July 25, 2018 Petrozavodsk, Karelia, Russia On a sunny but cool morning, we jumped out of a train arriving from St Petersburg at a cracked platform in a train station in Petrozavodsk. In spite of the arrangements we had, nobody was waiting for us to bring us to the kayak basecamp, that our 5-day long kayak adventure tour in Russian Karelia was going to start from.

When we arrived in Mexico at the beginning of November 2017, artefacts of the former Day of the Dead were literally to be found everywhere. The bookshops had tiny skulls hidden behind books, the showrooms for designer clothing had their trendy dresses on skeleton-like mannequins. The museum exhibitions were devoted to the Day of the Dead – one of the most important holidays in Central and Southern Mexico.

We leave the Arctic Circle behind and move back southwards. Travelling Karelia brought us to the conclusion that the wooden villages, churches, and the great outdoors are the best sights of Karelia. While the outdoors is jaw-droppingly beautiful everywhere in this part of Russia, you may find some great architectural landmarks here:

Santorini is a photographer paradise: white-washed houses, volcanic rocks rising over the ultramarine sea, blue and white chapels, color contrasting flower pots and sunsets over the old windmills are doomed to look good on the pictures. This Santorini photo series is the outcome of the four afternoons I spent on the island strolling in the villages above caldeira and hardly letting my camera off my hands.

A year ago our epic road trip with the Land Rover Defender we had bought from the British Royal Air Force started. It was also the starting point for this blog as it started with a day by day documentation of that trip. We travelled to 12 countries, 11.000 km in 1,5 month. It resulted in a number of adventures, funny stories and wonderful acquaintances we squeezed into ca. 40 blog posts. Now, a year later, we think of the time spent on the road and evaluate the trip. In this blog post, we want to share the highlights of our trip, name the potential dangers, pros and contras of travelling Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Turkey by 4x4 and what it was like, to live in a Defender for 6 weeks.

On our road trip from Moscow to the Arctic Circle and beyond it, we leave the paved road for the water road and set off for the Solovki Islands. Solovki embodies all the reasons we love the Russian North for: the beautiful nature, the remoteness and historical architecture. However, these idyllic isles have some obscure history of their own.

We arrived at the East coast of the enormous Onega Lake and my mind was blown away. That was just exactly what I dreamt to find in the Russian North: harsh and wild land, so scarcely populated that it might almost be called 'virgin', left and forgotten, and still beautiful in its decline.

Our first impressions from the trek, Ethiopian horses and basecamps in the mountains.

Meeting Mexico started with meeting Mexican cars - our friend couldn´t pick us up at the airport in Mexico City and sent us an uber instead. During our trip trough Mexico, it was the cars that made a lasting impression on us. Bright red, yellow, ultramarine blue - they matched up perfectly with the street colours. Diverse, lively and vintage, they embodied the spirit of Mexico. Strolling through the streets of Mexico City, Oaxaca, San Cristobal de las Casas or Morelia, we often stumbled upon the sight of a beautiful old car, parked next to a house painted in a contrasting colour. We could not but pull out a camera and start taking pictures. These pictures turned into a story, a story about wonderful Mexican cars and their owners.

Here we will write about how we got to Svanetia taking the most challenging but most beautiful road from Lentekhi to Ushguli and about our first impressions of Ushguli.