Tag: photo

A magnificent view, hammock paradise and a storm (January 2023)

After taking the ferry, I drove up a hill and from there I was treated to one of the most stunning views I’ve ever seen! It was truly marvelous and as the sun began to set, the colors changed by the minute. From the hill, I could see the Turtle Beach, the vast river delta with its reeds and lake-like waters, the rolling hills, and the large lake and mountains in the distance. It was a breathtaking sight!

When I arrived at my new home on that hill, I was pleased to see Isa and Arne were there too. We parked our vehicles next to each other, and the following day another couple of travelers joined us. They were traveling in their UAZ Buchanka, named Olga. I have a fondness for these charming Russian off-road vans. When I had been researching and comparing vehicles to live in, I came across the Buchankas and thought they would be a good option due to their reasonable price tag. However, after learning about the maintenance and repair demands, I gained a great deal of respect for these cute vehicles. It seemed that the internet was correct about their demanding nature. Especially Martin had an strong relationship with Olga and had become her designated mechanic. Although they had bought Olga as a new car, I got the impression that they had already gone through the process of fixing every part of her at least once.

The others eventually left and I spent another day taking in the beautiful view. One day, an elderly local man came by. He couldn’t speak English or German and communicating through Google Translate was not very effective, so we communicated through gestures and facial expressions. It was fun. I figured out that his old-fashioned phone needed to be charged, so I plugged it into Rosinante. We chatted and had tea and nuts. It turned out that the man had accidentally turned on the airplane mode of his phone and didn’t know how to turn it off. It was like a puzzle game. I used Google Translate’s photo mode to translate the phone’s interface and after getting lost in its complicated menu structure for a couple of times, his phone was back online and he got about 50 new sms.

I then went on a beautiful hike at Butterfly Valley. After that, I visited a remote and secluded cove. The place was stunning during sunsets, truly magical. With the presence of trees and many rocks and stones, it was the perfect spot for relaxing in my beloved hammock.

A few days later, I continued on my journey towards Cyprus and stumbled upon a vast sandy beach that stretched for kilometers. During a leisurely walk, I met Danny and his gorgeous dog. The following day, we had a long and in-depth conversation about love, humanity, life and the universe. It was enjoyable, intriguing, and a little crazy. I noticed that conversations tend to become a bit crazy when delving into topics like universal energies and the indescribable.

Danny added me to a Telegram group where people gathered to exchange information about traveling from Turkey to India. I found it fascinating that some of this information seemed impossible to find through a simple Google search. The further east I would come, the more uncertain things like border crossings and visa regulations would be. These things seemed to depend on constantly changing factors like political situations, making up-to-date individual experiences increasingly important.

Rosinante was parked at a beautiful spot on that vast sandy beach, slightly elevated with a good view of the wide, wide beach. One day, with the arrival of a massive thunderstorm everything changed. It brought wind gusts of 80 km/h, rain, hail, and a rough sea to the beach, more and more reducing the once wide beach. Living in Rosinante during the storm felt like being on a spaceship in the midst of a solar storm once again.

New year’s eve, new friends, in an recreational alien spaceship and proper traveling (January 2023)

After five weeks at that wonderful beach near Datca in Turkey, I felt like it was time to move on. For the first time on my journey I had an plan: I had decided to travel to Cyprus, stay there for 95 days before returning to Turkey for another 90 days. This would give me a warm winter and the opportunity to explore the east and northeast of Turkey, Georgia, and Armenia in spring and summer.

I asked some new Turkish friends for a recommendation on where to go dancing on New Year’s Eve. They suggested a small town by the coast, so I headed there. Upon arrival, I discovered that the town was a hot spot for tourists, filled with holiday apartments, hotels, bars, restaurants, a harbor, and a promenade. It was a proper little “concept town”. Although that place felt pretty alien to me, I decided to stay there to have a chance to meet some nice people and have a dance after my time in nature.

In the evening, I met Isa and Arne. They were traveling and living in their all-wheel-drive VW van and on their leisurely way to India. I felt connected to them from the moment we met. We spent the evening and the night talking about a lot of things, including living in a community on a sustainable farming, being human, traveling, and all the other stuff. I enjoyed our conversations a lot. Later that night, we went to a bar and chatted for hours with a friendly Turkish woman. Just when I started to dance a little, the music stopped at 1 AM. I didn’t know about the rule, but the bars weren’t allowed to play music after 1 AM. So I continued hanging out with the others and having a good time. By the end of the night, I had drunk more beer than for years, I guess. I felt good but the next day I took it easy.

After a day of relaxation, I headed south towards Cyprus. Isa and Arne, who had left the day before, had told me about a great hot thermal bath at a stunning lake. When I arrived, I ran into them again. They continued their journey, while I headed to the thermal bath, which looked like an alien spaceship. I spent hours soaking in the hot water. After months without a hot bath that felt awesome.

The next day, I went on a hike, explored ancient ruins, and took a ferry across a river. The ferry was very small, and when it was Rosinante’s and my turn, we had to drive slightly on the loading ramp to make room for two more cars. I had never been on such a tiny ferry before and although our ferry was very far from it, it remembered me on these super adventurous videos about little motorboats that carry jeeps across rivers in Asia and South America.

5 weeks, one beach part 3/4: Can I trust my pure being and summoning dolphins without thinking about them? (December 2022)

Back in Bulgaria, I had the feeling that analyzing and trying to deeply understand the things that were going on in my mind would no longer be my way. The funny thing is, that about six years ago, I had felt something similar but different. Back then, I had been thinking a lot about things that had been bothering me. It had been like a whirlwind of analytical thoughts, dissatisfaction, and sometimes desperation.

