My journey to Liberland began at 11 p.m. at a train station on the outskirts of Budapest when Vít Jedlička popped out of a silver Citroën rental van with his hand extended. Hulking, blond, wearing khakis and a blue blazer and sporting a goatee and a military haircut, he looked nothing like what I would have expected from the founder of an anarcho-libertarian microstate.

I had first heard of Jedlička after he visited Brussels on May 25 to meet with Syed Kamall, the leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament. Jedlička — a 32-year-old Czech politician affiliated with the parliamentary group headed by U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage — had flown in to try to convince politicians in the city to recognize a beet-shaped piece of no-man’s land on the Croatian-Serbian border as the youngest sovereign state in the world.

Jedlička’s pitch was simple. In April 2015, he had unilaterally declared 7 km² of unclaimed, uninhabited Balkan swampland on the west bank of the Danube as an independent nation. He would offer food and shelter to Syrian refugees willing to settle there. And, in exchange, the international community would overrule objections by Croatia and declare Liberland its newest official member.

Though I kept hearing about Jedlička and his quixotic proposal in Brussels and Strasbourg, I never managed to meet him. But I was intrigued by the idea, and I wanted to know more — which is how I found myself in Hungary, three months and a quick phone call later, accepting his air kisses on both cheeks and then waiting as he slid open the van’s door to reveal a row of pillows carefully arranged so I could sit comfortably on our long drive to Liberland.

Our companions on the journey were David Sundanzer, a 56-year-old American from Arizona living in the suburbs of Budapest, where he produces parts for his solar-powered medical refrigerator business; and Robin, a 6-foot-7-inch Czech visa fixer who refused to give me his full name.

Robin, the van’s driver, wore shorts, Birkenstock sandals, and a black headband around his head. He stretched his oversized hand to me while he flaunted a huge grin and child-sized teeth. He carried a Nokia phone and an iPad covered with “Institute of crypto-anarchy.” I could see how his professional skills would be helpful for Jedlička, who has promised to provide the first wave of Liberland citizens with 100 diplomatic passports in September.

Sundanzer was wearing a tailored white, button-down shirt, jeans and loafers. A father of five children between the ages of 18 and 25, he had a southern drawl and droopy eyes. Furious at being obligated to pay U.S. taxes while living abroad, Sundanzer had spent the previous year shopping for another nationality. He met Jedlička at a microstate conference in Crete in 2015, just as he was starting his citizenship-hunting expedition.

Jedlička likes to compare the creation of Liberland to the voyages made by European settlers leaving for the unknown. He founded the country on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, April 13. His promotional pamphlets feature the famous oil painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” In place of the stars and stripes, however, Washington is flying the Liberland flag: a field of yellow (symbolizing freedom) under a black band (rebellion) and coat of arms, on which a bird (liberty) flies under a tree (abundance) and over a river (the Danube). “Sometimes when we cross [the Danube], it looks like the painting,” says Jedlička.

Liberland’s national motto is “Live and Let Live,” and Jedlička plans to use bitcoins as its official currency. He has spent about $300,000 in donated money on the project in the past year. Bitcoin angel investor Roger Ver has pledged $10,000 per month, attracted by the idea of an economy based entirely on the cryptocurrency.

On the last weekend in August, Jedlička held a constitutional convention in Serbia. The tenets that were agreed upon mandate neutrality in foreign relations, forbid national debt, and allow for legislation to be introduced or overturned by referendum. The government will include a chamber for landowners, similar to the House of Lords. Taxation will be strictly voluntary.

In the first year after Jedlička announced the creation of his country, nearly 420,000 people applied to become citizens. If he accepted all of them, Liberland would be about the same size as Malta and have 100,000 more citizens than Iceland. So far, however, Jedlička has been selective about granting applications. He has designated some petitioners as “ambassadors,” but has yet to make any of them full-fledged citizens.

