Tag: rosinante

My offroad overlanding dream became true in Albania

About two years ago I really started to play with the idea of an worldwide offroad overlanding journey with a 4×4. I watched a whole lot of YouTube Videos, read a lot and got really hooked. When I think about the YouTube Videos I watched, GrizzlyNbear Overland always come to my mind. I think their videos are the ones that I enjoyed and I’m still enjoying the most.

In my mind the picture of going offroad with a 4×4 vehicle in an remote area, finding a camp spot on your own and living there as long as you want got created.

And here in beautiful Albania this dream became true.

For me Albania is really different in so much terms. The people are friendliness like crazy, the roads are perfect for offroading and there are very much things that where new and different for my mind. For example: before entering my first offroad tour, I met two Guys from Schatzi Racing Albania and they gave me there phone number, stickers and a beer and said that I can call them anytime if I would have any problem in Albania.

I started a offroad tour, that I got from Pistenkuh, crossed a bridge that was missing a few parts (after I crossed it, I talked to the guy living next to it and he was ashamed of the conditions of these bridge when I took photos of it, I gifted him a bottle of German beer and he was happy), did my first little river crossing because another bridge was not fully constructed and found a super cool spot to stay two nights.

More about it in the next post.

Bye bye Croatia on an abandoned military base

Croatia was so cool and beautiful! It’s the first country on my journey that felt really different than Germany and “western Europe”.

In contrast to Germany everything seems to be not so “over organized”. For example they have only approximately one thousandth of prohibition signs. E.g. there are beaches with rocks and there are no “danger, don’t climb the rocks” signs 😆🤯

I talked to some locals and although things are not so organized/ restricted what leads to a certain feeling of freedom, they have to deal with a lot of corruption and inequality. Often there is no straight way to accomplish things. You have to deal with things as they come. And if you want to get a business started, it seems to be very impractical or impossible to make this on a one hundred percent legal way.

Most of these shops are very smaller than in Germany and so e.g. there are very few big hardware stores and the ones that are big, are from the German Bauhaus company. You simply can’t get everything everywhere. And there is an invasion of German companys going on!

Of course are the streets very different as well. To go offroading it’s perfect. If you should wants to get really fast from A to B in the remote areas, it could get difficult, I think.

I talked a lot about what rules, prohibitions etc. do have impacts of your mind and thinking and once it’s more sorted in my brain, I will write about this.

Huge parts of Croatia are all into tourism and in Winter without or just a few people. First I thought this is the case because of the Covid situation, but locals told me that this is normal in Winter. E.g. one peninsula has around 1500 inhabitants in Winter and 20000 including tourists in Summer! Between November and April most things are closed. Even every second parking lot on the highways. For me at the start of my journey it’s perfect that there is a lot of space, silence and solitude 💫

This abandoned military base on the photos was my last stop with some lost places feeling and awesome sunsets in Croatia. There I meet a very nice and clever guy from Germany who helps people installing everything about electricity in their camping vehicles: https://tinoeggert.com

Wonderful laguna in Croatia and clever brains trick everybody

I got to Croatia and found this wonderful laguna at the bottom of a very steep hill that is not reachable with every car. This spot was so beautiful. After crossing the border and a little bit of downhill in Buzet, I spent two days here in the sun, meet a diver, a nice english couple and actually I did a whole lot of nothing. Crazy. These rocky beaches are very cool and you can walk and climb these rocks for a long time. And the beaches are stone-flitsch-paradises! 🎉

The border of Croatia was the first with barriers and an officer. I was a little bit nervous because of the covid situation etc. but it was very cool and I had a long conversation about Croatia, Germany, luck, working on digital stuff, life and so on. Croatia feels really different to me. Not in a bad way. I can’t explain this feeling.

Before I got to Croatia, I thought that the parking situation would be easy here. Then I read a lot of comments about people getting fined in the Park4Night app. And although I understand why this make sense, it disappointed me and made me think. So I got into a swirl of negative thoughts about a whole lot of stuff and then… I escaped it. 💫

Again I learned more to go with what is right now and not what could happen and again I learned to see the things more as what they are. And again this concept got clear to me: we don’t perceive anything as it is. It’s more like that we are projecting a lot on the things before we perceive them but normally we don’t know about it and we are not recognizing this. So consciously we are only perceiving what got modified by our subconscious before we perceive it. Clever brain wants to save energy and prevent us from becoming mad because of to much input, but how many people got mad because of this clever concept?! 🤪🤣

Next post will be about offroading. 😳🚀