There’s a saying “If you don’t grow up until you’re 50, you don’t have to” 🙂 Being 53 and having a gray beard that makes me look even older, I often get funny looks from guys I meet in the remote corners of this planet, when I suddenly stumble on them, either in my Jeep or on foot. It’s probably not normal for a guy at the right age to be someone’s grandfather to roam around remote places for no reason other than to find out what’s there 😉
Geography is a lifelong addiction for me. A passion, an urge to get to the best hidden corners of this planet. But, instead of doing long distance exploration (like most overlanders and travellers do), I’m especially hooked on something called “micro location exploration” – I do not feel that I really know some area, before I’ve taken every footpath, followed every stream, slept in every forest. Only when I can close my eyes and “scan” the area in my brain without any dropouts, I’m satisfied, confident that I’ve mastered it.
Where I move, there’s usually no one else. But occasionally I stumble into people in places where it’s more probable to meet some monster from the swamp than other human beings. It’s only natural that my appearance there is inexplicable. So in most cases I’m not even trying to, because if I did, I’d sound very suspicious, as if I’m making something up, trying to cover the real reason I’m there. And the real reason I’m there is, in most cases, because I needed to get high, injecting a strong dose of the great, mystical outdoors into my veins. That’s what makes me feel alive. But who would actually understand that? If I told that to anyone, they’d probably call the nearest mental assylum to check out if a patient had recently run off 😂 So I just cut the long story short, and I tell them that I’m the forest man, a guy who lives in the forests. Unfortunately, that has the very same effect on them 🤣
So am I ever going to grow up? No, I don’t think so. I’m a hopeless case 😇
The image in the heading shows just a small sample of my geographic database, consisting of more than 150.000 km of trail explorations, as well as tens of thousands of recorded waypoints.