The first question is always: What was the most impressive thing on your tour? Or the most extreme experience. I then tell them about the thunderstorm in Hungary that fired lightning bolts into the Danube every second, while I sought refuge under a row of leaning trees and wasn't afraid. Or how I dived into the Black Sea at my destination and howled so much that I was afraid of drowning. Or how a German sailor picked me up at the moment when I simply couldn't take any more and wanted to end the whole tour at the Iron Gate.
But in truth, these moments are not the most impressive. What really stuck with me was the feeling of having become a primal human being. At some point in the former Eastern Bloc, this feeling came over me for the first time - after two or three weeks. Suddenly I knew that I was at home on the river. That I wasn't the one who was afraid, but that the others should be afraid of me. Because I was no longer one of them. I was no longer civilised, tamed, socialised.
I had become a river person. I shat in the river every morning, washed myself in the river, bathed in the river, jumped around the campfire in the evening and howled with coyotes. I danced on my board in front of the Romanian Carpathians, lay naked on the beach in the Ukraine or roared my anger at the constant headwind in the dark forests of the Wachau. I lived a life that I could never have imagined before. And because I was such a primitive man, the people by the river invited me to tell my story out of sheer curiosity.
In Germany, people stood on a bridge and cheered for me - they had been following me on Facebook. Shortly afterwards, a rock band played for me and gave a gig that left me hoarse from singing along for days. In Austria, a right-wing extremist invited me to his lonely hut on the shore and shared his last piece of meat with me. I couldn't dissuade him from his views - he just said that I was doing the right thing with the paddling and nature and all that.
In Hungary, I didn't even have to go to a restaurant or supermarket for ten days because people invited me into their homes or onto their boats and provided me with so much food that it lasted all the way to Serbia. There I shared my Hungarian paprika sausages with a goatherd who had nothing but his three animals and a dog.
In Croatia, a large family invited me to a barbecue. They served freshly slaughtered chickens and home-grown salad. I learnt from them how long war lives on in people's minds. In Romania, drunken men called me over, gave me cheap red wine to drink and freshly caught sturgeon to eat. They hugged me with their fishy hands full of love - as if I were one of them. I never stayed in one place for more than a day and yet I was always at home. And when people ask me today why I went on such a crazy journey, I tell them that I still don't know what drove me to do it. But now I know what this trip was good for:
For seven weeks, I was myself. For the first time in my life, I was the person I am without the influences of my upbringing, society and the Western world: An original European. An original human being.
You can buy the book in bookshops or order it here www.delius-klasing.de
