Tag Archives: overlanding

Our offroad / overlanding tours in 2024

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It’s been almost 10 years since we’ve started offering offroad / overlanding tours in the Balkans under Rustika label, and in that time we’ve become best known for our total wilderness tours. These tours feature some incredible wild campsites far from civilization and major roads, often in deep forests with no mobile signal, in places where we would probably be undisturbed for as long as we decide to stay there. Serbia is especially famous for such abandoned places deep in the wild, but Bulgaria, with an even lower population density than Serbia, isn’t short on them either.

Our offroad / overlanding tours feature some unbelievably beautiful wild campspots

Lets start with the hotel tours this time

However, not all of our customers are fans of the jungle adventure survival style, that sometimes includes a fierce struggle with the elements. We are well aware that there are people who prefer to have a warm bed, a restaurant, hot spa and sauna after a day on the trail, and that is why we are offering three hotel tours in Serbia too. But due to a lack of demand lately, it seems that our potential customers aren’t aware of that fact. So we will start the overview of our 2024 offerings with those three hotel tours.

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Zwischen Winter und Frühling in ost Serbien

Sollten Sie nach Serbien reisen? Marco war 10 Mal dort, also ist dies eine Gelegenheit herauszufinden warum.

Das neue Video das gerade auf unserem YouTube Kanal veröffentlicht wurde, zeigt Ihnen wie Marco Abel Ende März 2022 die Wildnis Ostserbiens erkundete, gerade als der Winter dem Frühling Platz machte. Entdecken Sie diese spannende Landschaft und hören Sie was Marco über seine bisherigen Erfahrungen zu sagen hat.

The last oasis of freedom (part one)

Written by
Aleksandar Veljković

Living in the dream world
Living in the dream world

I’ve always loved to roam the mountains of eastern Serbia, ever since I was a kid. This vast space of mostly uninhabited wilderness is a sanctuary for all the freedom lovers who want to lose all connections with modern civilization and it’s set of rules, to escape absolute surveilance and endless “do’s and dont’s”. Actually, this is one of the few places in Europe where you still have large chunks of land that are completely out of mobile range, so you can really lose the faintest idea what is happening in the outside world. A world war could start, and you might well not realise it before it’s over!

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Two new photo albums from Serbian tours

Material from our 2019 season is starting to be added to our gallery – there are two new albums from some very inspiring tours that took place in the wilderness of Serbia in June and July. There is a widespread belief among overlanders that Serbia is the least interesting of the Balkan countries. We’re sure that, looking at these albums, you will get the opposite impression! Serbia has a broad diversity of different landscapes, probably being more diverse than any other of the Balkan countries, and offers fantastic possibilities for wilderness exploration, especially with some, in places quite demanding forest trails. However, if you take on Serbia, you’ll have to be ready to confront vegetation on a daily basis!

Ancient Trails is our brand new tour covering the mountains of central and southwest Serbia, and Secret Carpathians is our by far most popular tour, covering the serbian part of the Carpathians in eastern Serbia, continuing into the awe inspiring Balkan mountain range along the bulgarian border. Pictures speak much louder than words in both cases!


And, if you’re unpatient to see it, direct link to the Secret Carpathians 2019 video!

Our 2019 season calendar

Offroad tour season 2019 will be a breath of fresh air in the Rustika Travel routine of traditional overland expeditions – many of you have been to all the places we’ve been taking you so far, so we desparately need completely new, 100% undriven tours for our faithful visitors.

Here they are – Rhodopean Quest (Bulgaria), Overlanding Ancient Trails (Central Serbia) and Morocco Desert Adventure (Morocco) are three journeys that are completely new in our 2019 programme! So we have a bit of everything – all of our traditional tours in the Balkans are still here for newcomers who’ve heard raving reviews about them to enjoy, but there’s plenty more to choose from.

Continue reading Our 2019 season calendar

Balkans Wild Tracks 2018 video on-line

The editing of the video from the September / October tour in the south of Balkans (Albania / (North) Macedonia / Greece) is finished, and the video has been uploaded. Take a look at the highlights from this 13-day journey through magnificent landscape in this video!

Interested to take part in a Balkans Wild Tracks tour? You can find all the info here!

Montenegro Highlands video

The Montenegro Highlands is definitely one of the most breathtaking overlanding tours in Europe – nowhere can you find so much natural beauty and unspoiled high altitude wilderness in such a small area than there.  And our tour covers the very best of Montenegrian landscape in 10 days. Take a look what it was like last September!

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Overlanding vs offroading – different concepts

Written by Aleksandar Veljković
Written by Aleksandar Veljković

Although I spend most of my time exploring the world in a 4×4 vehicle, I drifted away from the mainstream offroading community long ago. Every invitation to a local 4×4 offroading event was a big bore to me, and over time the guys in the community started regarding me as some sort of an arogant asshole, who thinks is “above” them and something special. But the truth is that, for some reason, what they were doing was unbearably boring to me. Pushing the pedal to the metal, inventing artificial obstacles to master and competing against each other, simply didn’t light my fire.

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