Free camping

When it comes to great camping spots, a few come to mind:

• under fir trees by a river, in heavy rain, in the Harz Mountains, famous as they are for their witches,
  
• beside a clear and chilly stream in Wales,
  
• the olive grove, then the beach on Korcula (see below).
  

The list is growing quite extensive, actually.

Then there are the cheeky, more adventurous places. We started in this vein when we visited Bibone, an abandoned beach resort in northern Italy. We arrived at the perfect time, long enough after the summer season for the place to be deserted, but not long enough for the beach umbrellas, set up in reguar formation for miles, to have been packed up. So we opened one on the waters edge, pulled up a couple of deckchairs ... and voila! a perfect campspot.

There was also the market stall in Plitvice National Park, in Croatia. That was fun - rainy night, very wet underfoot and we really wanted to avoid setting up (and wetting) the tent. So we cooked up under a sunshade, then camped up under the roof of a clean, dry shed. It wasn't quite the middle of nowhere, so we set the alarm for early enough to be out of there before the struedel-seller came. Surely we didn't dream it though?! Could that really have been a group of tipsy, giggling ladies going past at, maybe, four o'clock? They must have been real - the big gush of piddle that one of them did behind our abode sounded real enough. Oh well, nothing we wouldn't do ourselves...

Or what about the night near Trogir, again under threatening skies? That night the covered porch of a house under construction, second from the bottom of a dead-end street, seemed perfect. Man, it even had running water and a clothesline! It looked a good spot, and was - we cooked, cleaned up and made ourselves comfortable. Not a cingle house had line-of-sight to us, noone would ever know we had been there.

Except, possibly, the neighbour. They came home to their house at the end of the street very, very late. We awoke but lay silent and still as their car came down the road, stopped while they opened the gate (which, of course, creaked loudly and was interminably slow). We tried not to talk, giggle, or breathe too much as they talked outside. And I have to admit I wished I didn't smell so much when their terriers began yapping about the place. (From subsequent conversation it's clear we both wondered how to shut them up if they came over, with numerous options coming to our minds...)

The neighbours themselves allayed our fears of discovery when they began to argue loudly and vehemently, making far more noise than the little dogs had. They clearly had more to think about than who was making use of their neighbours' porch.

I mean, it's not fear of discovery itself that makes us a little nervous or excited when we camp in odd places. We're careful not to camp anywhere that people would find offensive or otherwise worrying, and we're happy to explain our harmless motives. It's more the idea that, if someone asked us to move on, we'd have to pack everything up, all into the various places on the bike, and have the hassle of finding a new place in the dark.

This didnt stop us though, from setting up camp on the top deck (also a heliport) of the ferry between Sicily and mainland Italy).

Or from making ourselves comfortable in an unused waterfront bar on a peninsula on the Croatian coast.

Or (what a find!) in Aussie bush Italian-style.