Making plans is not my strongest asset but for a short hike near the Etna all I know is that I don’t need to go to the top. Elevation stays roughly between 1400 and 2000 meter and the loop is about 37 kilometer in total. Wild camping is not really allowed but also not really forbidden. The beauty coming my way is of another planet altogether. A world I love: barren and lush at the same time.
‘Are you camping?’ asks a slightly older man who sit in the front passengers seat of an overland vehicle, cranking his body forward, shining with anticipation. ‘Yes, I am,’ is my reply and the man, who has hired a female tour guide with jeep to drive through the canyons of Tabernas is beaming, as if he much rather want to camp too, instead sits in a car. ‘Oh, that is fantastic’, he bounces back. ´It is!´ I reply in a high pitched voice. The driver guide isn’t upbeat with my answer and has a look on her face as if she just swallowed a green plum. Camping is not allowed, really, and earlier she’d threatened Alex (the homeless camper I bumped into when stealth camping) with police because he was openly making a camp fire to cook.
Reaching Abla from an unintended and quite uninteresting angle might not have been so stunning, yet I find all the groceries that I wanted in the only shop open on a Sunday morning. Very satisfied pulling the trailer stuffed to its maximum capacity I enter a café to eat scrambled eggs and coffee, the two things I can’t prepare myself.
Walking (for some time) is liberating in many ways. There’s a sudden very clear goal. It is a goal made by myself and even though it is deceptive one, it brings me incredible much joy. I have plenty of challenge and every second is new to my mind. I don’t know where I will sleep the night and to not know is pleasant. Worries arises in thin air because walls that bounces thoughts back and forth are not any longer there. Hot flashes are gone and excess energy get used up. I lack no social interaction and the balance between alone and adventurous input is just perfect. I have a loving partner to whom I can share my experiences, for social media I need not to switch on the roaming data. My social media are the people I talk to and Geo who is together with cat V.
The tapestry of being self sufficient becomes complex. There, lilac flowers hanging to dry turning deeper purple against the wooden structure that once held corn to dry, I notice a beauty I would have admired while travelling past: now it’s where I am.
Seeing, sitting from an old barn, birds accidentally flying in while buzzing overhead from insects nestling in the wooden ceiling, I know there’s no turning back into a style that I once, and still, longed for.
Every burst of sunlight is an immediate thrust of a lance, straight through my brain and heart and the only decision on such winter days are which way I go. Left or right? It isn’t that difficult, yet with the knowledge that neither left nor right is anything to see, I have to be positive and find something to go to. The cabinet of my brain is filled with connections to forgotten tombs and chapels. I can braid together the multiple forests paths to a maze of sense. Read more
Previous part of this post: It is SAD I
Compelled to share my ideas of the forest as I have never been so much in them. Not my favorite kind of landscape, by far not as there is really not much to see when it comes to sweeping distances. Unending waves of land like a desert are none. Yet, there is this strong pull to be in the forest.
I felt the desire to write a little bit, but the tiredness from another sweaty shallow menopausal night kept me from finding a short, to the point topic. But luckily, not having a paid job, I decide to take it easy today and answer someone’s personal message which offered me an interesting topic. Read more
Updated March 2025: none of the animal derived pouches are for sale. I placed them in a frame to look at for myself. Plenty others are made and those are all possible to be purchased at CINDYneedleart
Besides cycling, cooking a decent meal and making plenty of selfies, I have one other activity: creating art.
How self-sustainable and conscious is living a part of your life as a traveler on a bicycle?
Cycling Cindy