Some trips end when you get home. Others, instead, begin right there. They stay with you. They change the way you look at a road, a map, a badly loaded car that somehow still makes sense.
This was one of those trips.
It was my first real overlanding trip with Stefy. No bookings, just a map marked with points of interest, a car, a tent and the desire to let the journey carry us. The route was this: Altamura, Castellana Grotte, Torre Guaceto, Lecce, the WWF Le Cesine Oasis, Torre dell’Orso, Otranto, Santa Cesarea Terme, Santa Maria di Leuca, Porto Cesareo, Marina di Pulsano, Taranto and back home. Put like that, it sounds like a list. In reality, it was a thread that carried us through landscapes very different from one another, each of them leaving something behind.
If I’m honest with myself, a journey like that does not come out of nowhere. It grows out of something that has been building for a long time. I have always hated the conventional idea of Saturday night — that empty, repetitive, tired ritual. Get ready, go out, meet the group, wait for hours before getting a table somewhere, have dinner, go home and then do it all again. It never gave me anything. If anything, it always made me feel as though I were taking part in something that did not belong to me.
I was looking for something else. I wanted something else. I was something else.
And I think overlanding, even before it became something I actually practised, was exactly that: a coherent form of disobedience. A way of inhabiting time and space that felt more like mine.
We left with a rough plan encoded in an Excel file, a few notes and the idea of travelling around Puglia. Nothing else that might take space away from the unexpected. When you leave without having everything fitted together, booked and locked down, travel stops being a sequence of confirmations and becomes a real experience again. You have to adapt. You have to pay attention. You have to make decisions as you go. And precisely because of that, you realise how much more alive you feel.
At the Castellana Caves, it takes only a few seconds to understand how easily anxiety can turn into wonder. You find yourself in front of that immense, vertical, ancient space carved into the earth, and you feel infinitely small — in the good sense, the kind that does not crush you but makes you lighter.
At the Le Cesine Oasis, you learn that even things you thought you knew are not quite as you had filed them away in your head. Trees, for example. As a child you draw them with a brown trunk and a green crown. Then you grow up, actually spend time in nature and discover that bark can be blue, grey, silver, full of shades no school drawing ever told you about. The insect-ravaged ankles and the vicious itching that stays with you for hours are, in the end, worth the capital deposited in your memory. You pay a small physical toll to take home something that stays with you forever.
Along the way we also came across a grass snake — Natrix natrix helvetica, for anyone who wants the precise name. It does not bite to attack. It does not deserve the automatic fear we project onto everything we do not know well enough. Perhaps that is part of travelling too: discovering that much of our fear comes more from ignorance than from the reality of things.
The stretch of coast from Lecce to Santa Cesarea Terme remains one of the most beautiful of all. A sequence of views, light, openings onto the sea and changes of atmosphere that make you realise how absurd it is to live in a place like this and keep looking at it through the eyes of haste. At times I had the feeling the journey was doing most of the work by itself. All we had to do was be there.
Then there is the episode that still makes me smile.
Towards the final stages, before heading home via Taranto, we could not find anywhere to sleep. Nothing. The options in the area were priced completely out of keeping with the kind of trip we were making, so we moved inland to Mesagne. At one point we stopped outside a church — I cannot even remember whether out of genuine hope or simply exhaustion. A priest noticed us, understood the situation immediately and called a nearby place that accommodated worshippers and pilgrims.
A very simple room. Separate beds. And in the middle of the room, a gigantic picture of Jesus that made the whole situation even more surreal. We were exhausted, slightly incredulous and definitely amused — although, it has to be said, the whole thing definitively extinguished what little libido we had left that night.
It is one of those episodes that seem small from the outside and instead become a perfect demonstration of what travel is about: when you do not control everything, the world finds much more interesting ways to surprise you.
One of the things that struck me most throughout the trip was not only the beauty of the places. What stayed with me was the warmth of the people we met along the way. More than once, when someone learned that we had booked nothing, they offered us somewhere to stay — not out of convenience or obligation, but out of simple human generosity. At a time when everyone talks about connections and fewer and fewer people seem able to create genuine contact, that mattered enormously.
It reminded me of something simple: when you travel this way, you do not only encounter places. You also encounter the goodness that survives in people despite so much ugliness.
There are journeys you would remember anyway. But when you live them with the right person, they acquire a different density; their emotional texture changes altogether. Sharing uncertainty, tiredness, detours, views, sleep, stops, improvised food and last-minute decisions turns a journey into something much deeper than a holiday. It becomes a gentle test of complicity.
And that is where I understood something important: overlanding is not only the way you move. It is also the way you are with someone while you are moving.
Looking back now, I think the shift towards overlanding happened during that trip. Not at one precise moment, not with a declaration. It happened inside that way of being on the road. In our relationship with time, with the tent, with the absence of bookings, with the pleasure of an open itinerary.
I stopped thinking only about the terrain. I started thinking seriously about the journey.
The destination still mattered, of course — but it mattered less than the way we got there.