Caravan

The Caravan Returns

2013-07-29T02:43:00.001-07:00

It feels an age since we left our life of roads and sands and cities at the break of dawn. We have been reconditioned back to the ‘normal life’, no matter how hard we tried to maintain the day-to-day wonder of the road, once home, we soon found ourselves dozing off into a sort of autopilot; working, eating and playing with a somewhat monotonous predictability. But, every now and then, I hear a sound or smell a scent that transports me to Istanbul or Samarkand or Rome and I am stirred from my daze, reminded to keep moving and changing and learning, reminded that we don’t necessarily have to accept this monotony. As a little testament to these moments, I have cobbled together the short film below; it is a messy jumble of video fragments from the trip, it’s hazy and disjointed but perhaps captures something of the wonder we felt on that epic journey.

I did make notes for a final blog post which, during the madness of our return, I never got round to publishing. I came across them the other day and felt rather sorry for them so have copied a section below. It was written on a train from Berlin to Paris a few days before our return and (perhaps unsurprisingly) I appear to be on my soapbox:

I suppose the thing that always comes up is what a lucky lot we are. And I don't just mean us, I mean you too. You were born into a world with opportunity, opportunity to work, to travel and to a certain extent, to do whatever you want. We all take this so much for granted that we so often throw all these opportunities away, accept mediocrity and settle down into lives that we are constantly told we should lead. We are among the tiny minority in the world that don't have to accept this and yet we still do. It's a waste I tell you! We both began this trip with the thought in the back of our heads that this was the last one, that we had reached 30 and that we really should be settling down. Having spent a year completely detached from our own societal rules, I now have no idea why we would constrain ourselves in this manner and plan away our futures. The idea of 'settling down' is by no means a bad thing but the idea of giving up your dreams because it's about time you did is madness. So what am I saying? It's my proximity to France, it's making me talk philosophical nonsense (which is, incidentally, what I love most about France, the freedom to talk philosophical nonsense without people accusing you of pretension!). Perhaps what I'm saying is LIVE! LIVE like you've never lived before because we'll all be dead before we ever worked out what it was exactly that made us happy. There, I'll shut up now. Sorry about that.

I've just been reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome and I will finish with a quote from it (that we also recently saw scrawled across a bar in Venice). It by no means sums everything up but it somehow catches the spirit of what we have both learnt over the past 12 months:

"Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing"

On Frozen Roads

2012-12-13T07:40:00.000-08:00

I was roughly shoved in the back and told to follow the other men outside. We walked through the snow to a small garage crammed with saws and axes and a noisily buzzing fridge. I had no idea what we were here for but I smiled my best smiles and nodded my best nods. A grizzled man with a drunken red face reached down and produced a bottle of some vile reeking poison, 'home-made!' said another. Was it a Molotov cocktail? Was I about to be axed to death in a cellar? Where even was I? Well, I'm afraid the answer to the first two questions is rather disappointingly 'no' and the answer to the third is 'at an 80th birthday party in Slovenia'. It greatly amused me that the men retired post-dinner to pass noxious spirits in the garage, perhaps the flavour of rosemary brandy just isn't the same unless accompanied by the scent of man and power tools. Though I'm not usually into such gender apartheid, I was very glad I wasn't inside with the women, watching a two-year-old and a four-year-old perform plays, so I took my slugs of spirits gladly and grunted (and shoulder-punched) with the best of them.

We were staying with a family just outside the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana in a world of pine and snow and wooden houses. We had left Italy a few days before having decided to end our trip on one last mad wee jaunt through Europe. Ljubljana itself was a great little city where we stayed in a great little hostel that was once a prison (our window was still barred). The hostel and many of the graffiti smeared surrounding buildings were saved from destruction by squatters years ago and now form the area of Metalkova, a kind of free-state within the city. After Italy's conformity to fairly conservative norms, it was great to be in a place that revelled in quite the opposite. As the snow piled upon the recycled artworks of Metalkova, we walked into the old town and drank mulled wine as the sun slipped down the icy sky and the streets glowed with a thousand Christmas lights. With our breath like smoke and our feet like stone we decided we needed a hot bath. Where better to fulfil such a desire, we thought, than Budapest?

Metalkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia

After a seven hour train journey through snowy fields we steamed into the Hungarian capital. Here too the streets were a twinkle with snow and fairy lights and the wind blew icily down the grand boulevards. The next morning we had found our bath and were slipping into the steamy waters of an antique pool. While fat Hungarians in Speedos played chess, we lay back and looked up at the winter skies and watched the steam roll away past the statues and curlicues and breathed sighs of a contentment that was surely fathoms deep. It's been so long since we've had a proper hot bath that I fancy there may have been Indian train grime washed away by those waters, not to mention Chinese desert dust and Kyrgyz kebab grease. That was supposed to come out sounding like a romantic recall of our journey but has actually just left us sounding quite dirty. Still, it's probably also quite accurate.

The baths at Budapest, Hungary

Budapest was an extremely beautiful city and we really enjoyed our time there, but there was somehow an air of sadness. The grand streets seemed sparsely populated, people in cheap clothes huddled against the cold, the glory of the architecture hovering like a faded dream above their heads. As in many formerly-communist countries in this time of failed capitalism, people often speak with great nostalgia of the social security they once had and the bleak uncertainty of the future. So, having had quite enough of whinging poor people we headed west to Vienna.

Note: just in case it wasn't clear, that last line was intended as a joke. I have nothing against people who whinge.

I was very interested to visit Vienna as it, along with Budapest, filled a hole in the history of our journey. Not only was it the seat of power that ruled over many of the lands we passed through back in January (the Habsburg Empire) but also the furthest westerly point reached by the Mongol hordes who raged west from Central Asia. However, though it was only days ago, my only concrete memories of Vienna are of intense cold. The cold had seemingly scoured the streets of all life and was busy chilling the joy from us too. It certainly seemed nice but I do clearly recall us standing in front of that famous ferris wheel after a long, cold stomp through the city and Nic saying with genuine feeling 'This is sh*t' and me having to cajole her back to happiness with an oversized wurst. That was genuinely, genuinely not meant to be innuendo but, reading it back, I can understand it could perhaps be read as such.

Anyway, I'm going to get us all out of Vienna before this all descends into filth. We took a train to the Slovakian capital of Bratislava and, though I can't put my finger on exactly why, it was really lovely. Maybe it was the snow falling oh so prettily, maybe it was the small lanes winding up to the castle, maybe it was the fact that a beer cost 50cents. Mostly though, it was the people that we met that have made it special. From documentary makers and Olympic swimmers to doctors of poetry we met some fascinating and wonderful people in that lovely little town.

Bratislava, Slovakia

After Bratislava we decided we had truly had enough of old towns and castles on hills and Christmas markets and people called things like Zoltan, so decided to cut across Europe to that capital of cool, Berlin. The icy winds were not in our favour however and due to various factors (mainly the ticket price) we were blown instead to Prague. We really had had enough of such places but thought we'd deign to give it a try (I'm sure your hearts bleed for us). But do you know? Prague is amazing! Who'd of thought? I thought it would be one of those things like caviar or Frank Sinatra or Forrest Gump that everyone seems to think is good when actually it's just sh*t. But no! I can't describe how beautiful it was to step out onto the Charles Bridge with the snow falling, with the Gothic spires and statues all frosted white and the gargoyles drooling icicles. Even at this late stage, it seems this trip still has surprises in store for us. Can't be too many though, we're going to be home in a week. Bloody hell.

Prague, Czech Republic

Of Souls, Lost and Found

2012-11-29T02:29:00.000-08:00

The coffin was at least ten feet tall and before it knelt a wimpled woman sombrely lighting a candle. The crowd around us began to move with the pounding of a brass band and the air soon grew warm with the moving bodies and the fragrant clouds of hashish smoke. 'What is going on?' you may well cry. If you're lucky I may let you know in a paragraph or two. Then again I might get carried away, completely forget and you'll be forever in the dark. Whatever the case we must first go back to our farm in the distant, misty hills...

Following the events of my last missive we spent another week or two in the hills of northern Italy, counting goats and wishing away the mist that had engulfed the valley. Outside the farmhouse windows only a few hazy metres were visible so we holed-up, built fires and baked bread. Luckily, we also had a couple of very welcome visits from folks back home. It wasn't that Nic and I had become entirely bored of each others' company but I had noticed her eying up the wood chopping axe with a rather evil glint in her eye and I can't deny that an over-baked focaccia hadn't struck me as a rather effective bludgeon. Anyway, one of the reasons for this chapter of our trip was to give us a taste of country life and help us decide if we might one day flee to a leafy idyll of our own. On one of our last nights among those dripping trees and muddy paths we felt like we were much closer to an answer and it wasn't an answer we had particularly expected. We needed a city. We wanted a city and a gallery and a cinema and a shop and a pub and people and life and energy and music and markets and bustle and buildings and art and bohemianism and a complete and utter lack of goats.

So with mud still dropping from our boots and labrador hair still matted in our clothes we hit the glittering streets of Milan. Past Gucci handbags, handmade brogues and newly-engineered faces we pushed our way into a gloriously decadent shopping arcade. I like to think we cut our own dash in our Indian trousers, lost luggage jumpers and practical raincoats and I've no doubt a few high-fashion heads must have been turned by this fresh new style. We met our friend Claudia for drinks and woke up the next morning with the pleasant feeling of being on an unknown floor in an unknown room, back on the road again.

