They night before the event I spent in a national park right next to Tirana, the capital of Albania.
The next morning hundreds of offroad cars gathered in Tirana. It was super cool to see so many cars and people sharing their excitement about offroading. Right when I got there, I found a really nice group of guys. I don’t know why but it’s always that way in Albania: you just meet nice people and they are immediately interested to getätigt today know you or what you are doing and if you want, you can just have a good time and make new friends. Thanks for the sausages again, btw.
We started our drive to a location in the mountains 50km away from Tirana. Most of the drive was on asphalt and curvy mountain roads. The last part was a proper offroad tour on gravel, stones, mud and snow.
The location was kind of an crater on the top of a mountain and there the madness started. Lots of people shredded through everything they could find, bugged their cars, crashed into trees, crashed into ditches, burst their tires, helped each other, had a barbecue, listened to the music of a DJ and had some beer and a lot of fun. Btw the DJ played some proper eurodance style music. I love it.
Shortly before I started my way back to Tirana, I got interviewed by a Albanian TV station. You can watch the interview on YouTube. After the interview I thought that I have been saying only crazy rubbish but actually it’s as bad, I think.
From Albania I made a short trip to North Macedonia and Lake Orchid. In this area there were none of the small mountain roads I use mainly in Albania to go offroading and to find cool spots to stay for a night or two. On the way I took around the lake, all official camp sites were closed because of the winter off season.
But then in the dead end of a small road directly at Lake Orchid, I found this abandoned camp site. It is really crazy because everything is still there. The reception building, the rest rooms, the small bungalows, wrecked caravans etc.
I had a lot of fun just going around and exploring this special place. By the way the lake and my spot were really cool, too. Rosinante parked right on the former volleyball field at the beach. After a morning run I tried to take a swim, but the water was cold like crazy.
At the evening three very friendly police officers knocked at my door, checked my id and we had a short but nice conversation about the Rosinante and the region around Lake Orchid and they had no problem with me staying on the volleyball field.
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.
