#womenontheroad
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.
Coffee. I could talk for hours about it. Turkish coffee, Bosnian coffee, espresso, mocha, bónbón, iced, hot, sweet, black…
Drunk slowly in the morning, soaking in the view. Knocked back in the passenger seat pulling my shoes on and hurrying to start the day’s adventure. Drunk in a little nowhere cafe over light conversation amidst a silver cigarette smoke haze.
Coffee is integral to the start of any day in the Balkans, be it paired with lokum, or baklava, or a shot of rakia and a cigarette- the Balkan breakfast way.
But possibly the best way to take our coffee is brewed up on a little camp stove inside a chipped old enamel pot, prepared by a warm-hearted local by the fire in their home.
The hospitality in the Balkans is unparalleled, unfaltering, woven into their every way of life. It’s impossible not to feel touched and almost taken aback as we, coming from a country with such closed doors and minds, are not prepared for this level of kindness.
And it’s this warm welcome that will keep us coming back to the Balkans for many many years to come.
I wash everything by hand in our van- underwear, tops, cardigans, you name it, using whatever river or lake water is available nearby. We take a trip to the laundrette once every two months for our bedding and that’s it. It saves money, but I also enjoy doing it in some weird, old-fashioned way.
Maybe because it reminds me of when I was younger. We were always moving between houses, hauling all of our stuff in this big old yellow Mercedes truck to and fro across two countries. I got used to washing my clothes by hand in the sink of whatever house we were in that month, always a different bedroom or kitchen to get used to.
Maybe that lack of permanence in my formative years is what drove me to eventually get a van. Those memories of brushing my teeth in a lay-by or sleeping in the footwell of our truck seemed like hard done-by times back then, but I look back on them now with a sort of fondness and nostalgia at my unusual childhood.
There are many hundreds of little reasons that made me want to travel; moments that seemed innocuous at the time now resonate with a deeper meaning and inspire me to push on further. Movement is in my soul; it makes my spirit restless to sit still.
Often challenges can be the most defining points of our lives, whether we realise it at the time or only once they have been overcome. Maybe one day we’ll look back at these times we’re living now, cast a fresh gaze upon old memories, and I wonder which of those will stand out, and which will fade away.
99% of the time our van is not as tidy as it looks in photos.
It’s a tiny space, but it gets messy just as quickly as we can tidy it again.
Camera gear, shopping and clothes end up scattered across the floor, cupboards open while we’re driving, things fall over and smash on bumpy roads.
We squeeze as many days as we can out of our bedding and clothes before we have to wash them again, probably a few too many. When the cab’s not filled with puddles from the rain it’s usually coated in dust and mud.
Living in a van is far from the idyllic few minutes in which we snap the photos for our feed, before the mess overwhelms us again.
It’s challenging living your life in a 6m2 space shared between two of you. Our bed is our sofa, our office, our dining room; our kitchen doubles as a bathroom, a washroom, a hallway.
But that hour in the morning when all the clutter is cleared away, ready for the day’s adventure ahead, and those moments when we crawl into a freshly made bed with clean sheets from the laundrette, it’s little moments like these that seem somehow amplified and make us appreciate the simple things in life all the more.
The sunshine on our skin was a feeling we’d long since forgotten, a sensation buried in the backs of our minds. Yet here it was, an unusually warm, dare I say hot day in the hinterlands of rural Albania.
After many months of winter, of snow in Kosovo, freezing fog in Macedonia and countless icy mornings it was a welcome relief and a boost to our morale.
We’d been craving a cool body of water to plunge into and wash away the driving sweat, but we settled for a bag shower on a dirt track nestled amongst the shrubs and canyons with the scent of wild thyme rising hot and citrussy in the air.
I washed our clothes in the sink and hung them out to dry, and we watched the sun climb out of the sky and brush over the mountaintops turning them hazy purple and red. Sunsets could be a thousand shades of gold and orange, pale pink and even the occasional streak of green, but they were always purple here in Albania. The kind of purple that stained the mountain faces and electrified the lake waters; the kind that demanded you stop and watch.
Late at night two men in a van came and dumped ten neat white bags on the ground in front of our van. We assumed they were fly-tippers, but come morning we awoke to the sound of saddles scraping past our van as two men loaded up their mules with the supplies they’d need to take to their village, a sight that always filled us with wonder and curiosity. ? ?
We said good morning to them, folded up the washing and continued on our journey towards a curious little town named Pukë…
