#camper van
I met up with a girl who had the same van as mine. We stayed at a couple of free camps together. It looks like we are trying to hide behind trees here . We stayed at a lovely little town here that had good amenities and a cool pub. I don’t drink, but my van friend did, so we walked to the pub. It was decorated with record album covers. They let us choose the music and they cranked up the volume. Lots of fun. I normally love staying in the bush, but I find the hospitality in small towns to be great.
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I decided to travel down south, in Australia this winter. It hasn’t been very cold - I only had a few frosty mornings, which were gorgeous. It was interesting to experience travelling in my van in a couple of states that have visibly different seasons (compared to Brisbane).
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A van almost exactly like mine, in the background at a rest stop I stayed at.
I bought my van with the pop-top already made. The guy in the other van had his made. He loved the fact that he could decide on the sizes of the windows on his pop-top canvas. He chose full size windows, which he said was great for ventilation when he is in hot weather. He also has windows on all 4 sides, whereas mine has them on 3 sides.
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I’m about to start my next lot of travels. In eastern Australia, a lot of people seem to head north to follow the warmer weather. Ii think I might do the opposite and see how far south I go.
Driving down these lonesome dirt track roads, icy waters below us, empty mountains all around.
Miles and miles and nothing but silence, nameless peaks stretching toward the sky dusted with patches of white. Those sunset clouds splashed unusual shades of deep purple and dusty rose pink casting a colour haze across the landscape that’s hard to describe, the fleeting kind that comes only after rain and lasts just a few minutes before it’s gone again.
Our tyres ploughed through deep, sticky mud to reach the small ridge that would become home for the night. We wrapped our faces in scarves against the cold and scrambled down the bank to skim stones across the lake’s frozen surface; they bounced and echoed with a bullet ricochet sound that reverberated around the valley and clattered through our ears.
These were the only noises we would hear all night; no birds, no cars, no wind or rain, just us above this frozen lake as the colours slowly melted and the stars came into view.
So much of Albania was just wild land, beautiful places that would not appear on any hiking trail or in any guide book, free to explore, yours to enjoy. With no fences or barriers to hold us back we could pitch up and call anyplace home for the night, and that was just the kind of freedom we craved.
Oh how good it was to be back in this land again.
Living in a van for us has only ever been about one thing: adventure.
It’s not about living the dream on a beach somewhere, it’s not about having the most aesthetically pleasing home we could build, it’s about taking that home on wheels out into the big wide world and seeing how far we can push it to its limits.
Our van is a vessel for our photography as we travel around seeking out documentary projects and video opportunities. It’s a place to rest our heads at night before we continue our exploration the next day. It enables us to travel to far flung corners of the countries we visit and encounter locals wherever we go.
Our van to us is so much more than a van; it’s our home, it’s the heart and soul of our adventures, and it’s taught us some valuable lessons along the way.
Whether we’re camped up beside the most serene and peaceful lake or bumping and crashing down a dirt track mountain road praying the suspension doesn’t break she’s there with us, our constant companion. We might be thousands of miles from where we began in a country where we don’t speak the language or broken down by the roadside but we will always have the comfort of our home on wheels to return to standing right there beside us.
There we were, waking up and jumping straight in to the hot, sulphurous waters of the second spring we’d visited in two days, way out in the Macedonian countryside, full of optimism for the day ahead. However, it wasn’t long until things began to take a turn for the worse…
This episode isn’t all roses, and what happens ends up causing us quite a bit of bother! It’s worth a watch so you can avoid making the same mistake we did.
Will we make it in time to one of North Macedonia’s most beautiful National Parks? You’ll have to tune in to find out!
For your daily dose of faith restored in humanity, head over to our YouTube channel NOW to be the first to watch!
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We knew nothing about converting a van when we started, not a single thing.
There was no guide, no manual for what we wanted to do; just an idea between us of travelling around the world in a camper van.⠀
We couldn’t afford one outright, certainly not the dreamy classic VW camper everyone imagines themselves driving off into the sunset in, so we built our own.
We bought a cheap van halfway up the country and drove it home through the night; we didn’t care that it was rusty and covered in tie-dye spray paint, we were just excited to see this tin can sitting in the driveway and the whispers of freedom she promised.
It was a long, arduous 10 months converting it over the winter, with many trials and errors and the bad weather against us. We faced many setbacks; leaks, holes in the metal floor, a saggy roof, but we had so much still to learn back then.
Summer came around and with it our first break for freedom; we thought it would last forever. But all too soon it was over, we returned home to save some more pennies and set about rebuilding our van with newfound confidence. This happened once more before we ended up with the van we have today and we do love it.⠀
It’s got character and charm, a few dents and scrapes but a lot of stories to tell. But most of all it’s the product of skills learned and perseverance, and the tenacity to follow our dreams even in the face of challenges.
If you want to learn more about how we built our van then pop over to our YouTube channel to watch our van tour
I remember this moment well. Not one week into our third roadtrip, still giddy with the highs of freedom, we had just entered the French Alps. It was our plan to cross the length of the Alps in their 1,200km entirety, a feat we were not sure had been accomplished yet by road.
Except our van was beginning to make some worryingly loud noises as we decelerated down a hill, and we rolled into the town of Briançon with our first bout of breakdown anxiety.
It was here in the confines of a LIDL carpark that we identified a propshaft issue, but, unable to find a French mechanic who was willing to work on a weekend, we pressed on.
