Companionship and solitude

This journey is my first real travel or journey I’m doing on my own. Before I never did even holidays alone. I always went with a girlfriend or friends.

Now that I’m on my way for quite some weeks, I must say, that I’m feeling really good in solitude. It feels like I don’t have to care as much as before. Like if a weight got lifted from me or something. Maybe I’ve got a ‘take care of others and feel bad if they are not happy traumata’ or something.

Before I started this journey, I often thought about having some time for myself and not to look what others are needing etc. And that’s exactly what’s happening right now: at the moment I’m just doing what I want. There are no appointments or other people that are wanting something from me. And there are very few worries and other topics of friends and family that I get confronted with. Sometimes that feels really unfamiliar and sometimes I recognise, that I’m searching for the next thing I have to do or worry about. It’s like a background process running and sometimes it gets into the foreground of my mind. When this happens, I need sometime to become clear again, that there is no next thing I have to do and nothing to really worry about.

But until now I didn’t do nothing for more than an hour or so. Most of the time I’m doing something: watching and experiencing these wonderful landscapes, listening to silence, driving, eating, thinking, writing, drawing, making music, messaging or talking with friends or locals, running, biking, cleaning, working on Rosinante, buying groceries etc. In the past I thought about going to an buddhist retreat of silence where you are not allowed to take anything with you and you are not allowed to talk to others. Just meditating, eating, sleeping, repeat. I never did this because it felt somehow not right for me. I thought, that finding a place in nature and staying there for a week or so and just doing my own retreat of silence, eating, sleeping, cooking, repeat would be a better fit for me. I’m wondering if this will ever happen.

Before I started this journey, I made the plan to start this blog to keep me sane. To communicate my thoughts, feeling etc. to some one or no one, just communicating. Until now, this seems to work pretty good.

Apart from my times of solitude I meet new people here and there. Especially here in Albania it’s crazy. Everywhere are super friendly people that start talking and showing stuff etc. More about that in another post.

In Croatia I meet Tino the smart and clever electricity guy from Germany I wrote about. It’s his offroad van you are seeing in the photos of this post. We meet again in Albania and spent some days together talking about all sorts of topics: cars, electricity, offroading, life, Germany, Albania, mindfulness and everything else and we did some crazy offroading tours together in which I learned a lot. This felt absolutely great too and I had a lot if fun. So it seems, that right now I did not become a crazy solitude guy that hates other people and wants to eat them or something like that. I hope, that I will meet more such nice, smart and friendly like Tino on my journey. And I think the chances are looking quite good.

My offroad overlanding dream became true in Albania

About two years ago I really started to play with the idea of an worldwide offroad overlanding journey with a 4×4. I watched a whole lot of YouTube Videos, read a lot and got really hooked. When I think about the YouTube Videos I watched, GrizzlyNbear Overland always come to my mind. I think their videos are the ones that I enjoyed and I’m still enjoying the most.

In my mind the picture of going offroad with a 4×4 vehicle in an remote area, finding a camp spot on your own and living there as long as you want got created.

And here in beautiful Albania this dream became true.

For me Albania is really different in so much terms. The people are friendliness like crazy, the roads are perfect for offroading and there are very much things that where new and different for my mind. For example: before entering my first offroad tour, I met two Guys from Schatzi Racing Albania and they gave me there phone number, stickers and a beer and said that I can call them anytime if I would have any problem in Albania.

I started a offroad tour, that I got from Pistenkuh, crossed a bridge that was missing a few parts (after I crossed it, I talked to the guy living next to it and he was ashamed of the conditions of these bridge when I took photos of it, I gifted him a bottle of German beer and he was happy), did my first little river crossing because another bridge was not fully constructed and found a super cool spot to stay two nights.

More about it in the next post.

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.