Bidding farewell to the lovely Claudia (pronounced the English 'Claw-Deer') we ran the rails to Turin to meet another and equally lovely Claudia (this time pronounced 'Cloudier' in the Italian fashion) who we had met on the banks of the Ganges a lifetime ago (i.e. in August). She inducted us into her rather wonderful city, its beautiful streets, wintry hills and pleasantly bohemian air. We spent a lovely couple of nights eating with borrowed friends, drinking into the night at pavement bars and walking the streets through air perfumed with chocolate, wine and hot pizza. Turin was certainly beautiful but, on top of that, and unlike many of Italy's tourist cities, it felt real.

It was in Turin that we witnessed the bizarre funeral described in the first paragraph. It was not in fact a funeral for a person but for a nightspot. Alongside Turin's Po River there is a whole strip of bars and clubs that have been serving Turinese party-goers and squatters for decades. In the last couple of weeks the council decided to close it all down on the grounds of health and safety. The 'funeral' took place outside the council offices and was a strangely joyous protest against this decision. It struck me as a very European scene - on the one hand a source of joy was being stupidly crushed in the name of health and safety but on the other it showed our sense of freedom and willingness to argue our corner, to stick our fingers up to the powers that be. 'It is so good to be back in Europe' said Nic, though whether she meant the protest or the chocolate shop around the corner I can't be sure.

With new friends in Turin

After such Claudia-based fun, we headed to Venice where there were no Claudias to be found but instead a big old city unfeasibly built on a lagoon. Arriving by train over the misty waters and emerging to see gondolas ripple the canals was rather wonderful and it is an undeniably beautiful and quite unbelievable city. It also seemed an appropriate destination being home to that other Silk Road traveller, Marco Polo (the copier). However, it did feel like Venice's true soul had long since been strip-mined by tourists greedily prospecting for romance. I would still recommend anyone to go as it is still utterly unique but, if you want an Italian city with soul, Turin is the place for me.

So, as we find ourselves back on the road with city maps and train tickets clogging our pockets, we look east once more. In fact, we've already crossed into a new land. But that'll have to wait for next time for we must return to our cell. We're currently in a prison. But, as I said, that'll just have to wait.

A Slight Return

2012-11-12T03:56:00.001-08:00

This has been a long time coming. Believe it or not, we've been so busy I haven't had time to write. Almost like we're normal people with normal jobs. Though thankfully not quite yet...

A few days after leaving the smoky pall of Delhi's streets we found ourselves chasing goats across a knobbly Italian hillside, gasping for breath and grasping for horns. But first, before I get carried away with tales of bucolic bliss, we must head south! Southwards and magically backwards in time, to a time before now, a time that was approximately eight weeks ago! To a plane hitting a Roman runway and a pair of vagrant Britishers being engulfed by a wave of reverse culture shock. Yes, Finn and Nic had re-entered Europe and they wanted cheese.

Blinking into the bright Roman sunlight we marvelled at the traffic that swept hushingly by, the streets free from smouldering piles of litter and the miraculous lack of pavement-dwelling livestock. We walked and walked through streets that appeared almost contrived in their 'distressed' beauty and a hundred piazzas that alone would normally be a town's main draw. We ate and drank wine and felt at home (albeit a slightly sunnier version of home).

Before coming to Italy we signed up with the organisation WWOOF which, if you don't already know, is a network of farms that host volunteers, providing them with food and board in exchange for labour. Our first farm was near Modena in the north of Italy and proved to be a rather lucky landing. We were housed in boutique luxury in an old farm house and fed four courses of delicious food every night from the restaurant kitchen. In exchange for such comforts we worked long days that involved building goat fences, chasing goats, clipping goat's nails. Less goaty pursuits included helping out in the restaurant, cutting lavender and picking almonds. Each morning we would walk the dogs up to the top of the hill where we would look down on the misty green valleys stitched with vineyards and olive groves, grinning stupidly at yet another surprising and joyful chapter of our epic year.

Our second placement was quite a different experience. Gone was the luxury and in was a wooden room and an old camp bed within earshot of a pair of snoring pigs. Dinner comprised entirely of ingredients grown organically on the farm, homemade cheese, the cured meat of the previous occupants of the sty and bread made from their own flour. But before eating, the family would sing a song. These songs whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Native American were sung with gusto by the whole family. The table itself was surrounded by bookshelves and a great untidy stack of board games which provided the entertainment in the absence of computers, TVs or mobile phones. But there was not much time for entertainments, long hours were spent in the fields, in the felt-making kitchen or juicing grapes. They lead a hard but true life and one that we learnt much from.

I spent quite a lot of time digging massive holes in the ground (while Nic sieved grain in the granary) and it was back-breaking work. However, as I've found before with such labour, I finished the day with a feeling not unlike that following meditation, a sort of connection to everything, a state where food tastes better, water is heavenly and a shower like a rebirth. Not that showers came too often, water was precious and they were generally only enjoyed once or twice a week (or in the father's case perhaps monthly). All water was conserved, the run off from the taps being collected in small basins with which to flush the toilets.

The days started early, the sun would just be creeping above the mountains, turning the clinging clouds mauve and orange while the valleys were full of mist, distant farmsteads and villages rising out of it like islands from a milky sea. Though it was cold and our still warm beds called to us, it felt so good to greet such a day and to spend it, after so much idleness, properly working.

Part of our reasoning for this current chapter of our trip was to see if we could live in the countryside and leave behind the city life. We still don't know either way. After eight weeks or so of relative isolation we travelled to Florence where we helped set up a market stall selling produce from the farm and überhippy felt ware. Florence was hardly a bustling metropolis but it was good to be back surrounded by beautiful buildings, art and design. It was also good to meet other travellers again and talk the evenings away, swapping tales and card games.

We're now back at our original farm, house-, goat- and dog-sitting while the owners are on holiday. We have time to reflect and cook and walk and empty their cellar of wine. The other night, I collected dead wood from the forest and built a lovely fire upon which we cooked kebabs on sticks (as we'd learnt to do in Kyrgyzstan) and toasted flatbreads on the coals. We watched the embers die down and the night sky light up and, not for the first time this year, felt like the luckiest man alive (Nic had already gone in because her feet were cold and was probably tired of me banging on about the beauty of fire.)

We currently have no idea where we head next but we're happy to be back in more northern climes with the leaves turning red and the smell of snow in the air.

Reveries in Delhi

2012-09-16T08:20:00.000-07:00

*WARNING: Nic has declared this entry 'too long', 'a bit preachy' and 'not boring as such...' She is most probably correct on all these points so read at your own risk (and when you're extremely bored and don't have anything else to do).

A few weeks ago, sweating in some jungly town not far from the steamy banks of the Mekong, we sat down to answer a profound question. What do you do when the world is your oyster and you have all the liberty and time you could require? To come up with an answer is more trying than you might imagine. In those steamy climes we put our heads together and bashed out a plan. Firstly, we needed to work, to have a purpose and a function. Secondly, we needed Europe. It is only when you spend so long away from the continent that you realise how much it too is part of our identity. I consider not just Britain but Europe to be my home.

So we decided that, after India, we would fly to Europe and volunteer on organic farms until finally arriving home for Christmas to rejoin society proper in January. We scanned the flights to Europe, trying to find the cheapest destination, just falling short of sticking a pin in a map. The best deal would take us to Rome. It seemed so apt, after all it was Roman gold that encouraged much of the Silk Road trade, imperial Roman soil over which we travelled for so many weeks and, of course, it is only natural that our road, like all the others, should lead to Rome. In a few weeks we'll be in Umbria picking olives in the Mediterranean sun.

It seems the right time to reflect on where we've been, what we've learnt, what we've seen. This has been a tough trip that's contained some seriously challenging times, but it has for both of us been the most educative and enlightening year of our lives. I might try and put into words exactly what it is that we've learnt.

Lesson 1: We in the UK live in a liberal paradise
Iran taught us more than any other country we've visited. Seeing the people suffer the awful regime was deeply sobering and made us realise that even David Cameron is an easygoing, bleeding-heart liberal in comparison (this doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything in our power to dethrone the greasy little shit). As far as I'm concerned Britain is one of the most accepting and tolerant countries in the world. While still racist, homophobic and sexist it is light years ahead of almost everywhere else. Of this we should be truly proud (though still do everything in our power to destroy the racists, homophobes and sexists).

Lesson 2: Work is essential to happiness
You might imagine that one could be endlessly happy travelling the world, stopping to graze on fine food, chatting and playing cards into the tropical night. And you can for 6 or 7 months but there comes a time when you realise we all need a function, a role in society, a job. Otherwise you just float, you're empty and pointless. We've met people who've been travelling for two or three years and they are, without exception, bored, bitter and joyless. Society, community and function are essential.

Lesson 3: We know nothing of generosity
We've been shown such astonishing generosity on this trip it is hard to comprehend. Especially in Turkey, Iran and Central Asia there seemed nothing perfect strangers wouldn't do for us. Free meals, free hotels, free bus rides, free sightseeing tours, good company. It was a level of hospitality we have never experienced before and was quite humbling.

