#dronegram
Meet the DJI Mini 3 Pro!
DJI announced a new drone today which — despite the word “Mini” in its name — competes more directly with the DJI Air 2 (though still manages to be under 250g).
Features of the Mini 3 Pro droneinclude:
- 4K HDR video
- Rotating gimbal for vertical shooting
- 34min standard battery flight time
- APAS 4.0 obstacle avoidance
- New DJI-RC controller
The Mini 3 Pro starts for just $759 with the standard controllerand$909 with the DJI-RC controller.
Our van wheels crunched over unpaved road after unpaved road, kicking up mud and gravel as we bumbled along a series of winding dirt tracks which wove their way through endless pine forest.
This was the face of Bosnia & Herzegovina’s interior, a world away from the bustle and bullet-strewn concrete structures of its capital Sarajevo. Here, pretty little stone houses were strewn across scenic plateaus which seemed to appear mysteriously out of the dense thicket of trees that surrounded them and crept up to their doorsteps. Wild animals were known to roam these forests, and we wondered how humans could live so close to them without conflict.
We were still carving our route home out, ever Northbound, savouring these last few days in the Balkans before we would hotfoot across Europe back to England. We slept soundly that night, cradled by the forest, and coaxed our van into life with jackets bundled against the icy morning air. This was our pattern of travel these days; squeezing the most of every moment, battling with our van to get it home, the road our only constant as we went.⠀
As the forest dwindled and eventually gave way to civilisation we followed a winding little road partially covered by snow up to a ledge, where we spent the night sleeping underneath the remnants of Tito’s fist. Now a crumbling concrete structure, this bizarre object known as a spomenik had once been a monument to the Partisan soldiers who fought in the Battle of the Wounded in the valley below, but was nicknamed for its uncanny resemblance to Yugoslavia’s former leader ad the iron fist with which he ruled. However, shortly after the Bosnian War, a group of vandals planted dynamite inside and blew it to pieces, although its skeleton still dominates the skyline for miles around.
We were beginning to understand more of Bosnia’s chequered past, evident in every bullet-strewn building and every crumbling ruin we passed. Twenty years was not enough time to heal, but even after the visible reminders had long since been repaired, the memories would not fade for generations yet to come.⠀
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Driving through the snow-covered mountains which encircled Sarajevo, it was hard to imagine this beautiful area as a war zone, even less so one that had existed in our lifetimes. Yet the scars leftover from the war were omnipresent; they were in every bullet hole-strewn building, in every road surface struck by a mortar, in every man who hobbled past us on wooden crutches. We had arrived in Bosnia & Herzegovina with the intention of seeing beyond its past, but found it quite impossible to ignore.
Perhaps most poignant of all the lingering remnants of war were Sarajevo’s abandoned Olympic venues; the bobsleigh track once filled with spectators, now a crumbling relic; the angular lump of concrete that was Hotel Igman, whose rooms had not been filled since the siege began. Most chilling of all perhaps, were the former Olympic ski jumps, located on the buffer zone across Igman ridge, laced with mines and used as a site for executions.
As our boots crunched through deep snow only the eerie silence in the air betrayed the area’s dark history. We’d spent the night at Hotel Igman, although not as its designers had intended; we’d camped up in what would’ve been its car park, or so we had presumed as it was buried under a foot or so of snow. Having woken up to find the bobsleigh track and surrounding pine trees painted white the previous morning, it gave us an enormous sense of comfort that the mountains on the opposite side of Sarajevo were also covered. This would be the last snow we’d see for many months, dusting the communist concrete structures and turning them into things of beauty, the snow and infinite forest of pine trees muffling all sounds as we slept beneath a blanket of white.
But now the snow was melting, icicles dripping all around us and soaking into our boots as we explored the remnants of Sarajevo’s ski jumps. It seemed metaphorical almost of our time in the Balkans; simplistically beautiful, all too brief and now slowly coming to an end.
We had just a few more days in Bosnia before our compass would point us North, and we would make our reluctant return into Western civilisation.
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When it rains in the mountains, it really rains. Not a fine mizzle or the odd shower like we get in England, but a biblical, all-engrossing rain that pelts down from the sky and sends rivers running down the mountainsides in great waterfalls that flood the roads and make planning any sort of activity quite impossible.
Such is the unpredictability of the Accursed Mountains, a corner of Albania whose curious histories and unique way of life woven amongst its limestone peaks will forever keep us coming back for more.
This fascinating mountain range was so named for its wildly inhospitable conditions, and is one of the rare mountain ranges in Europe that is yet to be fully explored. But mountaineers with their compasses and maps will never truly conquer these mountains, for the only way to truly navigate them is with a lifetime of muscle memory, ingrained into mountain men from the age they learn to walk. There are few roads, no signposted trails, and no forgiveness; if you get lost and the weather doesn’t get you then the wolves surely will.
But while the mountains may ward you off with their inhospitality the people will surely not, as they are perhaps some of the warmest and most welcoming in all the Balkans. With no fear of strangers and no reason to lock their doors some three hours away from the nearest town, they will happily invite you into their home for a coffee and a rakia before you continue on your journey.
The Albanian Alps possess a deep sense of mystery that fascinates us and seems almost tangible as we pull off the craggy SH25 alongside the Drin river, unwilling to drive any further in the torrential downpour. The thunderstorm would not pass until tomorrow evening when we would be rewarded with another spectacular Albanian sunset, but before that we would endure a night of lightning strikes powerful enough to knock out the area’s only phone mast, and thunder that shook us violently inside our van; if you’ve never heard thunder in the mountains before, imagine someone dropping about thirty dustbins off the side of a cliff at once. It booms.
It felt all at once overwhelmingly exciting and familiar to be back in the North of Albania once again, parked up so close to an area we’d become so affiliated with that had played home to one of our favourite travel stories. But now we were about to make more, as we were set to be heading off the road and into the furthest reaches of these mountains on foot, a place where vehicles could only dream to go and mules were the primary mode of transport.
Soon we were going back into the heart of the Accursed Mountains.
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?
