Cindy was still resisting to accept her nickname Bengel and suggested the nickname “Lausmadl” instead of “Bengel” but I did not like that one.
We searched on Open Street Map for a hiking route in northern Turkey and found a really good one.
On the first day it was raining a bit but our rain covers, especially Cindy’s natural one, did their job.
At the end of our first day, we found a fantastic place to put our tent and the next day was super nice as well.
After we had reached the summit on the second day, we went all the way down. In total almost 30 km. In the last part, when it started to get dark, we met a very big bear. We were just running down the mountains when we heard him next to us in the woods. We guessed that he was surprised by us and when he started running through the woods. Breaking the branches etc. he made a lot of noise. He was really big.
I committed myself to do my first Sesshin (meditation retreat in the tradition of Zen Buddhism) starting on March 20th which was my birthday. I felt that it would be nice to start “my new year” with a Sesshin. Because of the time shift between Portland and Cyprus, the Sesshin was about to start at 7 pm.
When I was writing with Cindy she told me that she wanted to do a hike in Akamas. It was a perfect match because I was just about to return to Akamas to do my online Sesshin with Bright Way Zen at a super nice spot I had found weeks before. And I felt like it would be perfect to spend some time in good company, getting to know Cindy and doing a physical activity before I would start five days of meditation.
Cindy and I met and did a nearly 30km hike in beautiful Akamas (see it on Komoot). Although it was my third time there, I still loved this hike and I enjoyed doing it with Cindy a lot. For the first time in my life I did a hike with someone else in my natural speed of hiking. It’s not that I was feeling bad when hiking at a slower pace in the company of someone else but still I found it interesting how powerful Cindy seemed to be. And for the first time Cindy and I spent some time together alone and got to know each other a lot. I got super curious about what else there was to get to know about her.
During the hike I was thinking about what else Cindy and I could do but found it to be too pushy to ask her what she was feeling about it. And there was the Sesshin to start later that day and Cindy had a guest from coachsurfing.com… So I guess it was just not the right time…
Inviting people to your mobile home via couchsurfing.com sounded like an awesome idea to me and I was thinking that maybe that could be an easy way to travel with someone else for a longer time.
From Akamas we went on into the Paphos forest. I’ve never had been on winding roads like this before. It was a labyrinth.
Serpentine and I enjoyed some beautiful hikes through nature and ended up at this crazy mother-ship-like monument called Troni (see it on Google Maps). I had never seen something like this. It was super impressive and was glowing in the night.
Every evening we were reading on this NASA website about the planets of our solar system. It was super fun as well and there are some crazy facts about it. My favorite is that Pluto has, in relation to its mass, the biggest moon called Charon (read about it on nasa.gov). And Uranus is a hell of a crazy planet: its rotation is very different and so it kind of “rolls” around the sun.