Lesson 4: We live in a world of miraculous things
By this I mean that we, in Western Europe enjoy daily luxury that is inconceivable to most of the planet. Among the most incredible are the following: Being able to draw safe, clean water from a tap, knowing that we are protected by legal rights and that we can say anything we like, living in a world where daily corruption is almost nonexistent (we do not need, for example, to pay teachers to guarantee a good result), knowing that our food is not only safe but always available, and, perhaps most miraculous of all, having free education and free healthcare (people cannot believe it when we tell them
this). There are many many more things that we daily take for granted, even gripe about.

Lesson 5: I no longer know what is East and West
Note: I've yet to find anyone else who finds this even remotely interesting, maybe you are the one!
We talk so often about life in 'the West' but what is it and where do draw the line? There are centuries old Muslim communities in mainland Europe and secular modernists in Central Asia, does modern Turkey now count as the West? Does Brazil or Australia? And how can we club Iran, China and India together as 'the East'? It is nonsensical, arbitrary and, as we continue to draw lines and wage wars over the idea of East and West, it is dangerous to continue with this gross oversimplification.
Note: I've yet to find anyone else who

Lesson 6: The world is indescribably beautiful (literally)
Though I've attempted to convey what we have seen in my blog, I will never be able to truly document the astonishing beauty that we have seen. The whirling of Konya's dervishes, the lumpen-throated beauty of Esfahan's mosques, the vast wastes of China's Desert of Death, the thousand-sights-a-metre onslaught of India's teeming streets simply cannot be put into words.

Lesson 7: We're quite possibly doomed
When you witness first-hand the industrial boom of Asia, the populations exploding like corn kernels, the hills stripped of trees, the smoke and and concrete dust spiralling into smoggy skies, you can't help but feel a little worried for the world. If the world as we know it is to end (and I'm increasingly sure it will in the not too distant future) it's as good a reason as any to live and appreciate the glories that we have before us and go out and see the beauty of an ever-shrinking world.

Lesson 8: Most people are good, everywhere
I'm not sure that takes much explaining. But it's true.

I could go on and on but cannot bore you with my mangled musings any further. In fact, I imagine most of you will have stopped reading by now and that I may be talking to an earless void.

We are now in Delhi and fly to Rome tomorrow. We're trying to soak up the last of our Asian journey, a journey that began as we crossed the Sea of Marmara way back in February. Outside, auto-rickshaws putter, cycle-rickshaws rattle and car horns howl to the scolding sky. This afternoon we will pick through the beggars and pushers to our favourite cafe, drink chai, watch the teeming world flow by and dream of distant yet familiar skies.

To Rome!

Into the Absurd

2012-09-10T22:41:00.000-07:00

But a week is left before our Asian journey is finally over and our new adventure begins (of more later). I did have a blog all ready to go ages ago but having accidentally deleted it I didn't have the heart to start again. So here, condensed into three exciting installments , are our most recent tales of daring adventure/layabout meanderings.

Part 1: How to become one with the universe
We begin in Rishkesh on the banks of the Ganges beneath kingfisher swoops and incense plumes. It is a holy place where Hindus come to ring bells and wash away sins and foreigners come to meditate, yogarise and be healed by crystals. Travellers walk around with yoga mats strapped to their backs, pull yoga moves while waiting for their cheese toasties and think that combining trance music with Tibetan chanting is acceptable practice (it's not). A place full in equal parts of wisdom and complete and utter bullshit.

Being the highly uncynical pair that we are, we began our own 'spirtitual' journey in a darkened room chanting 'Om' for a solid half hour. Our meditation instructor was so softly-spoken and I was so busy straining to hear him that I perhaps missed my opportunity to transcend this earthly realm. Instead of feeling the energy of the universe I felt the desire to shake the guru by the collar and tell him to speak up.

Our second attempt at a mediation course was more successful. Taking time to simply witness yourself in the moment is undoubtedly something we could all do more of. As long as he didn't start wittering on about God and chakras and pixie dust it was pretty much wonderful. We also attended a breathing class. Apparently the idea is that you take air into your lungs through your mouth or nose (the holes located in your face) and then out again through the self same orifices. This, apparently stops you dying from asphyxiation. Amazing!

Simply watching the river flow, the gliding kites that scanned its waters or the beautiful langur monkeys that emerged from the green hills really was the finest meditation of all.

Part 2: What the hell is the place and what is that smell?
The answer to the first question is Deshnok near Bikaner in Rajasthan, where a remarkable (if preposterous) temple brings pilgrims flocking from across the desert sands. The answer to the second became apparent as we passed through the marble gates. The stench was a nostril-bothering mix of ammonia and neglected pet shop and stemmed from the temple's main residents. Every corner was writhing with wormy tales, skittering feet and lank fur. Rats. Thousands of manky, diseased looking rats. And what's this? People are feeding them the finest sweetmeats, laying down dishes of milk for them to greedily guzzle from, praying before shrines cascading with them. Because we had respectfully removed our shoes, our feet were soon peppered with the rat feed and rat shit scattered all over the floor. 'Why oh why!' you may cry (and for good reason). They are apparently the reincarnations of storytellers who were given ratty avatars to prevent them from being taken to the death god (or some such twaddle). It was the most absurd place we've ever been and was so bewildering that Nic finally decided that all religion everywhere was ridiculous and pointless. Oh European logic and reason! How we yearn for thee!

Part 3: Taking the in-laws to volatile borders
A week or so ago, Nic's Mum and Stepdad descended on Delhi, bringing gratefully received chocolate, Saturday papers and new pants. I can't tell you how good it feels to sit in your pants eating chocolate and reading the Guardian for the first time in 8 months (though this was perhaps not the primary sight Nic's Mum had come to see).
We've done many things but the most note-worthy thing was travelling to the India-Pakistan border to watch the lowering of the flags. This may sound thoroughly dull but it proved to be almost as funny/bizarre/disturbing as the rat temple. A thousand flag-waving Indians jostled for space on stands overlooking the gate through to Pakistan, chanting patriotic songs and running around manically as if they'd just won an Olympic gold. On the Pakistan side a similar scene was taking place though, it has to be said, in a more dignified manner. Passionate cries of 'India Zindabad!' (long live India) were answered with 'Pakistan Zindabad!' from the other side. People were whipping themselves into a nationalist fervour that appeared part Royal Jubilee, part National Front rally (not that I've ever been to either may I add). And then the action started. Indian troops dressed in absurd fanned hats began matching with extravagant goose steps toward the border gate. The Pakistanis did the same until the guards were facing-off with preposterous high kicks, their feet cracking back down to the tarmac. The crowds went wild. The guards strutted around like arrogant cocks (either definition of the word 'cock' is apt here) attempting to prove the superiority of their own country. Though this is certainly better than the all-out war so often promised it was a vaguely disturbing and completely ridiculous display. To think that the two countries were once a (relatively) harmonious whole. It was like nothing we've seen on this trip. It the midst of all the noise and mayhem, we couldn't help but stare over the border a little longingly, nostalgic for the generosity and hospitality of the Islamic world. Thankfully, the in-laws left elated if utterly bemused, though Somerset-Wiltshire rivalries can be pretty fierce, home must have felt worlds away.

A typical Indian street complete with beautifully hand-painted shop signs

There's so so much more to write, there are temples of gold, mountains of green and cities of blue that paint the pages of my diary and jostle for space in jumbled memories. But I'm sure there's only so much you can take. We are finally done now with backpacking in Asia, feel we can take in no more and that the breeze is blowing us west. We're yearning to drink water from a tap (oh what luxury), sleep on sheets of discernible colour and use toilets that don't appear cleaner after I've shat in them.

Many of you may already know what our plans are for the coming months but if not you'll just have to wait for the next entry. We fly forth to the city which funded so much Silk Road trade and scattered ruins over many of the lands we have crossed. Perhaps then, a return to the source, from where our own civilisation once sprung...

On the way home from school on the back of a cycle rickshaw

The Golden Temple in Amritsar. I haven't mentioned this in the text but will allow picture to speak for itself.

Into the Clouds

2012-08-16T00:37:00.000-07:00

A 1,200-year-old Dhankar, Spiti Valley

How is it that we found ourselves in the heart of a cloud, running barefoot along a track of wet mud? Everything was misty white except for the five metres of muddy road ahead, but we knew, somewhere, further up the mountainside, our vehicle awaited us.

We were attempting to cross the Rohtang Pass and had found a lift with a local driver and his wife. We had been crawling up the road for hours and, at a particularly muddy patch, had had to get out to lighten the load. We eventually found our van, the wife, who had also had to pick her way through the mud and cloud, had somehow arrived minutes before us, despite her advanced age and the fact that she was suffering from typhoid. We lowland folk are simply not built for such altitude (the road we were on would cross a pass nearly as high as Europe's highest peak.) Because of the mist and rain and the quagmired roads, what should have been a three-hour journey took us ten. When we eventually reached the summit we watched Indian tourists in hired fur coats taking bleak pictures of each other in the mist. We warmed ourselves in a chai shop constructed from stone and canvas. With the chaiwallah hunched over the flame and the mist drifting smoke-like under the low canopy, we could have been in another time, another world. The following days would be equally unworldly but the roads to be taken would make the Rohtang Pass seem like a Sunday drive.

