Category: nature

Visiting Olympia and it’s old stones

After a couple of days living on different spots during March 2022 in Greece, I thought that it is time to go and have a closer look at some old stone.

Back in school when I started “learning” latin, my interest for Greek mythology was born. Up to now, I just remember barely the first lesson of Latin, but I remember quite a lot of stories about the Greek gods etc. If you want to get a taste, I can recommend the book Mythos by Stephen Fry. It follows a quite interesting, fresh and different approach of telling Greek mythology. You’ll see.

In the morning I’ve been nearly alone in the whole area of ancient Olympia and so I took quite some time to explore it. The weather has been great, the flowers were flourishing and the wing beats of the insects were filling the air.

When I was walking around, investigating these old stones and trying to imagine how they’ve looked in the past, I had an idea. I googled for images that recreated the broken buildings etc. And by that I found the app Ancient Olympia. You can take a virtual tour through the whole place and what is more, you can use it’s augmented reality function to lay the virtual recreations on top of the broken originals. I had a lot of fun with it. And if you can’t visit Olympia right now, you may give it a try to have a brief look.

When I’m walking around these old places, I’m always excited and wondering what life was like at that time. And because I like a lot of the ideas that are described by Stoicism, I had a closer look at this statue of Marcus Aurelius. This guy was one of the biggest Stoics ever. At least he had written a lot about it. If you want to have a closer look at Stoicism, I recommend reading the summary of Stoicism on reddit. I really loved reading it and from my point of view it’s an fantastic summary. What is more the guys on reddit are discussing a lot what a Stoic approach on the challenges of their lifes would be.

First days of real beach life in vanlife paradise Greece

In the next blog posts I’ll cover what my journey was like until now. Right now this stuff is only on Instagram and as I described in my last post, I’m going to change that.

After my time on Corfu, I moved onwards to the mainland of Greece and I was very excited how living in a car will work out in Greece. I had no big worries and heard a lot of positive voices about it.

After two years of living in cars in Germany living in a car in Greece is totally different! In Germany you have to search for places where you have a lot of nature and not so many other people around. What is more, you can’t just park on a beach. You certainly won’t find much places where you can even get close to a beach with your mobile home. And in contrast to that, I just found this spot at the Gianiskari Beach in Greece. I was totally amazed and flashed.

For the most part, Rosinante and I were completely alone. The weather were just starting getting warmer and spring really started. The beach is pretty big and there are sand dunes were you can try some offroading skills. It has been the first time in real sand for me and Rosinante and we had a lot of fun.

Friends and another way of overlanding on Corfu in Greece

I made my way to Corfu to visit Natalia a friend from the time where I have been studying in Magdeburg, Germany. We haven‘t seen each other for about 20 years and barely had contact at all. But when I saw that she just moved to Corfu with her boyfriend Petrus, I thought visiting her would be fun. It was kind of funny to meet after such a long time and we had a great time.

I lernt a lot about Corfu and Greece and met other friends of Natalia and Petrus. We went for dinner, in a bar, around Corfu town and had a dinner at Ines place. Ines is a friend of Natalia and Petrus that has three dogs and about seven to twenty cats (twenty because two of the cats a pregnant).

Corfu town is really beautiful and the small streets are like a labyrinth. Even with a postal address, I can’t find places there. The only way to find places for me is via Google Maps markers. And the locals go that way, too. It’s quite a miracle that the package that Thomas (a friend from Germany) send for me to Natalia arrived. In the package there was the new drone from DJI and a 360 degree action cam.

Overlanding is different on Corfu because as an island it’s more compact. I think in the summer season it will become really crowded with tourists everywhere. And on Corfu you really never know what happens if you go for remote beaches! One time I got lost in an olive farm and the other time I did some of the most difficult offroading so far when it comes to stone steps. In Corfu there are a lot of beautiful places and definitely recommend going there.