At one point, I realized that there was no need for the strong dissatisfaction and desperation I had been feeling. I understood that I could change my perspective on the things that had been bothering me. This realization came to me as I was reading the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari. In the book, he describes many interesting concepts, but the one that resonated with me the most was his explanation of how humans believe in a lot of things that we just made up, such as money, countries, and companies. These things don’t actually exist, yet most of us believe in them so strongly that they shape and dictate much of our lives. Furthermore, Harari describes how subjective, dynamic, and elusive the human perception of reality can be. I began to think that if I was already believing in so many things that were not real and these beliefs were having such a big impact on me, and if my perception of reality was not solid but could be changed, then I could create new beliefs and change my perspective in a way that would make me feel happier. This had been the starting point for a long process of change. Dissatisfaction and desperation became less and less important. I think that at this point, I had started to actively change my perspective on things by altering my thinking about them. It was a lot of thinking, but it felt good.

Around the same time, I had begun to meditate and study various literature on happiness, mindfulness, Buddhism, philosophy, and psychology. At that time, my primary motivation was to understand how the self within me worked. In retrospect, I realize that I had been approaching this desire on an intellectual level. I had believed that nearly everything could be explained in this way. However, over time, this perspective had begun to shift. My intellectual understanding became more and more supplemented by a deeper level of feelings and beliefs. Despite this, I still had changed the way I saw things by analyzing, understanding, and then altering my perspective.

At some point during my journey, which had begun about a year ago, I had started to feel that analyzing and understanding felt clunky and unnatural. I had realized that I didn’t need to understand everything. However, I was still very much in my thoughts. Then, back in Bulgaria, these active, analytical, and transformative thoughts started to become less important. I feel that the intense time I had spent with Artha, our love, mutual triggering and everything else, had the effect of a catalyst.

I felt that my perspective on my thoughts and the concepts they were following had changed. I got the impression that the relationship between feelings, beliefs, thinking and arising thoughts might be different than what I had believed. From that point on, I felt more open towards myself and started to be more honest with everything that came up inside of me. I felt a different kind of authenticity and naturalness, something I hadn’t experienced before. The feeling reminded me of sayings like “there are no wrong feelings.” I felt liberated from certain boundaries that I had applied to myself in order to be authentic, mindful and spiritual. After Istanbul, I found myself relying on analytical thinking again at times, but mostly I felt like I was starting to welcome all aspects of myself and observe the parts that irritated me. So, I guess that was more observing, welcoming, and letting go than thinking, analyzing, and actively transforming.

At one point on that beach in Turkey, I got the strong impression that I might be able to fully trust what felt like my pure being. By “pure being,” I mean “me” without the arising and commenting thoughts in my mind. In (Zen) Buddhism, there are the terms “small mind” and “big mind.” I read most about them in “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki. It’s a deep topic, but I guess for now, it’s enough to say that the big mind seems to perceive everything as it is, while the small mind (as a part of the big mind) tends to add delusions in the form of stories to everything one perceives. So, with a calm small mind and fewer delusions, one might suffer less in life because one would judge life less in a dualistic way of good and bad. I felt that what I felt like my being was pretty well described as the big mind, and my thoughts as the small mind. I felt like that I might be able to trust my being completely at some point, and I felt like the journey there had already begun.

I continued to attend the Dharma talks of the Bright Way Zen community via Zoom, and I was reading the book “The Unborn – The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei” translated by Norman Waddell. It felt like it came at just the right time and I connected strongly with it. From my understanding, Bankei’s teachings mostly revolve around the belief that one can fully trust in their pure being and that is all that is necessary to not suffer in life because that being will take care of everything that needs to be taken care of. He refers to this being as “the unborn Buddha mind.” My brief descriptions of the “big mind” and “small mind” and this one about the “unborn Buddha mind” are by no means adequate descriptions of the concepts that Suzuki and Bankei are offering, but I think it’s enough for this post. Reading that book and its constant repetition of trusting my being felt relieving, confirming, and very healthy for me. It felt like my belief in my pure being kept growing.

One day, while sitting in Rosinante, I looked at the switch for my charging booster. I had always wanted to drill a hole in the interior of Rosinante to properly install the switch, but I never got around to it because I couldn’t decide on the best way to do it. But on that day, I just did it. Afterwards, I fixed an electrical connection of one of the batteries that I had been meaning to fix for months, but didn’t know how. I also improved the routing of the cable from my power converter through the cabin. These tasks that I had been putting off for so long, ended up taking only a couple of minutes to complete. And after these, I found myself tackling a number of other things that seemed to just appear. I simply did what was next and didn’t give much thought to them. It felt like a chain of flow. I experienced this feeling on several days while I was on that beach.

On another day, I hiked to a small waterfall and meditated at a peaceful creek. On that day, there were even fewer distracting thoughts in my mind, and I felt easy, bright, and light. When I returned to my camper and was reading on the beach, I felt the urge to look out at the sea. I noticed a bird swimming on the waves in the distance and thought it was astonishing that my human visual system could see the bird so clearly from such a distance. I wondered if I could see dolphins, and as if on cue, two dolphin fins appeared not far from the bird. The bodies of the two dolphins partly emerged from the water, one bigger than the other. They dove, reemerged, and disappeared. I laughed wholeheartedly.