This was our 'road'. The men are reorganising the boulders so our bus could cross this rather watery stretch.

We were headed for the Spiti Valley in the State of Himachal Pradesh, a place more Tibetan than Indian, where arid landscapes hide thousand-year-old monasteries in their craggy contours. For the next stretch of the journey, we had seats at the back of a rickety local bus. Bundles, limbs, and crinkly old ladies pressed from all sides as we began the ascent of a craggy mountain pass. The road was unsurfaced and narrow and the bus swung the hairpins at a rattling speed, at times we were hurled half a foot out of our seats. As we took the bends, the rear of the bus left the road and, looking down, we could see nothing but a sickening drop to the rocks below. There was no mist here, nothing to mask the certain death one envisioned at every downward glance (or the occasional wrecked car many fathoms beneath). After a few hours, we reached the top of the next pass where Buddhist prayer flags streamed around a stupa and we climbed down to calm our nerves, ease our cramped limbs and rub colour back into our whitened knuckles. Above, jagged 6000m peaks were plated with vast glaciers, and hung with strings of meltwater that fell glittering down to the valley floor.

We fell in with a group of fellow travellers, Israelis trailing dreadlocks and crochet wool, a Spaniard on the run from his travel buddies, a profoundly deaf French writer, a German-Mexican on a Buddhist pilgrimage. We were all brought together by the narrow valley of snow peaks and scree, and continued the journey as a motley crew. At Ki, we saw an ancient monastery piled up on top of a hill and enjoyed a chai in its darkened interior. Many of the monks had been there since their mid-teens and would spend the remainder of their days amongst hypnotic chants and curling incense smoke, gazing out at the wheeling eagles, the icy peaks and the pink-faced foreigners huffing it up the hill.

In the winter, the valley is completely inaccessible and the roofs of the whitewashed houses were already being piled high with firewood and straw for the animals. It must be a bleak existence for many and the alcohol on the breaths of many locals seemed to testify to this. The most difficult section of the journey involved walking up to a mountain lake. We were over 4200m above sea-level and entering a strange zone of airlessness. The sun was so strong that our skins were glowing pink in minutes, the air so absent that we had to stop every twenty metres to gasp back our breath. Others complained of headaches or rapid heart rates. It is a truly inhuman environment. Still, we reached the top and me and the Spaniard, let's call him Alan (for that is indeed his name), ran and jumped into the lake. We'd forgotten that such excessive activity wasn't wise at such altitude and were soon gasping and spluttering. Once we stopped however, the sound drained from the landscape and nothing, bar the faint rustle of water, could be heard, just blissful silence. The one advantage of walking at altitude is that it doesn't seem to effect me as much as it does others, so, for a short but glorious time, I appear to be the fittest man around. It's a shame we had not brought a football, for once I may not have been last to be picked (even with the absence of one-legged Graham from school).

* Note: One-legged Graham does actually exist- one glorious sports day, I even managed to beat him into fifth place in the 100m.

Anyway, I appear to be wittering on and on. In short, Spiti was quite wonderful and I shall not forget those soaring landscapes, atmospheric monasteries and thrill-ride buses. It was certainly a highlight of our increasingly epic journey.

A rather beautiful Hindu temple in Sarahan - you can see the influence of nearby Tibet

We slowly worked our way south, greenery rushing up the valleys to meet us, while the monsoon once again darkened our skies. In this soggy atmosphere of mist and rain we eventually reached the city of Shimla. Shimla was built by the British as their summer capital, nestled on a ridge that enjoys a similar climate to our own damp isle. The architecture gazes dreamily back to a romanticised Britain, half-timbered cottages still clinging to the idealised notion of the motherland, churches with the illusion that they are in Bury-St-Edmunds rather than clinging to a Himalayan foothill surrounded by monkeys and turbaned Punjabis. We visited the wonderful little Gaiety Theatre, the boards of which were once trodden by a young Rudyard Kipling and Lord Baden-Powell. Again, we got the sense that modern Indian history is also our history. Oddly enough, most Indians talk with some affection for the days of the Britishers and feel it was positive time no matter how much we try to convince them otherwise.

Well, I think you've been reading for quite long enough now and, for the moment, will leave you in that strange corner of the British Empire, watching the church spires and scout huts disappear into the mist.

Nako, a typical Spiti village

From the Mother River

2012-07-31T05:52:00.000-07:00

Two furry hands groped under our door as another light fitting was smashed and another chair crashed to the ground outside. We were being held hostage in our room by a troupe of rather aggressive macaques. The veranda outside was a chaos of upturned furniture and shrieking monkey. Had we been able to step outside we could have overlooked the mighty Ganges, watched the pilgrims descending the ancient stone steps to take the holy waters. Slightly downstream, swarms of orange clad worshippers were making their way to the mother river, water containers dangling from gaudily decorated shoulder poles. They chanted and shouted, jostling past each other, unable to wait for their first touch, their first taste of this watery goddess. Considering the water is the depository for the nearby burning ghats (where human bodies are burnt before the remains are cleansed by the river), not to mention the destination for much of the city's sewage, we decided bathing in, let alone drinking, the water would not be wise. This didn't stop another army of pious germs flooding pilgrim-like into my weak and unsuspecting foreign gut. Though the monkeys had let us live, my poor culture-shocked tummy left me contained once more in our room. I lay there, guts and fan churning, and dreamt of cool mountain climes.

As always, Varanasi had slapped us in the face (and delivered a further blow to the stomach). It is a city where every journey to he shop involves pushing along tiny alleys, past vast Brahmin cows, harrying pilgrims and scabby dogs. As well as these obstacles, you also have to keep your eyes to the ground for it is slalom of cow shit, litter and scrawny puppies. The puppies in particular often blocked quick progress as Nic had to stop and stare adoringly at every one. Day by day, the heat brewed until it had exceeded 40 degrees (I'm not sure what that is in Fahrenheit but it's really about time you joined the metric age) and monsoon clouds boiled above the river. We needed to get out, we needed fresh air (and fluffier, less scabby puppies).

We took a train to Delhi, chatting all evening to the others in the carriage, dropping off to sleep to the rhythms of the train and awaking to the melodies of the chai-wallahs and snack men. We weren't in Delhi to see Delhi (we hav been many times before) but to take a bus north. The night was spent on a bus that twisted up and up into the Himalayan foothills, emerging into the Kullu valley as the sun rose behind the clouds that drifted endlessly down from green mountain slopes. The smell of pine and cannabis (it grows like nettles by the side of the road) drifted through the bus and expelled the fetid stuffiness of the plains from our lungs.

We are staying near Manali in a village of slate-roofed timber houses and slapdash concrete guesthouses. From our room we can see the opposite slopes of this vast green valley and, when the cloud momentarily slips from the summits, the snow-dusted peaks beyond.

It's good to see India is still a gathering place for hippies, the traveller culture here has barely changed since the Seventies. Travellers still arrive Millets-clad and emerge two days later in baggy pantaloons, salwar shirts and beads. Even the original hippies are still here in their folds of tanned skin and Hindu scarves, their long hair receding toward balding scalps. Jim Morrison still stares gormlessly from tie-dyed T-shirts, 'No Woman No Cry' still plays endlessly from sound systems as old as the hippies themselves.

So we sit here in our cool mountain hippiedom, watching the local women pick their way down the hillsides with baskets of fresh-picked apples and the local men bathe in the natural hot springs (as always during our travels, it seems the men have the better side of the deal). We travel next deeper into the heavenly heights to a place not even the mighty monsoon can reach. We're going back to a world of dust and goats and wrinkle-faced peasants. Over the mountains and into the great wastes beyond...

In the City of Joy

2012-07-16T00:31:00.000-07:00

As we left Calcutta airport by an aging Austin taxi, India wrapped its considerable arms around us. In this sweaty embrace, we breathed the familiar scents of frying food, incense, paan and sun-dried urine. The traffic and the city contracted and pressed around us so that every visible space contained anther life, another narrative. In that 45 minute journey, a thousand stories rolled by the window, stories of tragedy, joy and drama. Ragged men in grubby lungis pulled man-powered rickshaws laden with plump ladies, fat rolling from the gaps in their saris. The sides of the streets (for, in India, pavements are rare) were colonised by shelters of tarpaulin and stoves of battered tin, hot chai being brewed for the slow-wheeling masses. As we stopped at a traffic light (another rare thing), a child came to the window to beg, his clothes black, his skin grey, his eyes deadened from glue-sniffing. In all likelihood a Fagin-like beggarmaster would be watching his young charge, waiting for his pockets to be filled. In many respects Calcutta is remarkably like Dicken's London. But such tragic views are soon obscured by a joyously hand-painted truck, gods and goddesses in garish colours, garlands of plastic flowers around the windscreens. 'India is Great!' proclaim inscriptions on the trucks, or 'Horn Please!' (this because many vehicles lack wing mirrors and subsequently any knowledge of what is behind them). In compliance, the roads are filled with the sound of honking, screeching horns that clash with the Bollywood music and holy songs that crack and spit from distorted speakers. Monsoon-ravaged colonial buildings sprout foliage and cracked plaster, like once-elegant 1920s dames that have lost their marbles in old age. Roots wrap window frames in an echo of Angkor Wat but here there are still faces behind the glass.

