Category: overlanding

Entering Turkey, first impressions and getting bugged down hard on a wild beach (October 2022)

After having a magical time in Strandzha in Bulgaria, I crossed the border to Turkey. The border crossing went without any problems and I got the first stamp in my fresh passport.

In the first city I entered, I immediately felt how different Turkey was. It seemed very lively to me. In every settlement there was something like a central area where people met, hung out and lived their social life. I very rarely eat meat or fish, but when I saw the Köfte restaurant, I couldn’t resist. I’ve loved koefte for years and the ones I got there were minimalistic and delicious.

I took a long walk around the small town and bought different foods to try, a sim card, talked to a lot of different people and got a bit of a feel for how things were going in this new country. What impressed me the most was that the Turkish people seemed to be very talkative. They weren’t afraid of language barriers and seemed very friendly, interested and hospitable.

After that, I continued my trip and went to a wild beach on the Black Sea coast. This beach reminded me a lot of the big beach near Varna where I had spent a lot of time. But to get to this beach in Turkey, Rosinante and I had to go through some muddy off-roading and very narrow passages. We even got lost, but some friendly locals helped us finding the right way. That was a lot of fun. When I reached the beach, I met a very friendly goatherd and we had a nice conversation via Google Translate.

I stayed for a few days of hanging around at the beach, bo staff training, meditating, making music and so on and during these days only the goat herder visited me again, then I continued on my way. Because it would have been be an insanely long trip to return to the road and continue from there, I decided to take the shortcut and drive along the beach. I scouted the beach first, because I didn’t want to hopelessly bug down Rosinante on this wild beach. So I dropped the pressure in her tires to about one bar and took off. Everything was going great until we approached the last little slope that would lead to the exit of the beach. All the momentum I had built up was swallowed up in a second by that little slope and Rosinante’s tires immediately started digging themselves into the sand. Looking at the situation from the outside, I knew this was going to be a tough one. The sand was super soft and Rosinante’s rear axle was already touching it. I took my time and dug very well. I placed my two large aluminum recovery boards and the two small leveling blocks to get a little more traction. I locked Rosinante’s rear differential, let her slowly crawl onto the boards, and once she was there, I let her take off and build some momentum. The little slope swallowed it all with a big appetite. After three meters, Rosinante lay down on the sand like a sleeping whale. So I dug again. And it took me some time to find the leveling blocks because they were buried deep in the sand. After the second digging, I sent Rosinante forward again. The appetite of the slope didn’t seem to be satisfied. Again, it swallowed Rosinante’s entire momentum in just a meters. So I dug again. I dug out and placed the boards and leveling blocks. I launched Rosinante. And the slope got another feast of momentum. So I dug again, dug and placed the boards and leveling blocks, launched Rosinate and… finally we reached solid ground again.

Letting in another way of love (September 2022)

Artha and I kept in touch while I was at the seashell beach and after some days, I picked her up again and we headed south to chase the sun.

When we met again, it felt all so familiar and I enjoyed driving around with her in Rosinante while we kept deepening the relationship between us with deep conversations.

We found a fantastic beach, which should become my favorite beach in Bulgaria later. It was a very long beach with sand dunes and a vast area of nature. On one side was the ocean and on the other the woods and we lived in Rosinante right in between. When we arrived, the waves were pretty intense and high and we had so much fun letting us roll around by the waves.

Artha and I went for long walks, enjoyed talking and being in silence. And I felt that something was getting closer between us. One evening, we were walking along the beach and the sun was just about to set when we came along a small bench. Like pulled by a magnetic field, we sat down close to each other on that bench, witnessing the sunset, I turned my head towards Artha, and when our eyes met so did our lips. As strong and deep our connection felt from the first moment when we had met at Beglika, as strong and pure felt our kisses. We danced slowly under the light of the moon and the stars, got closer and closer and everything felt as natural and familiar as it could be.

After some days living in Rosinante at that big beach, we continued our journey south and visited the ancient site of Beglik Tash. We hiked and had a good time and after some days we headed further south and found a small and beautiful beach. We moved into Arthas tent and again, enjoyed the minimalistic beach tent life. We picked herbs, fruits, and firewood when we were taking long walks along the coastline, lived outside, met lovely people, and had great conversations. I enjoyed how we dealt with the change in our relationship. When we both recognized, that we overdosed some parts of it, we talked honestly and openly about it and everything kept feeling natural and authentic. We were flowing together.

One day while walking along the coast, we found that one part of the cliff looked very nice for climbing. After having a closer look, Artha was the first to go up. It was not an easy climb but it was about five meters high and when I saw Artha trying different approaches on the party slippery and crumbly sandstone, my heart was beating so strongly, that I had to concentrate and focus strongly before taking the climb by myself. In the end, we made it and were completely ecstatic about it.

