate as many diplomas as possible, so he can eventually make his many ideas to preserve the environment into actual projects. He built the small house that we have been living in for thoses three weeks.

Always a smile and a joke on the ready, he showed us around, leading us to places most people don't even know exist.

Rile, aka Speed Rilay

We met him on our last week in Bajina Bašta. He works as a taxi driver, and spends a large part of his leisure time walking and climbing around the mountains with Aleksandar. True man of the wilderness, he can light a fire from about anything.

It is however not the reason he is here. He is here because of his unbelievable performance on the raft. We had spent half a day attaching the first 6 floats when he came to help. Feeling inspired or something, he took over from there, and tied the other 13, plus additional consolidating knots at an amazing pace, using up the 80m of wire in less than an hour. Thus we decided to change his nickname to Speed Rilay.

Aleksandar's father, aka Père Castor

Nota: Père Castor is the French name of Papa Beaver. This man is legend. We met him first time when he came to add the stove to the small house. We saw him get out of an unlikely car I will describe later, and a crazy amount of gear he somehow changed into a chimney in an hour. As he does not speak English, he mostly talked to us using hands and faces, some of which would definitely deserve a video. Famous amongst Florian and me would be the happy-guy face, the unhappy-guy face and the this-is-shit face.

I can hardly explain what it feels looking at him getting himself to working on an issue, or even ignoring it entirely. It is like he could fix anything, or just build incredible stuff out of 3 pieces of wood and some wire. Or maybe some material he keeps in one of those places known only to him.

Examples? Well, I would have a hard time choosing between when he added heating or electricity to the small house, or maybe when he fixed the roof. But I think none of that compares to his car. The accelerator pedal is broken? No problem, let's attach a wire to the lever in the engine, and he can thrust by pulling the wire with one hand.

This is only a detail though, on this vehicle that would fit in Frankenstein's collection. Look at it closely on the right. This car runs on gas. I mean, autogas, as in LPG. One has to see him go to the service station and open the trunk with a screwdriver, bypassing the former pipe to access the LPG tank he added by himself. Actually, there is not much left of the original car features. The dashboard has been replaced by a bunch of switchs and buttons, and I would not be surprised to learn he rebuilt the engine at some point.

Trunk autogas tank, home made.

Living legend.