In the latest campaign, we're still around the third level, but **every single night** we've spend in the wild so far, we were interrupted by hard combat encounters (as in DMG-worded "hard"), forcing us to use our resources (like HP, spell slots, Ki, once-per-day stuff) and not restoring any of those lost the previous days. I feel like the [combat is still short](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/42123/does-a-short-combat-or-casting-one-spell-interrupt-a-long-rest), as it lasts four to six rounds, so we usually say that we'd like to resume our rest but the answer is always "you've been interrupted, your rest is over, you can't restart any until dusk". So the only real long rests we could have always were in town.

We've always used watch-turns, and being interrupted in the first night of the campaign, we now always spend one hour to find a safe place to rest and we make that intent very clear to the DM. But yet, kobolds, goblins, ghouls and gnolls always find us in the middle of the night, but never when we travel for ten hours during the day (which is comparable to "fast travel" in his own word). Once on the second day in the wild, we were faced to a deadly encounter (as in DMG-worded "deadly") which we survived only by fleeing. And we're kind of forced to get back to the deadly encounter, which is *more* than one day away from the nearest town.

We're five players and I'm the only one with PnP RPG experience... from ten years ago. I don't remember being this resourceless. We asked if it was a survival campaign and the answer was that it was only a normal introduction campaign found on the Internet that he spiced up a bit. We've also asked if we did anything wrong and the answer was that we followed the normal story.

The DM is mastering his second campaign (the first one is still ongoing, but with veteran players). The DM also plays a lot of survival campaigns as a player.

Is this situation normal? If yes, why? If not, what should I say to the DM?

Note that I'm fully aware of the "long rest" rule as written on page 186 of the PHB. This is why I encouraged my team to say that we resume our rest. (thanks Bloodcinder)