Too tired to search for a decent room, we took a darkened hole with peeling paint and a fan held up with newspaper and parcel tape. Pressing our faces to filth-smudged pillows, we drifted off to the beautiful music of a nearby prayer session.

All of this may sound somewhat hellish and, in many ways, it is, but it is also so alive, so full of hope and joy. It's as if you can witness the full spectrum of human experience in a few steps down the street. It had been six years since last we were here and twelve since we first arrived as wide-eyed teenagers and we were now delighted that our own narrative had finally rejoined this great ocean of tales. In a strange way, it felt like we were home.

We took refuge from the teeming, reeking streets in an old British Museum. Many rooms had barely changed since Victorian times, glass topped cabinets of rocks and fossils gathering dust, eight-legged goat fetuses in jars, slowly decaying stuffed animals. If, like me, Victorian taxidermy is your bag, it's a fine day out. In Calcutta, you realise how permanent a fixture the British believed themselves to be, there are buildings grander than many of those in London, great bridges of iron, monuments to the distant, mythical monarchs. Despite our strict anti-colonialism, we couldn't help but feel some measure of sorrow at the sight of these buildings slowly crumbling, the rotting corpses of a vanquished empire. I'm not quite sure what is happening to me, in Bangkok we had somehow ended up waving flags at the passing King in a gaggle of fawning grannies, and here I was in Calcutta shedding tears for our once 'glorious' Britain.

With the car horns still echoing in our ears we left Calcutta by sleeper train, the city sliding, no, juddering, by. We settled onto our grotty bunks and enjoyed the night air that filtered in through the glassless windows. Our train was due in to Gaya (the sight of Buddha's enlightenment) at 5:30am but at midnight they announced that the train was being re-routed and was going nowhere near our destination. We were suddenly headed instead to a city which we were almost hesitant to go back to, a city so intense it was like no other in the world. Allowing ourselves to be swept up by the twin powers of fate and poor time-tabling, we shrugged and returned to our bunks. Lying in my juddering bunk, a grin spread across my face, we were back in good old India, riding the rails to the holy city of Varanasi.

Another Road Ends

2012-07-06T04:39:00.001-07:00

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this vagrant life is that we can change our immediate fate in a matter of seconds. Discussing the next few weeks in a restaurant in Siam Reap, we realised that we had had enough of Southeast Asia and that another land was calling to us from across the Bay of Bengal. It was already our plan to return to dear old India but, following this discussion, we were practically running to an internet cafe to advance our tickets. Within two days we were on a bus to Bangkok which is where we are now, waiting for our Sunday flight. Unfortunately, this means our overland journey is now over (it is not possible to travel to India through Myanmar) but we certainly haven't done badly, London to Bangkok without flying. In a sudden and highly uncharacteristic spate of mathematics l have reduced our grand journey to the following meaningless statistics.

22,000km travelled
189 days on the road
20 countries passed through
68 places slept in
54 buses ridden
12 cars
9 trains
3 boats
3 trucks
6 diaries filled with rambling nonsense
10 number systems learnt
3 alphabets mastered (almost, and one of them is our own)
3rd trip of a lifetime

So that about wraps it up. You may be wondering why we are returning to India for the third time but I hope my next post will serve as some sort of explanation...

Of Lost Histories

2012-07-02T23:21:00.002-07:00

Bayon Temple, Angkor Thom, Cambodia. There are 216 such heads in this one temple.The woman on the left gives a sense of the scale.

Until the events of the last few days, we had been vaguely regretting the decision to come to Southeast Asia. We hadn't felt properly challenged, hadn't felt that 'I can't believe we're here' feeling that we find essential to our way of travelling. The temples of Angkor in western Cambodia have gone a long way to set that right.

You are probably familiar with images of Angkor Wat, the vast Hindu temple with its iconic three-domed silhouette, but Angkor Wat is just one of the many glories to be found near the city of Siem Reap. This was once the capital of a mighty empire, a city of a million people at a time when London had less than fifty thousand. An empire that, after overstretching itself into extinction, was swallowed up by the jungle. The temples of Angkor cover a huge area and, in the last two days, we have cycled fifty-odd kilometres visiting the various lichen-stained temples, monasteries and Buddhas. We've cycled down puddle-ridden lanes to discover walls and archways entangled in the jungle and clambered up crumbling pyramids to survey the stupas rising from the trees. In places, vast roots have ensnared the masonry like giant octopi, wrapping their thick tentacles around doorways and weather-worn carvings. We cycled through the monsoon rains and sheltered in ancient shrines that smelt of bats and incense or watched the brief washes of sun send giant serene Buddha faces into relief. It was utterly beautiful and made all our days of dissatisfaction melt in to meaninglessness. These are the kind of things you travel so many thousands of miles to see.

Preah Khan, Angkor

[My recent spate of tourist-bashing isn't quite over yet though. One middle-aged American was trying to frame a temple with his massively over-sized lens but couldn't quite cut out the poor grubby kids who were trying to peddle postcards and bracelets 'It's okay,' he said to his partner 'I can Photoshop the little sh*ts out later.' ]

Before arriving in Siem Reap, we'd spent a rather lovely week on the beach. I won't go into the details because talk of huts and beaches and glittering seas will bore you and quite possibly make you want to hurt me. The most story-worthy event of the week was when we signed up for a boat/snorkeling trip to some islands. We were both terribly excited until Nic remembered that she hated both fish and boats. Instead of gliding smoothly over turquoise waters as I had imagined, the boat heaved over a choppy sea and we got thoroughly soaked by a sudden rainstorm. We then stopped to snorkel but there was barely a fish to be seen, the masks leaked and I cut my foot by accidentally kicking a stack of corral (perhaps also contributing to the slow death of a delicate ecosystem). It wasn't the best day of our trip and, with Nic swearing never to set foot on a boat again, we headed back to our beach hut to spend the remainder of the week doing bugger all. And a mighty fine bugger all it was too.

Nic thoroughly enjoys her day out.

Continuing this strange, reverse narrative, we now travel back in time and space to Phnom Penh. Cambodia’s capital is a massive grid of monsoon-stained concrete and fish-stinking markets, ravaged by wave after wave of tuk-tuks and scooters. When I remember it now I think of suicidal dashes across liquid traffic while breathing the smog of a thousand two-stroke engines. There are many phrases with which I could describe Phnom Penh most of them involving the word ‘hole’.

Phnom Penh

However, Phnom Penh was also a serious, if hugely upsetting education. Just outside the city were the Killing Fields. It was here that the brutal Khmer Rouge regime murdered nearly 20,000 men, women and children. This of course was only a fraction of those murdered across the country between 1975 and 1979 (it has been estimated that 25% of Cambodians perished as a direct result of the regime’s actions). Among the victims were people who had been killed simply for ‘looking intelligent’, babies and children slaughtered because their father was a ‘dissident’ or simply a personal enemy of an officer. Because of the recent rains, the topsoil on the open graves had partly washed away to reveal fragments of bone and scraps of clothing. Looking around the warm, smiling faces of Cambodia today, it’s shocking to think that anyone over the age of 35 must have either been a victim or a perpetrator. It feels like Cambodia is in a similar place to post-Nazi Germany, wanting to know how it was that Cambodians came to murder Cambodians but unable to look the painfully recent truth straight in the eye. This is perhaps why they so often look back with pride to the glories of a thousand years ago and why everything from the money to national beer is emblazoned with a glorious image of Angkor Wat, hoping that their pride in the ancients can eclipse their more recent shame.

S21, Phnom Penh. This was the prison/torture facility from where people were sent to the Killing Fields.

Escape to the Four Thousand Islands

2012-06-24T23:54:00.001-07:00

We were squeezed in between the tanned and tattooed shoulders of Lynx-scented Europeans. One of them had a half-drunk bottle of Johnnie Walker in his lap and was slurring his words. 'Nice breakfast' sniggered his mate who was sporting a particularly offensive pair of luminous pink shorts. It was 8am and we had made the foolish and lazy mistake of taking the tourist minibus instead of the usual local bus. As we pulled away, Nic looked like she was chewing on something rotten 'there was a girl outside our hostel' she said, mouth twisted in disgust 'smoking with one hand and shaving her legs with the other.''
As the minibus continued its southern trajectory, the drunk lad was muttering something about dolphins in one ear while Nic was busy recounting her shock in the other.

When we finally came to a stop, Nic and I leapt out and practically ran to escape the others, scampering through a small market thick with the smell of fermenting fish and down to the swirling waters of the Mekong. Turning to check the progress of our drunken pursuers, we fled toward a small wooden jetty. From here, boats left for the islands that lay a kilometre from the shore. We bought our tickets but the others were fast approaching, the drunk one was burping notes into a didgeridoo, the one with the offensive shorts had doffed an equally offensive headband. Run. They were nearly on us when a man waved us onto a boat and we were slipping away, the mud brown waters sealing us off from the shore. I looked back to see the jetty receding into a landscape of greens and browns, the only other colour was provided by a shrinking pair of luminous pink shorts.

