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.

We had an epic time on our road trip to the Arctic Circle, exploring the northern wilderness in the European part of Russia: Karelia and the Kola Peninsular. This part of the world has everything we are fond of: pristine nature and it is far off the beaten path. There is room for both peaceful contemplation and wild adventure.

We are up to summarize our experiences into a series of articles. Maybe it will inspire you to put the Russian North on your bucket list or if it's already in your plans, our stories might provide you with some travel tips and a sample itinerary.

This first post is devoted to the things we learned on this trip: some of them were more or less expected others got us by surprise!

Happy sheep of Norway are free to wander where they want to, and often, their roads cross with that of tekkers'....

Shortly after we crossed the Swedish-Norwegian border and had made our way to the mountains of the Langsua National Park, we spotted small – almost tiny – wooden cabins with roofs covered with grass and moss. They perfectly blended into the surrounding nature! I felt that I wanted to stay at one of those cabins forever.

If you have been to Torres del Paine, Patagonia’s most famous national park, you know how crowded this place might get: mountains of multicolored backpacks, fully booked campings, dozens of trekkers who watch the sunrise at Mirador. However, there are some stunning places in Patagonia off the beaten path along the Chilean Carretera Austral. They are no less beautiful than Torres del Paine and way less crowded.

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.

A trail ride in Ethiopia was like being sucked into a time warp: clay huts next to the rivers, donkeys and horses gathering by the streams to drink water. No electricity, no cell phones. The way it was 3000 years ago. Living off the grid. No doubt we loved it.