Davide and OtiWe are Davide and Otilia, two friends with itchy feet, originally from Italy and Romania, that have travelled together as a couple for almost 7 years in 4 continents, low cost, overland and sustainably.

Now on separate paths, we keep alive our passion for traveling, experiencing new ways of exploring our world.
We are travelling, backpacking and volunteering in interesting projects from which we can learn and give as much as we can. We like to experience new things every day, to share our lives with other inspiring people and to stay outdoors, to be amazed and inspired by nature, which we love the most every second of our lives.

Davide Vadala'

 Davide:

Some years ago I quit my job to explore as much as possible of this world, trying to do it in a sustainable way. I turned my passions for travel and photography into my everyday life and I'm very interested in traditional and natural ways of building. I'm also a prolific travel and photography writer, with publications in several paperback and online magazines. I dream of a world based upon needs and resources, and I strongly unlike cars as a private means of transportation, making the bicycle my elected vehicle. In 2018 I managed to accomplish my first cycling trip from Portugal to Italy.

• My Travels
• Photography
• Architecture
• Sustainability
• My Vision

My Travels

I started to be a nomad traveller when I was still young, but only for a couple of weeks a year, as most of the people do. Until I couldn't stand anymore the western lifestyle, and I quit my job a first time in 2007. I went for 3 months in Arcosanti (USA), to experience an alternative lifestyle in a community in the desert in Arizona. After this experience I tried to go back to my job and to "normal life" but I had to quit a second and last time in 2009, since I started travelling endlessly. I've travelled so far in 47 countries and in 4 different continents and I accomplished the plan of travelling without using the plane as long as I could, before I had to for a medical emergency, in order to reduce my impact on our mother earth; the experiment ended after 954 days of travelling overland, almost exclusively hitchhiking, in which I covered more than 50 000 km on a single trip.

My travel map

Photography

I always practiced photography as a self-taught man and my pictures and photographic guides were published in international magazines and websites. I like to learn everyday something new about techniques, and to experiment and improve constantly. I have a natural skill in composition, isolating the frame that will be frozen in the shot. For me photography is emotion and joy: the emotion given by the picture and the joy of being the creator. While I'm an experienced outdoor and travel photographer, I would like to experiment more with Studio Photography, to learn more about portraits, studio lighting and workflow. So if you have a vacancy, and you don't mind sharing your time with a gypsy traveller, just contact me!

Architecture

I'm originally a Construction Engineer and Architect with bachelor, master and postgraduation studies dealing with low energy buildings. I worked some years in one of the most important italian firm planning Passive houses, Michael Tribus Architecture. Despite agreeing in the common goal of the reduction of the impact, I found myself too far from my original idea of remaining close to the earth. I imagine architecture as a way of creating things, like mother nature would do, using organic form and natural material that can disappear and go back to the nature at end of life. I also dream of cities given back to humans and nature, and planned for them and not for their cars, where children can play on the green streets and people meet and socialise. My favourite Architect is Antoni Gaudi, for his ability of creating amazing pieces of architecture, following the laws of nature. I admire architects and engineers that try to go beyond the borders of the normality, like Eugen Tsui, Paolo Soleri, Buckminster Fuller. I also lived and worked 3 months in Arcosanti, the first prototype of Arcology in the world, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright's alumni Paolo Soleri, an urban laboratory self-constructed from the desert in harsh consitions.

Sustainability

Being formerly involved with ecology because of my job, I wanted to cohere and put in practice my ideas in my everyday life. That's why I try to keep my footprint as low as possible, travelling overland whenever I can, eating vegetarian and moving only by bicycle or public transportation in the cities.
I also lived in many ecological communities in several continents, Arcosanti in USA and Sadhana Forest in India being the main ones.

My Vision

I dream of a world based upon needs and resources, where everybody can take as much as he needs and the word waste wouldn't exist anymore, consumerism being only a bad memory.
I believe in a society structured around the "sharing" value: sharing structures, sharing ideas, sharing instruments.
I pray for a future where people can be free and spontaneous, where the pressure of society doesn't exist anymore and humanity can start again to interact spontaneously like human beings, forgetting what is formality and appearance.
I strongly unlike cars as a private means of transportationI never owned one and I rely on my bicycle to move anywhere.

Otilia Lefter