We’d been in our Cape Town Airbnb for all of fifteen minutes when my friend, Nick, walked into the living room shirtless. “I’ve got a Tinder date for tonight.”

I was single for the first time in nearly a decade. I knew nothing about dating apps. Was this how quickly dates were made now?

In the northwest of Indonesia is a crocodile-shaped island called Sulawesi. In its jaws is an unspoilt, rarely visited, really odd region called Tana Toraja.

My tour of it began on a narrow, twisting path. My guide, Samuel, stopped at a point where it widened below high chalk cliffs. “You might have heard the expression ‘life is expensive, death is cheap.’” He laughed quietly. “Well, in Torajaland, it’s the opposite. All our lives we save for our deaths.”

“It’s like The Truman Show fucked The Twilight Zone.”

Transnistria is a tiny, wonky, narrow strip of land squashed from either side by Moldova and the Ukraine. When the rusty Iron Curtain finally collapsed, many Eastern European countries sought to regain their previous autonomy and form new national identities. The tiny, wonky, narrow strip of land now called Transnistria found itself sitting in what was now calling itself Moldova. Unlike Liberland, someone can visit Transnistria without getting arrested. Or, so I hoped. Because, in 2015, I decided to do just that.

t’s not everyday that you find yourself sat in a tiny boat on the Danube, squashed by the borders of Serbia and Croatia, with five libertarians, a future diplomat to Liechtenstein, and a self-proclaimed cannabis shaman, on your way to the newest (self-proclaimed) country in the world: Liberland. It was just one kilometre upstream. An easy trip, right? Wrong…