Borrowing a book sets in motion a weird story of random coincidence that spans five countries across two continents.
So, this is not a story about Prague. It is, however a lesson on the importance of returning a borrowed book and how small our planet can sometimes feel.
If picked up by Hollywood scriptwriters, this could be a love story – if the guy was Ryan Gosling and I was played by say, Rachel McAdams.
A stranger in Slovenia
It all starts in the seaside Slovenian town of Piran. And because all romantic travel yarns generally involve a bus somewhere, I’d just stepped off one having travelled from the Northern town of Bled to enjoy the last of the Adriatic summer. It was my Balkan bookend to four long weeks of mostly solo hard travel up from Macedonia when it was still politically unstable, the war felt like it had barely finished, accommodation was in people’s homes and Yugoslavian visas were still being issued. In most stores there was a dire selection of nothing much, unless you were after a pair of beige socks.
Slovenia at the time was the pick of the bunch because it was one of the first states to gain independency from Yugoslavia in 1991. While tourists had steered clear of the region during the Balkan War, Slovenia seemed to have picked up its beige socks and got down to business.
I’d grown sick my own company and in a rare encounter for the region, I spotted a fellow backpacker.
His name was Jonathan and he was American. He was sitting in a restaurant pouring over his Lonely Planet and drinking beer. I did something I never do, I invited myself to sit down at his table.
Turned out Jonathan worked for a global oil company in one of the Stans in Eastern Europe and when he got time off, decided he would travel instead of going back to his hometown of Seattle.
He was friendly, freakishly tall and after we got chatting he mentioned he was off to the famous Skockjan Caves so asked me to join him.
The book exchange
While we were walking through the caves, I told Jonathan that I was on my way to Prague the next day to see the city before returning to London.
I caught up with Jonathan for a drink in Piran just before I left Slovenia and that’s when he handed me a beautiful travel book about Prague to help me navigate my way around the city since he had just been there.
“Can you post the book back to me when you’re done?” he had asked when we said our goodbyes. “Or even drop it off at one of our offices in London and put my name on it – it should get back to me.”
I’m a stickler for returning books so I agreed, tucked it in my backpack and we parted ways.
Last days in London
After travelling through the Czech Republic, I returned to the English capital and my home for the past two years. It was time to pack up my life and ship it back to New Zealand.
The travel plan was to fly to Africa, join an old school friend and overland our way across the continent before finishing up in Capetown. Amid the craziness of packing up my flat and preparing for three more months on the road, I remembered the Prague book and my promise to return it.
I took the Underground from Balham up to Baker Street one day with the book and dropped it off at the oil company’s London office with Jonanthan’s details attached.
And that’s where the story would have ended. Facebook or LinkedIn were a long way off being created – we didn’t exchange emails and as I took off from London Gatwick in October 1997 I had all but forgotten Jonathan.
Okavango Delta
Cut to giant sweeping helicopter shot over Botswana’s majestic Okavango Delta.
The Okavengo Delta is a very large inland delta covering up to 15,000 sq km where the Okavango River meets the Kalahari. It’s considered to be one of Africa’s seven natural wonders with thousands of waterways snaking their way around the delta. Flood waters in the Delta peak during the dry season in August attracting one of the greatest concentrations of African wildlife and that is when it’s busy with tourists.
You can drive to its edges or fly in – but to get around involves mostly paddling about in the dugout canoes called Mokoro.
A group of eight of us from Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa had decided to drive in and camp for a few days in late November.
By then it wasn’t peak season but there was still plenty to see – it was possibly one of the hottest places I’ve been – around 50 deg C during the day. We spent most of the time in the shade of our campsite, with our African guides, trying to avoid the sun and venturing out only in the early morning or evening to see hippos and elephants and whatever else we could spot.
What are the chances?
It was one of those early mornings when I was in a Mokoro with my school friend Amanda and Laurie, an Afrikaner, that we spotted a group of fellow tourists along a waterway who had jumped out of their canoes and were swimming.
It’s hot, but we thought this was odd since there were a lot of Hippo about and they are one of the most dangerous animals in the African wild.
Just as we were about to pass, one guy popped his head out of the water and shouted:
“Hey Michele… thanks for returning the book!”
Laurie slowed the canoe to come up alongside them and I turned around to see a tall lanky American emerge on the water’s edge.
“Jesus Christ, you know this guy?” Laurie asked in disbelief.
Of all the waterways, in a huge delta, in a massive continent, on that particular day – we had happened to paddle past Jonathan. A total sliding doors moment.
The other Hollywood ending
All I could think was: Thank god I returned the book, otherwise this could have been awkward. Maybe Ryan and Rachel in the movie version then fall insanely in love. Or not. Sadly, this story does not have a happy Hollywood ending. Fate turned into a freakish encounter which then turned into potential stalker behaviour.
Jonathan found out the name of the truck company we were overlanding on then travelled down to South Africa and called up our Johannesburg hostel hoping for a meet cute. That’s when it was awkward – he had clearly read more into the weird reunion than I had.
Sad ending I know, however these weird chance events are just that, weird. So if you take anything away from this story, it’s this; If some random stranger lends you a book hoping for it back- return it for god’s sake because you never know what lengths they might go to find it.
*Jonathan is not his real name, if I put his actual name it would have completely destroyed your mental image of Ryan Gosling.