rosinante - benni rosinante blog

Companionship and solitude

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.

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.

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