We spent a chilly but scenic night at just shy of 2,000m high on the shores of Lac du Mont-Cenis then pushed on toward Italy in the morning. Shortly after crossing the border however, the noise was now a permanent feature and a growing concern, until finally we pulled over and phoned for a recovery truck outside an Italian cafe. We spent five hours here waiting for rescue, drinking espresso, chatting with the locals in my best Italian, then finally succumbing to boredom and heat fatigue as we baked in the sun at the roadside.
After a good long while we were taken down the mountain on the back of a tow truck and it was just like the good old days, as though we’d never left the continent in our (t)rusty LDV. We were offered a hotel and help with the repair bill by our breakdown company, but I insisted we stay with the van. Much to everyone else’s chagrin we three spent a cold, miserable night confined to our quarters in the garage courtyard, dreaming of the hot shower and comfy bed we could’ve had.
But I knew I was right in my decision, and if three years of travelling thus far had taught me anything it was this: the van was our comfort, our safety, our home. When she stops we stop, and where she goes we go.
~ This image was created as part of our “Transient” travelogue project. ~ Stepping away from the Instagram frivolities and fakery, “Transient” serves as a close and intimate portrayal of our lives in an attempt to remove the romanticism of travel and capture a raw and honest self-documentary inspired by the images and stories of the new age travellers of 1980’s Britain.You can view the full project and others over on our website lbjournals.com.
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Isolated.
Few places offer such opportunity to seek the wild and the remote such as North Albania.
A swathe of black pine trees, a horizon dominated by the hostile white peaks of the Accursed Mountains, and a winding dirt track meandering toward a wide open plateau just big enough for one van to camp. This is where we spent our nights while our days were spent in nearby Pukë.
Of course, parking in such remote places is usually fraught with a danger we must weigh up and assess before deciding to stay. And with our van playing up in cold weather since driving the perilous SH75 road we knew this was a risk we would take.
Dusk arrived, staining the valleysides purple and tinting the dry grass a beautiful shade of umber. The starlit night was peaceful and undisturbed by another human presence, but by dawn the winds had began to pick up, descending from a mountain whose name we were later told translated to the .
Our sleep interrupted, we cracked our eyes open and lay in bed while the van rocked to and fro until one of us gave in and got up to move it to a sheltered spot. Unfortunately, with the wind blasting straight into the engine, the stubborn old beast refused to start and we were left stranded, watching the hammocks and the lights sway as though in an earthquake.
Thankfully we were rescued, for the first in a number of times that week, by @discover_puka in a Land Rover. With our van running at last we were able to drive into the town to wander round its beautiful square and little tiny shops, and sample some of the local Puka beer made from the surrounding area’s mountain spring water.
Then we returned to our secluded spot amongst the pines to rest for the following day’s adventure, safe in the knowledge that even the most troublesome days in the wild were bound to make a good story one day.
Alone in the wild.⠀
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We can never truly be alone, no matter how remote we go in our van. Because if we can drive it, someone else can too.⠀
But still we like to find these hidden crevices, areas of land with no purpose and no reason to visit them. We like to tuck ourselves so far out of the way we might not see another person for days, for reasons we can’t explain.⠀
It’s difficult to put into words, my desire to meet people and hear their stories in every corner of the world we go, and the yearning to conceal ourselves away like some childish game of hide and seek, except no one’s going to come looking.⠀
I can’t explain it, but I find solace in knowing I’m not the only one.⠀
In a particular chapter of a very well-known book Jon Krakauer finds himself climbing to the top of an Alaskan mountain so remote it hasn’t seen a visitor in years, risking his life in the snow, all in the name of solitude. The lengths he would go to to escape humankind, and the loneliness that struck him once he was back amongst them- that story sticks in my mind, always.⠀
Some may find unabounded silence and space unnerving, the knowledge that if something goes wrong you’re stuck out here. But we relish in it, the what if’s outweighed by the bliss of isolation. The possibility that maybe, just maybe, not one person has ever camped in this spot before and we might be the first.⠀
The solitude quells our minds as much as it unnerves them, but still the excitement of adventure keeps us pushing onwards into evermore distant corners of the earth.⠀
P.S. Can anyone name the book?
On a particularly frosty Monday morning we rose earlier than the sun did, cameras in hand and blankets around our shoulders to capture the sunrise and encapsulate it in our memories.
The watercolour sky was awash with pale pinks and dusky orange, the jagged mountain peaks shrouding the horizon beyond. Below our camp spot sat the most pristine lake of emerald water, clear as glass, and a thick stream of cloud scooting across its surface before being sucked down into the valley below.
We stood patiently, cameras poised, as the fiery sunlight licked the tops of the mountains and slowly made its way down to their base. Finally, after what seemed like hours, the golden rays filtered through the peaks and burst through the chill in the air. The snaking dirt track beneath us was all of a sudden bathed in gold, the fog clouds set ablaze in the sky, and the warmth of a late winter’s day kissed our cheeks and unfroze our hands.
It felt like an achievement for us, a rare gift of total aloneness after several chaotic days amongst the city folk of Tirana, long before the first commuter minibuses would rumble their way down this track. We retreated to the van to reward ourselves with coffee, watching the sun scatter the orderly clouds into a haze of fog that enveloped the landscape and licked at our van.
An early start and a little less sleep had been a fair trade to enjoy this moment all to ourselves. We cradled our coffee cups and pored over maps, planning the day’s adventure ahead before the rest of the world had even pulled back the covers and risen out of bed.