Applicants can broadly be divided into four types: wealthy ones, like Sundanzer, intrigued by the possibility of voluntary taxation; anarchists like Robin seeking a land with a minimalist government; working-class folk inspired by the idea of low taxes and fleeing the evils of globalization; and the helpless, who are genuinely seeking freedom.

According to Jedlička, 1,000 lawyers and 1,200 architects have applied to live in Liberland. More than 40 percent of applicants come from the Middle East or North Africa, many of them from countries ripped apart by conflict.

Becoming a citizen of Liberland will cost $10,000 in bitcoins or in payment via work merits that can be earned by building infrastructure, helping with administration, carrying out manual labor, promoting the country, or promising to reside there permanently and contribute to the community. “I would run down the street to the ATM and hand over cash [for citizenship],” says Sundanzer.

Jedlička has said citizenship should be merit-based. He says he has more than 1,200 lawyers working for him pro-bono and two major public affairs shops in D.C., who approached him after he spoke at the American anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist’s weekly Americans for Tax Reform meeting. But he only wants to admit people who will give back to their country. “We want to make sure that it’s a nice group of people who can trust each other,” he says.

* * *

We had been driving about an hour and a half when we finally reached the Serbian border.

“Where are you going?” asks the guard.

“Liberland,” Jedlička says.

“Okay, pull over.”

A customs agent went through the contents of the van, showing little interest until they came across Jedlička’s bitcoin machine, which looks like a small yellow ATM about the size of a microwave and takes cash and converts it to bitcoins.

“What is this?” the agent asks.

“A bitcoin machine,” Jedlička says.

“We’re going to have to register it,” says the guard.

Jedlička went inside the office to sign papers for the machine; the technology is foreign not just to rural Serbians but to most of the rest of the world as well. He came back victorious.

“They put on our official paper that we’re going to Liberland,” he says.

Last year, Jedlička was unanimously voted president of Liberland (there were three voters: Jedlička; Janiss Ruzkova, with whom he has a two-month old child; and a friend who came with him to settle the new country). He had discovered the land while searching on Wikipedia for “terra nullius,” Latin for “nobody’s land.” Thanks to a decades-long border dispute between Croatia and Serbia, the small patch of sparsely forested land was technically unclaimed, each country maintaining that it belonged to the other.

Liberland lies west of the Danube, considered by Serbia as the rightful border, but east of where the river flowed in the 19th century, which Croatia believes should define the territorial divide. Each side had refused to claim it, worrying that doing so would undermine its larger argument, costing it more valuable pieces of land along the river. And so Jedlička staked it out as his own, arguing that under international law dating back to the colonial era, terra nullius was free for the claiming.

Serbia has been broadly supportive of Jedlička’s efforts to settle Liberland, seeing in them an opportunity to bolster its side of the dispute. Croatia, however, has fiercely opposed the possibility of a third party moving in. And so, as would-be settlers began to arrive following Jedlička’s declaration, the country’s authorities were quick to try to put a halt to the project.

Since April 2015, there have been more than 50 arrests of supporters who have attempted to enter Liberland. Jedlička has spent two nights in a Croatian jail, and he has granted honorary citizenship to 19 people convicted in Croatian courts of illegally crossing from Serbia into Liberland. The cases are currently under appeal.

Earlier this year, having grown tired of dumping money into legal fees, Jedlička switched tacks and decided to try the diplomatic route, shuttling between Brussels, London and other capitals, shaking hands with local politicians, giving talks to Libertarian groups, and setting up “embassies.”

So far, the results have been at best mixed. In May 2015, the Czech Republic warned against Jedlička’s attempt to settle on the disputed soil, saying in a statement, “Mr. Jedlička, as well as other Czech citizens residing in the territory of Croatia or Serbia, is obliged to observe the local legal system. CR considers the activities of Mr. Jedlička inappropriate and potentially harmful.”

