1 year on the road

... have seen 17 countries
... have travelled 27000km
... had 22 visitors
... break for cats, dogs, chicken, sheeps, gooses, pigs, cows, horses, dromedary and camels

... have destroyed 7 wine glasses, 4 cups, 1 bowl
... had 7 flat tires, one broken brake pad, on defect clutch line
and a million small things to fix every day.

We love it! After 1 year we have found our speed and rhythm. That is a lot slower though than expected but still sometimes a little too fast for us. With every border crossing we feel like opening a new chapter in our diary. Every one of them is somehow special for us. We feel like we can only get a clue of the people and the culture travelling through in the little time we spent. All the nice people we met and all the good food we found was amazing. Every one of these countries offered so many delicous foods… we definitely never had to starve.
To get to know the people you just need a lot of time. You need the time to skip your plans for the day and maybe even the following ones within a blink of an eye. The decision is not always easy but usually is worth it.
Most of the time we need to see the beautiful landscapes and nature. You can see a lot of it driving by, but to really feel the majesty of a Caucasus mountain range or the Kazakh Steppe it just takes time. Time to explore it by feet, time to go around the 11th next corner and time to just sit and see the sun go down. We are enjoying every little bit of it. Every day we learn about these countries which you often hear so many bad stories about. Every day we feel like we understand the world just a little bit better and sometimes just the opposite. At the end they are all beautiful, no matter how bad the stories are.

At one point during the past year we had to admit that our plans were not going to work out. So the choice was between travelling faster to meet our goal or change the whole plans. As we don’t really want to spend the winter in Russia we had to find a nice spot to spend the winter. We have looked at a lot of scenarios and decided to leave our beloved home in Kirgizstan. Our first stop without the car will be Nepal. As we are meeting a bunch of friends there, we decided to stay over the winter, travel through India and come back to Kirgizstan in spring. From there we will keep on going east to see the Baikal.

It was one of the most difficult decisions we had to take during our trip. Amongst the million of decisions every day this took quite some thinking. Every day we have to decide so many things and every day we change the plans. Sometimes we don’t have much time to think about. Will I stop at the highway to meet the other travelers or is it too dangerous?  Will I accept the invitation for dinner? Is it really necessary to go to the next city? Sometimes we got stuck for days even though we wanted to move on very fast. But at the moment this is our life. We take every decision on our own. We are responsible for everything we do, for the consequences of our decisions and you feel sooooo free!

As we said, we love our traveling! We love to be free, we love to be our own boss, we love all the great people and we love this beautiful world! We will never forget the past year!