We were approaching Four Thousand Islands, a place where the Mekong spreads its limbs wide, encircling a cluster of palm-fringed islands. Wooden canoes drifted past on the current and a thousand butterflies flickered in the undergrowth that seemed to sprout from the river's surface. The boat hit the muddy bank near a monsoon-faded old bridge. We disembarked and walked past stilted wooden huts and a rotting French school, the last evidence of a colonial past that was being slowly digested by the jungle. We found a cabin by the river and swung in our hammocks, watching scooters putter over the bridge and boats putter beneath it. Amongst these various putterings and flutterings we were lulled into a pleasant stupor and the days, like the great river itself, rolled languidly by.

We had enjoyed Laos but were pleased to be leaving for Cambodia. We crossed the border and followed the Mekong on its journey south. We stopped at the town of Kratie where we took a boat out to see the endangered Irrawaddy River dolphins. We sat watching the water, drifting between islets of half-submerged grass and were soon rewarded. Dolphins broke the surface all around. Even Nic, who has a deep resentment for dolphins because of their 'smug attitude', claimed it to a beautiful experience.

I'm actually way behind with this blog as we're now staring at lovely blue sea and swimming has become a more pressing matter than blogging. I shall endeavour to catch up in the next few days, selflessly sacrificing my beach time for your entertainment. It seems I have become the dolphin of Nic's hatred, a smug face grinning inanely from the waves.

Foreign Devils of the Mekong

2012-06-09T06:54:00.001-07:00

Foreign Devils of the Mekong

It seems I have created great confusion with my last post. One road may have ended but we're not quite done yet. But gone is the dust! Gone are the barren plains! For, dear reader, we are now in a world of lush vegetation and unimaginable humidity, watching the monsoon skies explode above our heads.

This new chapter of our trip began on a train in China, a train that headed ever south into stifling valleys of palm and bamboo. This verdant corridor would break now and again to reveal glinting paddies full of coolie-hatted peasants planting rice. [If anyone has less colonial name for the 'coolie' hat, do let me know.] We found ourselves in the southern Chinese town of Jinghong where a diverse population includes Han, Thai and Burmese peoples. Dipping our feet in the Mekong, which was stained luminous colours by the neon of the karaoke bars, we watched the great river flow ever southwards. We took a bus to the border with Laos and crossed into this sleepy little republic. Laos is a place where the people seem to wilt like bamboo, one often has to wake them in order to buy a bus ticket or a bottle of water. Even the name, Laos, is pronounced with an almost feline listlessness.

After a few days, we were standing by the Mekong once more, hoping for a passenger boat to materialise on the lazy brown waters. A morning mist lay on the green hills of the Burmese shore, rain fell on the rattan cabin in which we'd slept. The cabin was a wonderfully authentic affair of rusting fans and mosquito netting. The wooden shutters
would open to a world of green and rain and a wall of sound, raindrops drumming on palm fronds, crickets and cicadas trilling like a thousand tiny machines. As we waited for a boat that would never come, we watched local tribal women hauling sacks of potatoes up the muddy banks from dugout canoes. They wore fantastic headdresses dripping with silver medallions and many were naked from the waist up.

When we finally understood that a boat wasn't going to come, we back-tracked through lanes of stilted rattan houses and wet-nosed water buffalo before catching a bus to Luang Prabang. Our guesthouse there displayed a list of rules from the local police office warning us of potential criminal activities. To my great disappointment, we were not allowed to 'bring drugs, crambling or bringing both women and men which is not your own husband or wife into the room for making love.' This I could just about handle, but the next rule dealt a serious blow to our entertainment plans. We were not allowed to 'bring prostate or others into your accomodation to make sex movies'. I wasn't entirely sure how to prevent my prostate from entering the room without a serious operation but we did put our porn movie plans on ice.

Somehow we managed to enjoy Luang Prabang without resorting to such deviance, relying instead on massages, ornate temples and Lao coffee to keep us entertained. The strange thing in Laos is that a thousand other backpackers have already walked the puddle-ridden streets we now look upon. Laos suffers from a spill-over of fun seeking backpackers from nearby Thailand. People that wear vests sporting the names of their last destination, people that flock to the infamous Vang Vieng to party all day and watch episodes of Friends while smoking opium (I'm not sure which is more mind-rotting). There was a Guardian article recently detailing the madness in Vang Vieng which explained how 26 travellers have died there in the past year after taking drunken dives into the river. The locals are now afraid of the waters, scared that they are cursed with evil spirits. Just idiotic foreign devils. We ended up in a bar in Luang Prabang that was filled with western revellers. Appalling commercial R'n'B pumped out as muscle-bound Aussies played volleyball and fluff-faced backpackers did shots. It felt like a party scene from an American teen movie. Perhaps, we thought, Laos is not the place for us.

Lao culture is already in great danger from its powerful neighbours. China is spreading south with neo-colonialist tendencies, stripping the hills of timber as they pass, Thailand and Vietnam are squeezing in from the flanks. And perhaps we are no better. Though I believe that independent travel (if done sensitively) can be a force for good, in Laos it is bringing the very worst parts of our culture to a little developed country. Sometimes we don't feel like we're even in Laos, just a playground for stoned and drunken westerners. Buddhist monks crossing paths with girls in bikini tops.

While travelling the Silk Road it felt like we had purpose (however illusionary that may have been) and were learning and, to a lesser extent, teaching as we went along. We were never really treated as tourists, simply foreign guests. We now feel like we've fallen into a world of meaningless travel, a world where the backpackers are simply on extended beach holidays. I am possibly being a little superior here (imagine!) and perhaps we cannot so easily separate ourselves from them. However, it doesn't really seem right here and so we're heading southward toward Cambodia. Apparently it's not been entirely colonised by f**kwits just yet. Unless, of course, you count the Khmer Rouge. On that rather tasteless note, I shall bid you farewell and hope that I won't resort to more whinging in the next exciting post...

Into the Desert of Death

2012-05-13T00:31:00.001-07:00

We arrived in China with dust between our rattling teeth. Due to the roads of uneven rubble and our Chinese truck's complete lack of meaningful suspension, we had to cling to the bundles around us to avoid being thrown out of our seats. The greenery of Kyrgyzstan had dissolved to leave barren red mountains and clouds of dust so thick you could see it wafting through the windows like smoke. We were entering the great Taklamakan desert, the most deadly stretch of the old Silk Road. Some believe Taklamakan simply means 'once you go in, you never come out' others have referred to it as The Desert of Death. The Desert of Considerable, if not Fatal, Discomfort might be a more apt title today. Alongside the 'road', wind-blown construction workers slept in bleak encampments, trying to lay a 21st Century highway in this ageless wilderness. For the moment, the wilds appeared to be winning.

After five hours of this truck-based torture, a Chinese terminal building emerged from the murk surrounded in Disneyland streetlights. 'Welcome to China!' cried a uniformed guard. In customs there were informative signs in Chinese and Arabic characters but, beneath this, the thoughtful English translation simply read 'Times New Roman'.

Kashgar, our first stop in China, is a predominantly Uighur city. The Uighurs are a Turkic, Islamic people who have found themselves, largely unhappily, under Chinese rule. The people are far closer in appearance to Uzbeks than to Chinese and the language is a close cousin of Turkish. Interestingly, Iran aside, we've been using the same words for numbers ever since arriving in Istanbul. Who said foreigners weren't all the same?

The streets of old Kashgar hummed with life, skull caps and wispy beards decorated the wizened faces that gathered around the market stalls as hawkers sold herbal aphrodisiacs, bear fat skin ointment and a yellow juice that came from a weird stew of scorpions, snakes and hedgehogs. Bewhiskered men spilt from the Friday mosque and ate bread hot from the street tandoors or bundled their veiled wives and kids onto their scooters, puttering off into lanes of mud and smoke. Most of the surrounding buildings were in a state of ruin, bulldozed to make way for Modern China. Gaudy new malls sat like abandoned spacecraft amongst the rubble, sending neon messages back to the mothership in Beijing. Here, Han Chinese (the predominant ethnic group in China) shopped for fashions and face creams and there was barely a Uighur in sight. Over-loud sound systems blared the latest pappy Chinese pop but failed to drown out the honking cars and the Mandarin being barked on every street corner. Though muted by the ever-present dust, the Han buildings had their own volume, assaulting the eyes with their acid-trip technicolor. We were saddened by such Han imperialism, but largely delighted, after months in the Muslim world, to be in the brash, noisy silliness of China.

On the outskirts of Kashgar sits the near-legendary animal market. We rode out there on the back of a kind of motorbike trailer. Other visitors were taking the same method, stupid looking sheep and angry looking bulls eyeing us warily. The market was a mass of hoof and dust, the air filled with a lowing and braying and whinnying that mingled with the cries of the traders as animals were led off to new homes (or perhaps new pots), horses were test-driven and fat-tailed sheep's fleshy rumps were fondled for maximum fat. Though Nic had her eye on some pathetic-looking donkey or other we managed to leave empty-handed.

