So, I am basically already off to my next adventure but then, seeing the way my life is organized at this moment, it is also hard to draw a line (other than geographic) between one adventure and the next. There is little time to catch my breath in between. So I will just stick to geographic lines and say, I am off to Colombia - finally! I will write again, once I have spent enough time there to know what I can or should be writing, which will probably be several weeks. In the meanwhile, just assume that I got there well and will be enjoying the first weeks of getting to know the country.

As a good-bye present for my leaving Europe here is a last post about European adventures this summer. Maybe sometime I will also manage to post some pictures, although I didn't take many.
So, while in the train to Austria, I could not help but notice that Austria feels very little like home. Crossing the border was not emotional in any other way than that I was sad to leave my friends and sports teams (who are also friends, of course) behind. But now I am here (still), and after a while it started feeling, not so much like home but at least very familiar. Things suddenly are a lot easier, when you know a country, the language, the supermarkets and other stores there are, the mentality of the people, and all the strange things people do, that nobody ever talks about. Like driving a car into the forest. Which, I think, is something very Austrian. I don't know how many time I was standing in the middle of a dirt road in the forest, trying to get a better look at a bird and then had to leave the road because a car wanted to pass. Mind you, it is forbidden to drive on these roads unless you have a special permit, but then it seems that half of Austria seems to have that special permit, so after all, it is not the special any more... Well, that kind of thing. So, I don't know if this is something I should be proud of, but I did realize that I know these kinds of things about Austrians, and this makes life in a country a lot easier.

Knowing certain things, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean, you like them. After all, why would I be roaming the planet if Austria was perfect? I received quite a shock when I found that the price for a train ticket in Austria is approximately twice the price of a ticket for a similar distance in Italy. Only that, in Italy I had a train every half hour and in Austria I had to wait almost 2 hours for the next train, having only just missed the earlier one. Had my bicycle not been in need of repair and/or had it been allowed to cycle on the main road, I would have arrived at my destination earlier if I had just cycled there - and I would have saved money too. Being as it is, I already developed a suspicion that the people who plan (or build, who knows) cycle paths and cycle routes in Austria get paid an extra bonus for making cyclists climb additional elevation metres, compared to the road that goes the same way. If so, then cycle route planners must be among the best paid jobs in Austria, because in all the days of cycling there I only ever once was on a cycle route, which did not cover more elevation metres than the road (simply because there were no hills anywhere nearby), and to make up for that, it just went back and forth across a river and through fields so that, in the end, the distance between point A and point B was at least three times a long as the distance between those to points on the road. But, well, since there probably are a lot of cyclists (like me) who want to simply refuse to bike additional elevation metres and kilometres only to follow a cycle route when the road takes them exactly where they want to go but much faster and much easier, Austrian planners decided to just put up signs to ban cyclists from the road. Which sucks really bad and depending on the surrounding landscape, the weather, the time of the day, the level of tiredness and some other factors, made me veeeeeery mad. But what could I do? So I just ended up climbing every hill that is anywhere near a main road, and ideally then cross the main road to climb a hill on the other side, before I crossed the main road again to finally find, that the car road finally allowed cyclists on there again. The positive thing about cycling in Austria was that mostly (!) the cycle paths were well marked and I did not get lost as often as I did in other countries. But I would really have wished for signs that also indicated whether the cycle route is the only option or if you can also go on the road because much as I hate cars passing me at high speeds, the cycle route was almost never the better option in my point of view. Mind you, another thing I found, as soon as I arrived in Austria: when cars pass you, for the most part they pass you properly (ie. according to traffic rules and safety standards, which was quite different from Italy, where mainly I was glad to simply survive... Well, in Austria I survived too but it was certainly not thanks to the good biking infrastructure. As an afterthought, I have to add that maybe somehow, cycling route planners get paid those bonuses not from their jobs but from e-bike companies, because, guess what, something like two thirds of all the bikes I met on the way were e-bikes. Which is strange, but considering how difficult the cycle routes are to bike even when the main road would be perfectly easy, I must admit, I understand those people's choice for an electronic support.

I had almost 6 weeks in Austria, and I can't say I am sad they are now over, but I must say they passed quicker than I thought they would. Whenever I was not somewhere in the forest counting birds, I was either visiting friends or doing translation works, hoping to earn some money for the next stage of my life. But most of the time I spent somewhere in the woods, many of them on mountains, doing bird counts, still for the Austrian breeding bird atlas. Bird-wise it was rather boring, because even though I was doing the counts in very different parts of Austria, the habitat I counted was all more or less the same, so - not so surprisingly - so were the birds. But then, somebody has to do it, and apart from the birds itself, it was nice after all. I was much more flexible this time because I was sleeping outside in the forest many times and I had my bike too. By now, I am used to this kind of travel, so it was not that different from what I had been doing all that time, only that this time I biked only few kilometres every day and the mornings I was hiking and listening to bird songs. I also got to enjoy the beauty of nature in Austria again, which, technically speaking, is really nice, but somehow my mind was somewhere else and so I did not enjoy it as much as I should have - hence, there are very few pictures too. Somehow I get the feeling that after all it all kind of looks the same really...

Well, so I am off now. For real. This is the first time that I travel without having a proper plan. I learned in the past that my plans never work out anyway, so thought I could give travelling without a plan a go. The problem is that I am not the type of person for that. I learned to move from plan A to B to Y if I had to, which was not a problem at all for me in the end. Which is the more natural way of dealing with the knowledge that plan A never works out. Now I try the more obvious option of not making a plan at all which is scary to me. Which also means that, instead of having a plan (or several), I have tons of ideas which could easily become plans in case the country turns out to let me. Only, I know that it is impossible to life more than a small amount of these ideas.
The funniest thing is this: I used to have the feeling (whether it is true or not, you are probably better to judge than me) that people were loving about me for not being able to life according to my plans. Not that I care what other people think about me in general. But I met other travellers who did not have plans and seemed to fare better - maybe they did not, maybe it is just their way of communicating things. Anyway, now that I decided to try the more obvious method - if you know your plans will not work out, don't make plans in the first place - I find that communicating with other people (non-travellers) becomes so much harder: If you tell someone that you will move to a different country then they all want to know what you will be doing there. Clearly, the obvious answer "live" is not good enough. But I am hesitant to give the only "true" answer, which would be, "play football", since this is the only thing that I am absolutely sure of, I already contacted a football club if I can play with them ;). But, most likely, playing football will not be my main occupation so maybe it is also not really the right answer either... Well. Let's just stay with "wait and see".