Category: nature

A solar storm and more in little Montenegro

I did not know much or anything about Montenegro. It’s a really small country with lots of mountains and fine it’s somehow cute.

I found this awesome spot that is not reachable with every car. At least I would not want to reach out with any car. But you never know: the locals are going all sorts of crazy tracks with there VW Golf, which are very popular here. After I arrived at this spot a storm started. My weather app claimed that there were wind gusts with about 81 km/h. When there storm started I decided to pull down the roof and this was as difficult as never before and a very good decision. Rosinante was shaking like a spaceship in a heavy solar storm!

Washing day and I knew that these ski sticks would come in handy for different use cases.

There is one main road going art the coast line and through wonderful small cities. Btw: 500GB mobile traffic cost 10€.

Montenegro means “Black Mountain” and I think the name fits quite well. The rocky mountains often have dark rocks and are covered with dark forests. It looks amazing. And in front of the small coastal road there are tiny isles with just a couple of houses or one church on them.

Offroading was a quite restricted and if I see a sign like this I take it serious. And I think that’s good because the road after the sign really got heavy as seen on the photos.

Taking the last part to the summit on foot through these foggy mountain forest was cool.

Above 1200m there was still snow and ice and some of the roads were blocked so hard by snow that going there was to risky for me or maybe even impossible.

So I decided to head on to Albania where a lot of offroad routes are below 1000m.

Bye bye Croatia on an abandoned military base

Croatia was so cool and beautiful! It’s the first country on my journey that felt really different than Germany and “western Europe”.

In contrast to Germany everything seems to be not so “over organized”. For example they have only approximately one thousandth of prohibition signs. E.g. there are beaches with rocks and there are no “danger, don’t climb the rocks” signs 😆🤯

I talked to some locals and although things are not so organized/ restricted what leads to a certain feeling of freedom, they have to deal with a lot of corruption and inequality. Often there is no straight way to accomplish things. You have to deal with things as they come. And if you want to get a business started, it seems to be very impractical or impossible to make this on a one hundred percent legal way.

Most of these shops are very smaller than in Germany and so e.g. there are very few big hardware stores and the ones that are big, are from the German Bauhaus company. You simply can’t get everything everywhere. And there is an invasion of German companys going on!

Of course are the streets very different as well. To go offroading it’s perfect. If you should wants to get really fast from A to B in the remote areas, it could get difficult, I think.

I talked a lot about what rules, prohibitions etc. do have impacts of your mind and thinking and once it’s more sorted in my brain, I will write about this.

Huge parts of Croatia are all into tourism and in Winter without or just a few people. First I thought this is the case because of the Covid situation, but locals told me that this is normal in Winter. E.g. one peninsula has around 1500 inhabitants in Winter and 20000 including tourists in Summer! Between November and April most things are closed. Even every second parking lot on the highways. For me at the start of my journey it’s perfect that there is a lot of space, silence and solitude 💫

This abandoned military base on the photos was my last stop with some lost places feeling and awesome sunsets in Croatia. There I meet a very nice and clever guy from Germany who helps people installing everything about electricity in their camping vehicles: https://tinoeggert.com