One of the true highlights of Kashgar was the people we met. Having spent months travelling less-travelled roads, it was lovely to meet a hostel-full of fellow backpackers. It is remarkable how quickly strong friendships can form and we spent a happy week eating, sleeping (in dorms, you understand and generally in separate bunks) and living with a wonderful group of people. Sadly but inevitably, these relationships are always wrenched apart by the pull of the road and soon our group was scattered to the sands and to the mountains.

We headed east along the northern Silk Road, spending 24 hours on a train that smelt of stale cigarettes and instant noodles. Despite an almost unassailable language barrier we had soon made friends with our fellow passengers and even, after a few hours' struggle, managed to ascertain their names. Outside, the desert was bleak and forbidding and barely a non-humped soul stirred. We finally arrived in Turpan, a hot, dusty (apologies for my constant references to dust, it's just so, well, dusty) town that sits in the second lowest depression in the world! I was quite excited by this fact before we arrived but then realised that there's not much to be said for being low. It's just hot. And dusty.

We cycled out into the countryside (read: dusty plain) and waved at the cheerful locals who called out 'hello!' I like to think they thought we looked like nice sorts and were seeking to form some cross-cultural relationships but fear they may have been saying 'look there's a hairy freak on a bike, let's wave and see what it does!' The hairy freak and his spaniel-eared companion dutifully waved back. Anyway, this is all rather tangental. We reached a ruined city that had been half-consumed by the desert, ate a picnic in a 5th century Buddhist temple and returned to catch a night bus to the Silk Road hub of Dunhuang.

The bunks on the bus were two feet too short for me but even with my knees round my ears, I still managed to enjoy the moonlit desertscapes and fell asleep watching the glowing cigarette ends of insomniac passengers. In Dunhuang we slept in a cabin that sat in the shadow of a vast range of perfect sand dunes and were awoken by the cries of goat kids and the papery flap of the birds that darted from the eaves. Nearby was one of the 'sights' we've been looking forward to since London, the Thousand Buddha Caves.

We were guided around by torchlight for each of the 700-odd caves contains exquisitely delicate wall paintings and sculptures dating back more than a thousand years. The artwork is a clear child of the Silk Road, where Persian, Central Asian and Indian styles mingle with the more local Tibetan and Chinese aesthetic. It was here that European archeologists first discovered the Silk Road's importance in spreading Buddhism to China. It was here also that the British explorer Aurel Stein ran off with thousands of priceless Buddhist scrolls some of which you can still see at the British Museum. 'You've seen them?' said our guide with great excitement. It is times like this when I realise how miraculously lucky we are to be able to see all these wonderful things. With the Buddhas left once more to their peaceful slumber, we set off toward the setting sun, nothing but a dull glow in a sea of dust.

In the Valley of Horses

2012-05-09T12:11:00.001-07:00

Firstly, can I apologise for the lack of photos. Once again, we're in a country where this blog site is banned (this is coming to you via my wee brother) so doing anything other than text is a bit complex. You'll have to just make do with the boring wordy bit...

After weeks of desert dust, leaving Uzbekistan by the verdant Fergana Valley was like jumping into the sea on a hot sticky day. Black smudges on the eastern horizon slowly thickened to become a rampart of mountains that marked the border with Kyrgyzstan. It was in Fergana that Central Asians were first met by Chinese travellers who had ventured into the unknown west to find the near mythical Fergana horse. The horses were rumoured to have wings and to breath fire, but the forlorn donkeys and scraggy old nags I saw gnawing on the fields didn't quite live up to expectations. It was this first meeting of east and west, however, that first began the exchange of goods and ideas that was to become the Silk Road.

*a short disclaimer: all history included in these blogs is based on stuff I've read and quite possibly misremembered over the last year or two so it could be complete rubbish. Let's just keep quiet about it and carry on...

We first stopped in Osh where the wounds of more recent history still lay unhealed. In 2010 Osh was the scene of serious ethnic violence and rioting (it seems Stalin sneezed while drawing the border and annexed thousands of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan). Trying to find differences between these groups other than language is difficult. The best we could come up with is that they wear different silly hats. Traditional Kyrgyz men wear tall felt hats that, along with shiny boots, big belts and beards, gives them an almost gnome-like appearance. In Osh, they pottered around the bazaar eyeing up bridles, horseshoes and shinier boots. The bazaar itself was patched together from rusty Chinese shipping containers and a few riot-damaged buildings. After the relative order of the more Sovietised Uzbekistan, we revelled in its filth and chaos.

We next took a string of minibuses into the mountains, squashing in between head-wrapped country women until forest draped the valleys and white peaks surfed the clouds. We stayed in a homestay in the amiable and amiably named village of Arslanbob. The bridge to our house had been washed away in the spring melt so we had to cross the gurgling water via a makeshift construction of old plastic pipes. Every house has a yard with chickens, a donkey or goat (both if you're lucky), fruit trees and an outdoor mud ovens. Last year's harvest is stored beneath the seating platform and truly fresh produce is rare, the seasons here still mean something (generally wooly apples and hairy potatoes).

From Arslanbob we hired horses and a guide and clopped through the dappled light of the world's largest walnut forest. My steed was not far from the Great Glue Factory in the Sky and wheezed along grumpily. I had visions of him collapsing beneath me with his legs splayed in all four directions. On the road we passed old 1950s Russian trucks carrying dozens of hoe-wielding locals on their way to the high pastures. Here they planted potato and corn, hacking with mattocks at the damp earth in the shadows of the mountains.

We rode up to a rocky promontory where I really felt my horse should have reared up on his hind legs so I could wave my Stetson in the air. Instead he decided to turn around and sullenly chew the grass behind us so that my back was turned to the glorious view of the valley, twinkling as it was with zinc roofs and a thousand meltwater streams.

After only a few days in Kyrgyzstan we discovered the border to China was about to close for ten days and that we would have to make a premature dash to the frontier. We took a shared taxi to the village of Sary Tash. Normally, you share taxis with other people but his one was partly shared by a hundred loaves of bread, some putrid smelling eggs and a bag of meat that kept dripping blood on the floor. Sary Tash was a town of collapsing outhouses and muddy yards churned up by peasant boots and mountain drizzle. For the first time since Albania, we slept more or less fully clothed in beds so saggy we were nearly folded in two.

Early the next morning we stood by the road stomping our feet and praying for the sun to rise. We were hoping to hitch a lift to the Chinese border but for a while all we saw we're a gormless cow and man having a poo in his yard. We didn't have to wait for too long before a Tajik truck stopped and we clambered into the cab. 'To China!' we cried (well, that's at least how I see it in my memory), climbing the passes into pristine snowfields that stung the eyes. After only half an hour, we had to join a queue of trucks that were attempting to cross a stretch of lethally bumpy ice. When some inevitably got stuck, I jumped off to relieve myself and, in a thoughtful bid to entertain the weary truckers, fell waist-deep into the snow. After a lot of waiting followed by a lot of juddering around painfully we cleared the ice and finally reached a border town of rusting caravans. Across the border lay China!

But that will have to wait for the next exciting installment! Did our intrepid explorers make it to China? Did Nic have a sudden bout of food poisoning? Had the Chinese border inexplicably moved 150km to the east? Find out next time...

The Road to Samarkand

2012-04-19T00:53:00.000-07:00

Khiva, Uzbekistan

After checking our passports, the Uzbek border guards checked our football preferences. Though we were unable to agree on the superiority of Manchester United we were waved cheerfully through. Before long we were hurtling away in an old Lada that seemed to be held together with parquet lino and gaffer tape.

As cracked roads and Soviet factories swept by in the dust, I asked whether life had been better under the USSR. 'Life good now!' replied our driver 'in USSR I was teacher, now I'm taxi driver!' I didn't entirely follow his logic. We spluttered to a stop at the old city of Khiva, one of a line of Uzbek oasis towns that serviced the old Silk Road. The city was a warren of honeycomb houses, mosques and azure tiled minarets. It isn’t really a living city, it is partly a theme park for overweight French and German tour groups. They roll out of coaches in a mass of overstretched pastel travel-wear and telephoto lenses, gawping like dying fish. We haven't seen any such tourism since Western Turkey and it was a bit of a shock. Still, as theme parks go, it was truly beautiful and seeing a silver moon over the silhouetted skyline removed the tacky modernity and allowed us to step back to those romantic Silk Road days. The good old days when they did romantic things like trading slaves and throwing criminals from minarets.

We changed money on the black market (you get nearly 30% more than in a bank) and were given thick, gangster bundles of notes. We have to carry it around in a bag.

Less than 100 pounds in Uzbek Som
On the way to Bukhara there were two roads, one half-destroyed by sand and potholes, the other only half built and strewn with huge barriers of concrete. Our taxi had to weave between the two over little beaten earth ramps. None of this stopped our driver from driving at 140kph whenever possible, or from deciding to moisturize his face with a little cotton pad in one hand and a bottle of cream in the other. It was up to his knees alone to steer round the potholes and through the narrow concrete gaps. Near-death flew by the window very five minutes. Seatbelts are slung over one shoulder for police checks but otherwise its considered weak to wear one ‘It’s against my soul!’ said one Uzbek.

