Three and a half to four hours. That is how long it took to enter your own country at the Bogorodica border crossing last night, on the way back from Greece. The information came from the travellers standing in that queue - not from any official announcement.

Photographs from the crossing show kilometres of cars and buses backed up in front of the border booths. Traffic was moving at a crawl. People with children, after a full day on the road, waiting for hours a few hundred metres from home.

Bogorodica is not a newly discovered crossing. It is the main link to Greece and the busiest point on the southern border - every year, every summer, every Sunday on the way back. End-of-weekend queues are not a surprise, they are a timetable. And yet every return looks like something nobody saw coming.

Four hours of waiting is not a natural phenomenon. It is the sum of how many booths are open, how many officers are on shift, and how the flow is organised. All of those are things you plan in advance - if anyone is planning them.

What stands out most is the silence. No official information on waiting times, no advance notice, no figure for how many booths were staffed. A traveller finds out how long the wait is from the driver in the next car, or from a social-media post. The state runs a camera system that logged 151 traffic offences in 36 hours, but it has no way of telling a person there is a four-hour queue ahead of them.

Is it really so hard to publish live waiting times, the way the neighbours do? Thousands of people ask that every summer. There is no answer, but there is a queue - every time, in the same place.