Tag: people

Spring, hiking and climbing in lovely Armenia (April, May 2024)

After more than three months in the ski resort and  organizing a lot of stuff in Tbilisi, we made it back into Rosinante and the nature life and went to Armenia!
It was awesome to run around in T-shirts again and discover new places.
We found super nice camp spots.
And the scenery in Armenia was very diverse.
Like always we had different temporary dog friends. Some were more funny than others.
Waterfalls!
And more waterfalls!
These stones looked very exotic. They are called Symphony of Stones and I’d say they are one of the biggest tourist attractions in Armenia.
Most of the time we searched for our own hiking tours and found very nice ones.
On that river crossing, Racki and I tried different approaches. Both of us got wet feet. Who would have guessed?
This monastery in Tatev looked very nice. Next to the monastery we took one of the longest (distance between two pillars) cable cars in the world.
And the birds in that region were huge and majestic!
Here are the hikes we did on Komoot:
Angel Canyon
Wings For Life Run
Jermuk Waterfall
Shaki Waterfall and Zorats Karer (ancient tomb memorial) unexpected hiking tour, Tatev monastery, Devil’s bridge, Hermitage, Wings of Tatev (cable car)
Azat valley, Symphony of stones and Geghard monastery
Parz Lake round Short hike down to the river (Lastiver)
And we went back into the climbing life! It was awesome! After a couple of days we were fit again and did weeks of climbing!
This was my favorite route. 38m long and 6b grade. It was awesome. But before it was awesome, it was a frustrating experience for me.
During that time my grandfather died in Germany and that was another special experience for me. He was quite old and had his illnesses and so it was no surprise but still it caught me. Mostly it remembered me at the time when my parents and other grandparents died and this kicked me really out of balance. I got kind of stressed, partly pissed and it was not the easiest time for Racki and me. I guess I could not really communicate my imbalance or did not understand what was going on with me which made me kind of pull back which maybe confused Racki who always loves to do something together. But in the end I mostly found my balance again and we got relaxed again.
In Armenia we met so many lovely people! It was unbelievable. Even compared with other regions of great hospitality this was so amazing. This guy (a natural reserve ranger) let us stay in the reserve area, explained a lot of interesting stuff to us and gifted us a lot of grilled lamb. Which I ate because I’m not as strictly vegetarian as Racki.
These guys took us with them to a hot spring bath and we had a good time together. And there were a lot more of these lovely Armenian people.
Our diesel heater showed some malfunction and to be able to maintain and repair it without putting the cabin off our pickup we realized one of my dream improvements for Rosinante: we installed the heater from the inside. In Yerevan these nice guys laser cut a custom stainless steel plate for us and in the end they wanted no payment at all.
This is the custom cut plate. In Germany we maybe could have ordered one online but in countries like Armenia this is not so easy or even impossible. The tasks of the car life.
The sexy pig-batman-ass hole in which we fit the heater.
We cleaned the heater and afterwards it worked flawlessly again. I’d say it’s normal that diesel heaters get dirty when one uses them a lot and so I thought about it since I started living in a car. In the end it was not difficult to dismantle, clean it and put it back together. The needed spare parts we had with us. And so we learned to handle one of the big car life topics.
Some classic site seeing in Yerevan.
We did none of the famous volcano off-road tours because the weather was too cloudy and there was still too much snow on the volcanos.
But still we did some off-roading to explore nice places.
And some more tricky off-roading.
And nice roads. And in the end when crossing the border back to Georgia we normally would have had to pay 90€ driving penalties but the officials decided to let us leave without paying.

A nice spot at Van Lake and searching for latex-free condoms in eastern Turkey (June 2023)

After the crater, we went down to Van Lake and found an awesome spot next to the water.

The water was very rich in minerals and after swimming in it we felt super soft. And after washing clothes in it, it was the same. We even took some of it with us when we left a couple of days later.

But now we were facing a challenge: having sex every day made us running out of latex-free condoms. Cindy had a latex-allergy and so the ordinary latex-condoms were no option. So we started rationing our condoms and started searching for the latex-free ones in dozens of super markets and pharmacies. Not an easy mission in eastern Turkey. Most of the ordinary condom boxes had pretty decent layers of dust on them and nobody understood what latex-free meant. But giving up or getting children was not an option and so we continued our mission.

Although the people we met could not help us, they were all so lovely. This Turkish hospitality is just unmatched. Everybody is interested, friendly and helpful. This made our mission much easier although we had no success.

And then we met the first woman working in a pharmacy. She could speak very good English, knew what latex-free means, and was able to order some latex-free-condoms for us. We ordered three boxes and were relieved. But only a bit because in the end we only got one box. So the mission continued…

Building, repairing and a lot of fun (May 2023)

I went back to the nice little beach in southern Cyprus and just hung around when a nice elderly woman came along with her very chilled little dog. We had a little chat about farming and building things and she invited me to her place just a few hundred meters away from the beach.

The next day I visited her and after having a delicious meal I started repairing and building things with her. We had a lot of fun and there was always plenty to be repaired.

We talked about life and mostly everything and had a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed the repairing and building with just little supplies. It felt much more free to me because doing a perfect job was not the goal. The goal was just to make things work again with the supplies that were available.

After a couple of days Amos and Miquel joined us and Miquel and I started repairing some more things. Another day Lowen came along as well and it was super nice to spend some time together.