Whereistheyak's Blog

It is not so easy to return home, neh!                              

We returned home one month ago from 1-1/2 years of traveling. But in some ways it feels like we just came home for the first time – ever. We never lived together in Italy or in Denmark, we met eachother in Kazakhstan, we had to separate again and then we decided to leave our jobs and our families and drive together around the world. We left going west and we returned from the east and somehow it seems it was the only right way to take. At least this way we made it home!

It is not so easy to come back home after such a crazy, wild and free trip. Something is definitely calling us from out there! But the future is a new adventure, a new project. Even if it does not involve getting behind the steering wheel of Frida every morning to drive down new roads, it is still something we have never done before. And we have here inside us a world of impressions from a life lived on the road for 494 days. 

Saturday, October 12 at 12 am, we entered the main square in Bergamo. Our relatives and closest friends were waiting for us with flowers and flags and smiles and hugs. The end of a dream, a project, a journey. The end of a trip around the World . We didn’t make it in 80 days as Fogg and Passepartout in the novel by Jules Verne, but we enjoyed, experienced and explored till the end.

For lovers of statistics, we drove 88,850 km through 21 countries, we climbed 77,400 vertical meters, we reached 24 summits including 1 above 6,000 meters, 5 above 5,000 meters and 4 above 4,000 meters.

It’s hard to find the right words to describe our journey. The sensations we experienced are so deep and personal that someone could see them as banal or trivial. So instead we just recommend everyone to dream and to explore the world in their own way.

As my dear friend Klaus is saying, the true traveler is the one who explores in his dreams, with open eyes.

Have a good trip!

Our Japanese family (Claudio, Yuko, Nico, Dani, Akiko, Miwako and Tito) gave us these bracelets to protect us on our way back home from Japan. Now they are attached to the keys of Frida to remind us of our dreams!!!

Finally, we entered Italy.

After 16 months and 90.000 km around the world we arrived back to the country of the contradictions. We have been dreaming about this moment.

Actually, the first impressions were a bit different from what we expected!

In the first 20 km we risked 2 car accidents and we had 10 people sending us “affanculo” (literally “go to sell your ass in the street”…)…then we increased our cruise speed a little bit and things got better ;-D.

We found a lot of bad surprises, starting from the price of diesel (the highest in the world!), to a lot of people asking for money in the streets and finishing with a general feeling of insecurity.

BUT, BUT, BUT fortunately there is something that is compensating for ALL of this: THE FOOD!!!

We are struggling with large amounts of pizza, cassate, babá, pastiere, struffoli, cannoli, mozzarelle, caci cavallo, sfogliatelle, taralli!!!!! A real Marathon!!!!

Click here for photos from Italy

The famous sfogliatelle!

Yesterday night was our last night of sleeping in the hills of a foreign country, surrounded by cicadas and distant barking dogs and with a full sky of stars above. Tonight we will take the ferry from Greece to Italy. Honestly, when we were driving through mosquito infested far eastern Russia and there were still 10,000 km to go, we were dreaming to arrive to Italy the next day and have a nice pizza! Now we are a little bit sentimental….. It is very hard to end a trip like the one we just did. Actually, how to end it!? Maybe it will never end….

Frida on the road in Japan  – photo by Nico.

Turkey is like a tour-de-force of sweets and pastries! We already ate 2 kg of baklava!!! Now we are in front of the blue Mediterranean – with a good pair of binoculars we could almost see Italy from here! Without the binoculars, we are looking down at two plates of the local pastry “lok”, swimming in honey….it will be our last big effort! Then we are coming hoooooooome!!!

Click here for photos from Turkey

Marco and the Herr Fresh Baklava Supreme from southeastern Anatolia…            

We are in small and beautiful Georgia! We already ate too much good Georgian food and drove around most of the country, visited churches and ancient cave monasteries, drank sweet Georgian wine and enjoyed the small villages of the wild and remote Svaneti region.

Click here for photos.

How can two person that are not speaking a common language communicate?

How can we travel around the World in countries where few people are speaking a language that we know?

There are different ways to solve the problem, in the picture below you have one of them.

Conversation between Marco and a Georgian speaking only his native language!

More hieroglyphics…

Yesterday we climbed Mount Elbrus, 5.642 meters, a magnificent volcano in Caucasus region, Russia.

It was a particular moment as Elbrus was the last mountain we planned to climb in our World Tour.

Sergey has been with us on each summit.

The memory of his usual say “every summit is possible” helped us in our project and motivated us in each difficult moment.

THANKS SERGEY!!!!

On the top, in few seconds, together with Sergey we revived in our minds all the peaks conquered in the last 15 months:

• 77.000 vertical meters climbed
• 24 summits in 11 different countries
• 1 summit above 6.000 meters
• 5 summits above 5.000 meters
• 4 summits above 4.000 meters
• 4 summits above 3.000 meters

Now we are ready for the next mountaineering challenges!

Click here for photos from Mt Elbrus

Finally we found it, the most beautiful spot in Russia! It is right here, in the Caucasus Mountains, at the foot of Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe at 5,642 m. Elbrus is a beautiful and peculiar double-stratovolcano, her two peaks all covered in snow and ice. Now we are traveling a bit around the valleys north-northeast of Elbrus in order to acclimatize before our scheduled climb at the end of August.

Click here for photos from Russian Caucasus