Category: Europe & The Near East 2007
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Three Weeks In Yerevan
I’ve been in Yerevan for about three weeks and the hold-ups continue. My friends here like to joke that by the time I finally get this deep-winter sleeping bag and pedal south towards Iran, it’ll be spring and I won’t need it any more! That may turn out to be the case, but in the meantime […] Continue reading →
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White Peaks and Red Tape
We knew that as we headed out of Europe and into the Middle East and Central Asia, we’d be cutting through as much red tape as we would snow and ice. So maybe it was a good idea that we’d expected it, as international bureaucracy is becoming a bigger pain in the proverbial than a […] Continue reading →
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A Cold Start to a New Year
After a week of relentless and sometimes masochistic cycling covering almost 500km, we arrived in the snowy Georgian capital of Tbilisi on New Year’s Eve. At 2 a.m. Continue reading →
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Half A Year On (And They’re Sacrificing Sheep)
It seems far longer than 6 months — but at the same time it feels like we left yesterday! It’s an odd feeling, but I think I can pin it down to the fact that we have removed almost all trace of routine from our lives. I begin each day with little real idea of […] Continue reading →
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Coastal Progress
We’ve spent three weeks since leaving Istanbul following the Black Sea coastline. Yesterday we completed the very hilly northern stretch, arriving in the peninsular town of Sinop. It’s a charming place with some of the friendliest people we’ve met in Turkey so far. Already we’ve been fed lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch again, taken clubbing, […] Continue reading →
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Frost, Tea and Celebrity
Ten days have elapsed since we made our way hesitatingly out of Istanbul after nearly a month off the bikes. We were expecting hardship; cycling and camping in the cold, wet, and mountainous climes of northern Turkey. Continue reading →
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It’s Not All Bad News
I know you like reading about our misfortune. It’s dramatic stuff. I like writing about it, too, trying to commit the experience to words and take you to that place and time. I hope that the results are entertaining, but also resemble the reality of what happened, too — exaggeration and artistic license are not […] Continue reading →
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At Least It Happened In A Big City
Andy and I have been soaking up Istanbul for a fair while now. We’re both itching to get on the road again, and I’m excited and a little apprehensive at the prospect of seeing through the winter in Central Asia. But we’ve had more than our fair share of hiccups, and they are still preventing […] Continue reading →
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Thoughts From the Far End of Europe
We arrived in Istanbul a couple of days ago, cycling into this sprawling monolith of a city along one of the two main routes against about 9 manic lanes of rush-hour traffic, minibuses and not-so-mini-buses. That experience recovered from, we have again been enjoying the hospitality of a variety of city-dwellers courtesy of the Couchsurfing […] Continue reading →
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An Unexpected Welcome
We pedalled slowly down the dusty track out of the last Hungarian village. An unsettled evening was in store — clouds brooded above, hanging menacingly as the air gusted and whipped around us, and the silence of the plains was interrupted only by the distant sound of cowbells on the wind. I had cycled a […] Continue reading →