My goal – a rainbow gathering in Israel is finally coming nearer. I spent time in many differents marinas, sometimes bypassing security guards, sometimes getting help from them. But the main season is over and for getting a lift on a sailing- or motorboat one needs to have a little patience it seems.

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Hitchhiking in Turkey often seems as difficult as finding food in a supermarket – not a huge challenge! One sunny day I find myself hitching with my new 40 kilometer sign somewhere on the southcoast as a car with two Turkish women and one Dutch guy stops. They take me on a scenic tour with high rising reddish mountains and beautiful views of the mediterrean sea which shows some tiny islands in a blue sea. It’s a twisty road, and we pass trucks which are packed twice as high as their real height, and still contain some relaxed Turks on top of the load.

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Half way over the Bosparus I throw my last Bulgarian coin overboard – it flies through the air, hits the water, and I watch it turn over and over again below the water before it dissapears in the depths. I hope it will bring some more good luck! Not that I really need any more, life is already very kind to me. (Let’s hope that life’s not listening though!) So many beautiful things are happening that drinking caj with a friend (under palmtrees at the mediterean sea) is just an intermezzo inbetween other more interesting happenings.

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I managed to upload some pictures of the last couple of months: couchsurfing collective in Austria, a beautiful sunrise in Bratislava, a short stay in Budapest, hiking in Poland, visiting the Ukraine, and hitching through Hungaria and Serbia.

You can find them all here.

I meet a lot of amazing nice people on my trip; some of them can be found on the pictures. I’ll leave it up to you to imagine the accompanying stories :-)

This will also be the last photo update for now – I’ll be sending the camera home, as I’d like my backpack to be a little bit lighter – 0.7 kilos in this case.

All the best,
Jurgen

Two September 2005. My footsteps echo through the house, which is now totally empty, except for me and my two guests from Vladivostok. This morning it’s not just they who’ll be leaving with their backpack, it’s also me who’s going away. The first hitchhiking destination will be my parents place. And then? My destination is unknown and planning is nearly non-existing.

I just know that I need to go. I’ve no insight whatsoever in my current financial situation, and I’ve got no home, no work and no belongings to return to. The only thing I do have is the faith that I can and will deal with whatever happens.

Now it’s already one year of nomadism. One year of constant travels, one year of homelessness. What happened?

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One thing I realise while camping in the Polish mountains is that I’ve been trying to get to St.Petersburg for a long, long time now. Although I know I want to go there, it might just not be a real goal of mine, otherwise I’d have been there by now. So one day I go online in a library in a small and touristy mountain village, cancel all of my appointments, and give myself the freedom to really go wherever I want.

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