#vanderlust
This is our home. She’s a 2002 LDV Convoy, once a minibus, now a cosy cabin on wheels. She’s taken us to places that no minibus was ever designed to go. She’s travelled tens of thousands of miles with us over the past four years. She’s survived roads many 4x4s would cringe at.
Sure she wobbles and squeaks and moans and the brakes constantly fail and the rust is eating her inside and out, but she’s done us proud this humble van.
Her roaring engine turns heads wherever we go as people stop to stare and read out the letters L… D… V?
It never ceases to amaze me that the simple combustion of fuel that drives our engine can propel our little home all over the world. Our van is both the heart of our adventure and the very thing which enables it.
She’s taught us everything we know about mechanics, roadside repairs, replacing parts, and everything we know about building a home too. The constant problems that come with an old van are both a source of frustration and a motivation to learn, but they sure make for some interesting travel tales.
After all, it wouldn’t be an adventure without a few bumps in the road.
We spend our whole days moving. Scenes and images flitting past us in a blur of motion, trying to ingrain as many sights and sounds into our memories as we can. So much to take in, so many moments to keep. So when we finally settle down for the day, on whatever nameless piece of land, or road, or body of water we find, I like to sit with myself, and just be.
I listen to the sounds of birds or bells or the cry of the muezzin, I watch the sky fade from blue into purple then from fiery gold into black, like the extinguished flames of a fire. If it’s cold I’ll wrap a blanket round my legs to sit in the doorway for as long as I can stand until the night air creeps indoors and I am forced to close it. This silence allows me to take it all in, to digest the many experiences a life of travel hands me like gifts.
I wouldn’t want to waste one second of the time we’re on the road, this time we’ve worked so hard to earn, and this is my small way in which to appreciate it all. My memories are worth more than all the money I could earn, pressed safely between the pages of a book and encapsulated in photographs forever.
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.
What I love are slow mornings, waking up to the sunlight stroking my face, climbing out of bed to make coffee and cracking open the door to appreciate the morning view. A little walk or a dip to refresh my body and mind, and a moment of contemplation before we consult our maps to plan the day’s route ahead.
What I don’t love is being woken up at 7am by someone insistently honking their horn outside our van, stumbling groggily out of bed to be greeted by a police badge.
They ask us where we’re from, what we’re doing here, and we reply that we’re sleeping and is there a problem?
“No problem,” he says, and gets back in his police car and drives away. Well then why the hell wake us up?!
These are the stories of two very different mornings parked in the same camp spot. Setting up camp is a little like flipping a coin; you never know what the result will be, but you can be sure it will make a good story.
Our first few days in Albania were spent at this spot, enjoying a rare moment of winter sunshine, waking up to the soft tinkling of goat bells and the distant braying of donkeys.
The glassy lake waters reflected the steely grey mountains and smoke stacks which rose upwards in the still air.
Sure the water was cold, and the nights were even colder, but that didn’t stop us from taking a refreshing dip in the mornings with little fish swimming around our ankles. The warm air tingled against our cold skin as we emerged, revitalised, and headed back to the van to brew up coffee.
It’s simple mornings like these that give us time to recharge our batteries, to bask in our surroundings and plan the next leg of our adventure. This is the simple life we so crave, detached from civilisation, and our van which affords us this moments as we drive into the depths of beyond in search of a wild place to just be for a little while.
When we arrived in Albania on an unseasonably warm January day our hearts were fraught with a mixture of emotions: comfort, familiarity, but also a degree of hesitation. We had fond memories of our time in this country, but were they simply painted bright by nostalgia, and would our second visit live up to expectation?
Our answers to these questions came on just our second day here.
We’d spent the day basking in sunshine, washing our van and dipping our bodies into the icy waters of Lake Prespa, and were just beginning to enjoy one of those spectacular Albanian sunsets which painted the mountains the particular shade of purple that was so ingrained into our memories. We went to fire up the engine but our van refused to start; the batteries were too flat, the air too cold. The engine got slower and slower until it had no juice left to give. We were now faced with the prospect of a night here with no power, no heating and no light; we’d seen approximately three cars all day and the light outside was rapidly fading.
Yet somehow, whether by miracle or fate or pure coincidence, a car approached just two minutes later. We waved them down, explained as best we could what had happened, and the man along with all six members of his family came over to help us. We had no jump leads but this didn’t deter him, and in the most Balkan display of ingenuity and problem solving he had our van running in no time by swapping our battery with the one from his car, starting the engine then swapping them back around while it was still running. He even fixed the loose positive terminal with a screw.
Feeling like we’d been a burden we offered him a shot of rakia as a thank you and his face lit up; they then immediately invited us to join them for their son’s birthday party at a nearby restaurant. Instead of spending a cold, dark night in our van we spent the evening drinking, sampling local cuisine, having conversations via Google Translate, eating homemade baklava and birthday cake and toasting each member of the table with a hearty, “ë!”
What a welcome back into Albania.
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
Deep canyon walls rose high either side of us as we followed alongside the raging blue river, weaving in and out of craggy rocks and diving through tunnels carved out of the very mountainside itself.
After six short weeks in Albania, which felt like it had lasted both like a lifetime and the blink of an eye, we were now driving North through the Tara Canyon, one of Montenegro’s most impressive natural wonders and the deepest canyon in Europe.
Our journey had begun that morning after an exceptionally rainy day in Albania, and as we waited for the diggers to clear the landslides that blocked the road we were questioning whether we had to leave at all or if we could stay here forever. Our second time in Albania had been just as incredible as the first, and we left with a deeper understanding of the country as well as a handful of new friends.
The border crossing into Montenegro was no more than a remote outpost, lacking in electricity or internet; they wrote down our details by hand, stamped our passports, shouted out the letters “L- D- V!” then a burly uniformed man lifted the barrier by hand and we drove beneath it onto Montenegrin soil.
The sides of Tara Canyon soared up to 1300m above us, higher than our windscreen view would allow, and we found ourselves stopping frequently to admire it with coffees in hand. This was day one of our meandering journey back to the UK, taking in as much of the Western Balkan countries as we could along the way, and our revisit to Montenegro did not disappoint.
Two years ago we’d visited but largely stuck to the coast, afraid of the heavy winter snow further inland; this time round we actively sought it, and were not disappointed as we turned a corner into the Durmitor National Park and found a vast whitewashed landscape spread out before us.
Sadly we couldn’t stick around to enjoy it; with burnt-out glowplugs we were barely coaxing our van into life every morning, and an overnight stint at -7°C would surely leave us stranded.
We drove onwards, following the canyon walls until we arrived at the border to Bosnia & Herzegovina…
P.S. This is actually four photos stitched together to create a vertical panorama- that should give you a sense of how big this canyon is.
Alone in the wild.⠀
⠀
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?
Standing on the edge of the world with you.
We’re missing camp spots like this one in Albania as we self-isolate back in Cornwall after a nightmare drive getting back, but we still have many weeks worth of photos and travel stories to share with you all that will hopefully brighten your days.
Tell us what you’re up to if you’re self-isolating- we’re working on our huge backlog of travelogues for YouTube, repairing the many problems with our van and drinking countless cups of Yorkshire tea! ☕️