* * *

After driving another half an hour after the Serbian border, we pulled up to Liberland’s unofficial embassy in Serbia, the Anna Café, a smoky old bed and breakfast connected to a nightclub. Jedlička, who uses the place as his residency when visiting Serbia, booked me in the “president’s suite,” a simple room, with white sheets, high ceilings, silver polyester curtains and a lacquered armoire.

I went to sleep that night to sound of pumping techno beats from the dancefloor next door and woke up to people smoking cigarettes and talking loudly in the kitchen. In the cafe, I met a young couple with two children who described themselves as “digital nomads” — Paul King, 39, a shaggy haired Brit from Cambridge and his wife, Caroline King, 35, a petite Swede.

The couple run a business selling hammocks and pashminas online, and they were excited about the possibility of settling in Liberland with their two boys, Winston, 6, and Henry, 4, who they have been homeschooling while traveling to visit the garment factories in Asia that produce their products. The couple does not trust state schools, says Caroline, considering the coursework they offer “brainwashing.” Her children are too advanced for the programs, she added.

“We don’t have anywhere to live this week, and we always wanted to come here,” Caroline says.

After breakfast, we all headed to a farm with a ramshackle bar located under a bridge along the Danube. Agnex, the owner, poured me a glass of wine out of a used 1.5-liter plastic water bottle, and served us fried Sterlet fish from the river and cooked over a firepit. She told me that she had benefitted from the foundation of Liberland, as well as from the passing of refugees along the Balkan route, before it was closed last spring. The extra business from passers-by, she says, had allowed her to spruce up her establishment.

We sat at a picnic table, with pigs roaming freely around us, as Jedlička explained that it was his upbringing in communist Czechoslovakia that had driven his desire to form his own government. “When you see how much nonsense government can create, with a little adjustment you can bring prosperity,” he says.

He grew up comfortably in the suburbs of Prague, where his father’s company constructed petrol stations. His mother is an English school teacher. After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in political science, he found work in sales at an IT company and as a financial analyst, before going into politics and the microstate business fulltime in 2015. He is also a regional president of the Czech Free Citizens Party, a Euroskeptic libertarian party with one representative in the European Parliament.

Jedlička’s Brussels connections have helped him with his diplomatic mission, like when he convinced center-right European People’s Party MEP Tomáš Zdechovský to attempt to land on Liberland last year. He figured the Croatian police would be reluctant to arrest a diplomat. Zdechovský stepped on the land and did some measuring. Jedlička tells me, “We needed to measure our border stones in order to synchronize data with our land registry.” The Croatian police didn’t detain Zdechovský, but said they would report the trip to their minister.

* * *

Noticing that his gang of rebels were looking a little bored, Jedlička suggested that we all head to the Croatian border to see whether he’d be allowed to enter the country. A Croatian couple who lives a few meters away from Liberland on the other side of the border had invited him to their house.

And so the husband from the couple piled into the van with Robin, Sundanzer, Paul, Caroline, their two sons and me, while Jedlička and the man’s wife drove ahead in another car.

We were quickly waved through the rickety Serbian checkpoint. Robin laughed that the guard didn’t notice that he never handed over his identity card.

On the Croatian side of the bridge, however, the going was not as easy.

All of our passports were collected and scanned, and we were instructed to pull over and step out of the vehicles so they could be searched. “Get familiar with your rights, we’re checking everything,” says the border guard, as he handed us sheets of paper in our native languages.

A female guard zeroed in on Sundanzer and his American passport. “Where are you going?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he stammers.

“You have to know where you’re going,” she demands.

“I just want to see the country,” he says.

The other guard picked up the packets of Liberland catalogues emblazoned with the slogan “Small is beautiful.”

“I’ll take this,” he says. “I have to report it to my superiors.”

He also took the Liberland flags, and then proceeded to take unpack each bag and box and inspect them thoroughly on a metal table.

“As an entrepreneur, this doesn’t make me want to do business here,” Sundanzer says. “This is why we have to make countries competitive, so they can’t treat people like this.”