After nearly a week on the beach, we went into the magical Bulgarian mountains and found an awesome spot there. We spent the days in the woods, picking mushrooms and nuts, listening to nature, and having a magical and spiritual time. We visited the nearby village and talked with the people there for hours. I could not understand the Bulgarian but Artha translated parts of it. It was a lovely time. The people in the village seemed to be very grateful for the time we spent with them and gifted us a lot of fruits.

It was nice and interesting to observe and feel how the relationship between Artha and me was changing and how we were together when there were other people and of course when we were alone. For me, it felt like the pure and unconditional love between us got enriched by another form of love. A love that was less deep but, more vivid and in a way stronger. Like a love that was pulling us close to each other. That love satisfied something inside of me. And all the time something between us was changing. We were opening up more and more toward each other and I started thinking if that process would ever gonna stop. There was a strong, powerful dynamic between us that manifested itself in all kinds of ways. It was magical, felt authentic and loveful, and strong.

Discovering unconditional love and new friends (September 2022)

After our gorgeous days at the beach, I brought Artha back to Varna and headed north along the coastline of Bulgaria. At the Beglika festival, I got some recommendations for nice spots at the beaches and so I started exploring. Like most of the time, I had no plans but a rough direction. But this time it was different. I felt like I did not want to go so far away from Varna. I guess, at that time, I would never have gone south to Turkey and left Bulgaria.

I found a very nice beach of seashells. The whole beach was covered with seashells! I never had seen something like this before and found it interesting. In one direction was a long cliff perfect for walking and after one kilometer in the other direction a small boardwalk started. I had calm walks, some french fries and enjoyed my time there a lot.

One day a French family arrived and after getting to know each other, we spent some evenings together. We talked about life in cars, France, Germany, Bulgaria, freedom, music, and everything else. the father used to play the guitar and his wife and daughter were singing along. They gave me a little concert once and I loved it. I told them that they really should practice playing and singing the theme song of the movie “The Last Unicorn”. Mhhh. I’ll ask them if they did. They just wrote me, that they found a good old truck in France and will now start to convert it into a home and go to Marocco next year.

Making a lot of electronic music on my iPad I more and more thought about getting a real acoustic instrument. I had been thinking about that for a long time but for some weeks the feeling grew stronger. Maybe a Handpan, a flute, a keyboard, or a Didgeridoo?

During that time, I felt something had changed inside of me. Of course, everything is always changing. But, you know, sometimes it just feels like something changed and is different now. From my perspective right now as I’m writing this, I have different feelings about it than the ones I had back there at the seashell beach. Back there, I felt like something big and heavy got lifted off my shoulders. And without that heavy thing, I profoundly experienced that there is unconditional love. And with that, I mean real unconditional love. The love, one can feel for someone else without any expectations, without any doubt, without limits. Studying a lot of Buddhism, the idea/ the descriptions were very familiar to me, but it felt like I did not let this unconditional love I was always feeling for certain people because with it would come a burden. The burden of having to feel that love forever and the burden to show and deliver it constantly. It’s crazy to describe and in a way it does not make logical sense, I guess. But what is the logical sense when it comes to feelings? And especially when it comes to love?

This change inside of me opened and brightened my heart. I don’t know how that time with Artha at that lonely beach contributed to that change, but I’ll be forever deeply thankful for it to have happened. Or maybe it did not happen that time. Right now, I feel like this opening of myself for feeling and living pure love and compassion is happening all the time but at the seashell beach I just really recognized it. Experienced it.

I had profound and honest conversations with my best friends back in Germany and step by step I opened up more and more. I let go of fears about expectations and burdens and made myself vulnerable by telling them that I indeed love them.

In one of my last posts, I wrote about the time I had together with my friend Michele. In that post, I wrote that I love him. Before the opening that I’m trying to describe here, I would not have written that. I would have felt like I can’t do that because it would force me to feel and show that unconditional, limitless love forever.

The most profound conversations I had with Cori. I can’t remember that I had such honest, pure, profound, and loveful conversations in my life. We got to know and love each other back in Germany and always had a joyful, loveful, compassioned, and deep time together. Before I left Germany, we traveled a little bit together and she visited me back in Greece. That time in Greece was partly very exhausting and challenging for me. You can read about it in the older posts. Later, in July and August, I felt a distance growing between Cori and me. At the seashell beach, I experienced the love between us in a very different way. I felt how unconditional and pure it was. That it did not know any measurement of distance. Cori had experienced that for a long time like that. I just felt like I opened myself and allowed myself to feel it. To take it from her and let myself feel it for her in a pure way that does not need any explanation.