Category: Europe & The Near East 2007

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 it’s still well below freezing by day and by night, and I’ve heard reports that temperatures in the deserts of not-too-far-away Turkmenistan are still approaching minus thirty — even the nearby Iranian city of Mashhad is currently experiencing nighttime lows of minus twenty-five, according to… Continue reading →

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 brand new leather saddle! Continue reading →

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 →

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 what will happen. Usually (but not always) I’m pretty sure it’ll involve some cycling. Today was no exception, but we were using our bikes to get around Trabzon, rather than having a long day’s slog on the road. In the previous 4 day’s cyling, we’ve… Continue reading →

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, given baklava to take away with us, and lent a fishing boat to sleep on. To round things off, today’s weather has been gorgeously sunny and even warm enough to spend the day exploring in only a T‑shirt. Continue reading →

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 →

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 for the non-fiction of a travel blog. But to put things into a wider context, it’s sometimes good to write about the times when things do go our way! Continue reading →

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 us from leaving. So here’s a run-down of how fate, or the process, or luck, has treated us in recent weeks. Continue reading →

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 Project website, which has again demonstrated its increasingly invaluable efficiency in finding local people in urban areas with the desire to help and host travellers — all over the world. Continue reading →

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 hundred kilometers, and was ready to pitch my tent and sleep, but the lure of the unknown drew the three of us onwards for just a little longer. The map showed a road across the border into Romania, and it would be a satisfying achievement… Continue reading →