travel

_{Photo by Akuppa}

Language is what made us climb out of the trees and start walking straight, it’s one of those fundamental differences between ourselves and every other creature on this planet.

Somewhere between 50 000 and 200 000 years ago there must have been a human - or Homo Sapiens as they called themselves those days - who wanted something more than basic communication.

What was indie again?

The only thing that Wiki could teach me about this subject is that indie is short for independent. Interesting, but I had expected more from professor Wiki.
There are a lot of links though, to indie art, indie games, indie music, indie film and indie everything else.

Indie is a term that can be used for everything that is not mainstream, or - very important - everything that does not want to be mainstream.

If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you might have noticed that I’m quite in love with the Balkans. But I’m not the only one. The last three years, Croatia had an average of eleven million tourists per year. Yes, Croatia is also part of the Balkans.

But I like my travel destinations to be a bit uncommon, “off the beaten track” as we travelers say. So I gave Bosnia and Herzegovina a shot, I had a look at Montenegro, I went to Serbia, Albania started to get close to what I had in mind, but this time is was going to the most mystical country of them all. Kosovo.

All individuals have their own personality, which is good, or life would be boring.
All individuals have a natural aversion of certain other personalities, which is also good, or life would be incredibly boring.
But there are certain personalities that are just plain irritating, annoying, disturbing and aggravating to everybody. Which is bad, because they will ruin a place for everybody else.

What’s up next?
Good question, glad you ask!
Because next is an 18-day-Western-Balkan-trip waiting for me.
Yay! Whoohoo! And more of that.

To be more specific, on the evening of the 29th of March I’m flying to Belgrade, Serbia and I have a flight back home on the 16th of April from Thessaloniki, Greece.

In these days of modern technology, getting lost seems to be a lot harder than one would expect. Less than twenty years ago, you had to be careful when exploring unfamiliar grounds because before you knew it you didn’t have a single clue on how to get back.
But those days are gone.
Cell phones, GPS systems, notebooks, internet cafés and the wide spread of the English language have made it fairly impossible to get completely lost. An important consequence of this is that mankind will loose a series of skill which appear to be considered completely useless by now.
But are they really?

Sleeping in dorms is something preserved for the backpacker. What playing bridge is for old people and binge drinking for frat students is sleeping in a loud and crowded dorm room for us, the cheap and smelly backpackers.

When I tell people about solo traveling, an often asked question is if that isn’t very expensive, because single rooms are always more expensive than if you’d share a double. When I answer that I often sleep for an average of 10 euros a night - depending on the location of course - and that I had once taken a three nights for five euros offer, unbelieving eyes stare at me.

How did I do that?

Unless you’re a dedicated ground traveler, you’ve spent a certain amount of your life inside of an airport. You need to arrive two hours before your plane leaves the ground and often delayed flights and expensive nightly taxi rides make sure that you end up spending much more time in the airport than any normal person can appreciate.

And between you and me, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Every airport has the same automatic glass doors, the same check in desks, the same security control and the same shops selling overpriced food, drinks and souvenirs.
Even the duty free shops appear to be overpriced these days, need I say more?

People who have visited Central or South American countries have certainly seen them, possibly also taken them for a ride. They are discarded school buses from the USA, or as locals like to call them: Chicken buses.

They are easy recognizable in the streets, they have the form of a school bus but are painted in shiny colors instead of boring yellow. They go full speed down hill but appear to have issues to get up again, they sputter oil and black smoke like a volcano and they seem to be enormously overpacked.

But they are my favorite way of transport, I enjoy them much more than mini vans and certainly more than luxury buses.
Here’s why.

In my last blog post I have already explained what triggered me to visit an island like Lanzarote, known for its all-inclusive package deal holidays.

If you don't want to click the link, I can summarize that there were 2 reasons. The first one was al little voice in my head that did not want to believe that there wouldn't be anything to do for an independent traveler on Lanzarote.

A couple of days ago I was reading an article on A Dangerous Business called Why I'm a Weenie When it Comes to Solo Travel and it occurred to me that solo travelling might seem a bit lonely and even dangerous to people who have not experienced it. Yet.

So I started thinking.

I am a big fan of nonconformist blogs because they tickle my imagination.

Every time I read a blog post of NomadicMatt I curse myself for not doing the same. How hard can it be to write two blog posts a week and post a photo every Friday? Especially if that’s the only thing you have to do the whole damn day.
So why is he spending his days on some Asian beach and why am I freezing to death in dark and grey Belgium?

_{Photo by Rex Pe}

Many of us have been taught a second language in school, but the level of education of these classes is highly dependent on where you live and what your primary language is.
I often consider myself lucky that I had the odds against me on this one. I was born and raised in Belgium, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium to be more precise.

_{Photo by vivekkhurana}

Every budget traveler knows that flying is by far the most expensive way of transportation - which personally I find a good thing because flying is also the only way of transportation for which they haven’t found an environmentally friendly fuel yet, but that’s not what this post is about - but from time to time there is no way to get around it.

The backpacker trails are paved with booze, drugs and sex, and that's what makes them so much fun. But once in a while the backpacker wants to come to its senses and that's when they head a different direction, off the beaten track.

A couple of weeks later they generally find themselves tired but satisfied, back on the trail again, drinking beer in a hammock in some funky hostel, stargazing about the time they've spent in El Salvador...

Have fun with: Off the Beaten Track: El Salvador !