I made my way to Corfu to visit Natalia a friend from the time where I have been studying in Magdeburg, Germany. We haven‘t seen each other for about 20 years and barely had contact at all. But when I saw that she just moved to Corfu with her boyfriend Petrus, I thought visiting her would be fun. It was kind of funny to meet after such a long time and we had a great time.
I lernt a lot about Corfu and Greece and met other friends of Natalia and Petrus. We went for dinner, in a bar, around Corfu town and had a dinner at Ines place. Ines is a friend of Natalia and Petrus that has three dogs and about seven to twenty cats (twenty because two of the cats a pregnant).
Corfu town is really beautiful and the small streets are like a labyrinth. Even with a postal address, I can’t find places there. The only way to find places for me is via Google Maps markers. And the locals go that way, too. It’s quite a miracle that the package that Thomas (a friend from Germany) send for me to Natalia arrived. In the package there was the new drone from DJI and a 360 degree action cam.
Overlanding is different on Corfu because as an island it’s more compact. I think in the summer season it will become really crowded with tourists everywhere. And on Corfu you really never know what happens if you go for remote beaches! One time I got lost in an olive farm and the other time I did some of the most difficult offroading so far when it comes to stone steps. In Corfu there are a lot of beautiful places and definitely recommend going there.
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.