Winston asked Paul, “Daddy, what’s capitalism?”

“Capitalism is when people can control what they make,” says Paul.

Robin accidentally stepped on little Henry’s toe which made him scream. To calm him, Caroline started breast-feeding him, while Paul explained to me that they have most of their savings in bitcoin. “You can always swap them for gold,” he says.

Jedlička explained that last time he was arrested in Croatia they called him “Mr. President” and put him in a newly renovated cell with clean sheets.

“The judge told me, ‘Don’t worry. All good presidents are arrested,’” he says, adding that it helped that the judge’s son was a fan of Liberland.

Once, a Croatian judge who was of Serbian origin told him, “Liberland is just in your head.”

“And I said, ‘Serbia is in your head,’ ” says Jedlička.

Some three hours after they had pulled us over, the guards returned from their office with the verdict. Jedlička was a “threat to peace and order” and denied entry. Sundanzer was also turned back. The guards stamped his passport with an x, showing that he had been rejected.

“It’s crazy that refugees can pass, but an American can’t. We could be in Germany by now,” Jedlička says.

* * *

It was only the next day that we finally headed for Liberland, or at least as close as we could get without getting arrested: a lookout point on the Serbian side of the river. Jedlička drove like a madman on the dirt road, while Sundanzer tracked our location on his smartphone. We crossed a small stream by pull ferry because the bridge was too decrepit.

Our perch was a dirt mound on the river bank next to an abandoned house, which was covered in a tarp and crawling with bugs. I was itchy just standing near it, and I sprayed the air around me to ward off mosquitos.

From where we were standing, we could see three people swimming and playing on the riverbanks across from us, less than 300 meters away – in other words, they were in Liberland. Tall green shrubs lined the white sand beach behind them. The center of the island was packed with a dense forest of tall leafy trees. The water was murky with a greenish-brown tint, and lily pads crept along the swampy land on our side of the river.

“This is not unlike where I grew up in swampy Texas,” Sundanzer says. “But I escaped there.”

Jedlička isn’t waiting for Croatia to recognize his right to settle Liberland. As he carries out his diplomatic offensive, he is moving forward with plans to line the river with a series of connected houseboats, designed by the late British architect Zaha Hadid’s firm. The going rate for one of the houses, he says, could be as low as $50,000. He has hired Serbian contractors to get the boats on the water by October. “We need to get as close as possible to the land,” he says.

Houseboats wouldn’t just allow him to sidestep his conflict with Croatia; they would help solve one of Liberland’s biggest challenges. Liberland may be a libertarian paradise, but it’s also located on a flood plain, meaning any structure that won’t float will have to be built on stilts.

Sadly for Jedlička’s diplomatic offensive, while 12,000 Syrians have applied for Liberland citizenship, no refugees have answered his call to be among the first settlers. “There were hundreds of thousands who passed nearby our territory, but we didn’t have a single Syrian stopping by since,” he says. “Unfortunately, these people were not interested in starting a new country, they were interested in getting social benefits in Germany.”

When I asked if he planned to offer Syrians houseboats, Jedlička seemed to be worried about how they would get along with the anarchists, tax-fugitives and privacy hawks who are pining for Liberland citizenship. He told me he won’t build a mosque to attract them; the Liberland government would not support religious institutions. “They can build it themselves, but it will be expensive,” he says. “They will need a rich sheikh to build it.”

Refugees, it seemed, were welcome if they could provide him with diplomatic legitimacy, but maybe not for long. “They have to contribute,” he says. “They can’t say ‘Allahu Akbar’ and blow up the houseboats. You got to be careful with those guys.”

Jedlička swatted away bugs as he looked out across the water. Croatian border patrol boats were pulling up to the swimmers splashing along the shore.

He watched as the police began grilling the interlopers.

“Thank you for protecting Liberland,” he yells.