Somehow we survived and made it to Bukhara. By this point in our journey we had seen enough mosques and madrassas to last a pious mullah's lifetime and possibly didn't fully appreciate the beauty of the architecture. It was fascinating though to see the bleeding of cultures traced in the stone. Persian tiling clashing with Tibetan woodwork, true Silk Road architecture. It was also lovely to see friends we had met in Iran and Uzbekistan, other Silk Roaders following the dream east, discussing roads to China while the domes turned from azure to gold in the dying sun.
Samarkand is largely a fairly drab Soviet city but it is also home to some pretty monumental architecture. It was the imperial capital of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame). Tamerlane controlled an empire that stretched from Pakistan (or thereabouts) to the Mediterranean. We've been hearing tales about him since arriving in Turkey. One described a foolish Anatolian ruler who said something along the lines of 'That Tamerlane's a pussy, I could slap him up no problem.' Hearing of this, Tamerlane had the ruler and his entire city slaughtered and beheaded, then demanded that a mountain be made of the heads. Unsatisfied with the height of the mountain, he had his men rebuild it with a bloody mud mortar until it satisfied his crazed desire. In short, he was a bit of a twat. He did, however, commission some amazing buildings, huge constructions of glorious blue and green tile work, gold ceilings and towering minarets. Even to our mosque-numbed minds, it was quite stunning.

A Samarkand interior

Another train took us to the Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital. It was almost a relief to find there were no historical monuments to see, just Soviet boulevards cooled by chlorophyll-green trees and a few monumental, yet tacky, buildings of white marble. Though there’s nothing much to truly inspire here, we’ve enjoyed walking around the spray of the sprinklers and the smoke of the street side shaslyk. The main reason we came to Tashkent was to see Nic’s ex-student Maruf. Maruf smothered us with the full power of Uzbek hospitality. He paid for our hotel and our food and drove us everywhere. We ate with his family, devout Muslims in a country where secularism often overrides (it is more common to see women in tight-fitting skirts and fishnets than in headscarves). The family plied us with food and gifts and I am now the proud owner of a rather fetching purple wedding gown. I even ended up wowing Maruf’s PVC firm at their weekly football match. My giraffe-like finesse had them revising their high regard for English football.

Nic shows Maruf's family our wedding photos

The main stress during trip has been obtaining visas. In order to follow our journey we have had to acquire letters of invitation, flight details, hotel bookings and employer references. Naturally we have had none of these so have become rather expert in forging such documents. Amazingly, in the last couple of days, we have acquired all the visas we need to complete our Silk Road journey and are now free to pass through Kyrgyzstan (I don’t think even the Kyrgyz know where that is) to China. With the hot Spring sun now warming our backs we travel onwards to the mountains with the distant scents of the Far East just beginning to tingle our noses.

Outside Tashkent

Slow-dancing in Central Asia

2012-04-09T00:09:00.000-07:00

We left Iran via a range of craggy mountains littered here and there with the rusting carcasses of crashed lorries. As we descended onto the flat desert scrub of Turkmenistan, we caught our first glimpse of one of the most extraordinary cities in the world, a cluster of white towers shimmering in the dust. As we approached the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat we saw women, beautiful women with flowing hair and tight-fitting dresses. After Iran, this was most shocking, the brazen hussies! Nic let her headscarf drop and we gawped at the dresses and head wraps in a clash of gaudy colours and were so relieved to see women being allowed to be women again (albeit women who made their clothes from 70s curtain fabric). But the women could not keep our gaze for long, Ashgabat was upon us.

Turkmenistan has been described as Central Asia's North Korea, a totalitarian system has been in place since independence from the USSR and tourists are only allowed to visit if accompanied by government minder. We were given a three day transit visa and were not really meant to see anything on the way. Amazingly, those three days turned into one of the highlights of the trip.

Turkmenbashi was the president of Turkmenistan from independence to 2006 when he died. Modern Ashgabat was his own little vanity project and his portrait still hangs in squares and on government buildings. Unlike sour-faced dictators like Mao or Lenin, Turkmenbashi is pictured in smiling catalogue poses, running through the mountains in a tracksuit or admiring an unseen view. Sadly, the gold statue that used to rotate with the sun has now been removed. What remains is a pristine city of gleaming white marble, vast municipal buildings and two-storey high TV screens showing the glories of Turkmenistan. An army of workers prune the manicured gardens, polish the gleaming chrome traffic lights and sweep the unsightly dust from the vast empty squares. It is illegal to have a dirty car so every vehicle, like every building, sparkles in the sun, reflecting the thousand bubbling fountains. Despite being a madman's theme park, the city somehow worked and we walked around with grins of disbelief on our faces.

The first three hotels we tried would not accept foreign tourists so we ended up in an ex-Soviet block governed by bulldog-faced babushkas. It was all peeling 1950s wallpaper, scuffed carpets and infinite faux laminate corridors. The people reacted to us shyly, it was clearly not normal to have a pair of unwashed outsiders dirtying the place up. The people in Central Asian sometimes look Mongol, sometimes Russian, often a mix of the myriad peoples that have swept across these lands.

The next day we managed to charter a taxi to the northern town of Konye Urgench. We had been physically pulled five different ways by eager taxi drivers and ended up with the one who pulled hardest. Our man was a member of that universal tribe, the Boy Racer. We tore out of town to ear-rupturing hip hop and the false modernity of Ashgabat soon gave way to scrubby desert. Yurts and camels appeared among the dunes as the road grew worse and the tunes got cranked up further. At times we were driving at a near 30 degree angle. Next the road were the broken bodies of rolled cars that had spotted the potholes too late. This was one of three major roads in the country and its destitution highlighted the absurdity of Ashgabat's 'perfection'. Bizarrely, in the middle of the desert, stood one solitary section of a modern flyover complete with lampposts and tarmac, going nowhere.

We finally arrived in Konye Urgench, a city once sacked by both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane but now is just a few ruins amongst dusty lanes and humble concrete houses. A 60m minaret built in the 14th century still survives, looking out toward the horizon for the ghosts of the Mongol horde.

After such a long and eventful day we retired to our 'hotel' 'bar' amongst golden swags and pink lacy alcoves . We were just enjoying a nice cold beer (after 7 weeks, even Berk tastes good) when the door burst open and a wedding party danced in trailing a glum looking bride in a cloud of white nylon. Before long we had downed a glass of port and found ourselves slow-dancing to some dreadful Turkmen pop. As the Euro-house blared on and the men got increasingly sweaty, Nic pointed out that we hadn't even managed to slow dance at our own wedding and now here we were, in a cheap roadside motel in Central Asia, drunk on port and Berk, dancing in a mass of vodka-crazed Turkmen.

It was quite some transit.

Whisky Good!

2012-03-31T05:14:00.000-07:00

Our time in Iran is nearly up. The last week was spent in Tehran where a line of white mountains give false hope to the concrete-dwellers down below. Tehran is a vast grid of flyovers, cables and propagandist murals. The former US Embassy is rather tastefully daubed with images of a sick and dying West, the British Embassy still stands silent. These symbols do not however reflect the opinions of the people we have met.

We were walking through Tehran with Freddy, an Iranian friend of ours when he spotted the police up ahead. Freddy, unlike most Iranians, sported sideburns, long hair and a rock T-shirt. As we approached the police he quickly and subtly removed his earring. I asked if they would they take the earring if they saw it, 'No' he said 'they'd take me.' He wasn't joking, friends of his had been arrested for less. One friend, a black-clad drummer with a mane of curly hair, had been arrested for little more than being with his girlfriend and for being a 'satanist' i.e. having long hair. He faced a 6 month jail sentence but was lucky enough to have an uncle in the police. It is these small things rather than grand ideals such as democracy that often get people most riled. Before democracy, before freedom of speech, people want personal freedom, alcohol and sex (or at least the right to hold hands with their girlfriend).

Amongst the hundreds of people we have met in Iran only two have had good words to say about the government, one was in his early teens, the other a touch unhinged. The rest have attacked the regime with unchecked vitriol and not just the regime, but Islam itself. Of course most of the people that speak to us do not represent all of Iran, they are the educated, the open-minded, but there are many such people. A majority say they to want to leave Iran, ask us how they can get to England.

Plenty of things happen behind closed doors though. Freddy (he has rejected his Islamic name) and friends meet in a smoky cafe in Tehran, images of revolution and rock musicians on the wall. Here men and women with tattoos, piercings and dangerous thoughts smoke and talk. I was surprised then, to hear that they were playing inoffensive soundtrack music and soft jazz, 'We can't play vocal music' they explained 'they [the authorities] think it's satanist'. Elsewhere, one middle-aged man excitedly invited us to his hotel room where he proudly got out a bottle of homemade vodka and huge bag of weed. 'Whisky, good!' is a common refrain. Another man told me about his underground club who meet once a week to discuss Pink Floyd lyrics. It is unbelievable that such a thing has to be underground and perhaps equally unbelievable that anyone can make sense of Pink Floyd lyrics.

Every time someone starts government-bashing (and this is very often) I ask what can be done, how it will change, but the answers are always pessimistic. There is no hope, they say, we just want to leave. Some blame the Islamic Revolution in 1979, some blame the coming of the Arabs, the coming of Islam. It is so very sad. I have never known a country with so little hope, a country with such a broken heart.
The people here have been so unbelievably kind and hospitable I can't even begin to describe it, but being in Iran has been a sobering experience, a saddening experience. Perhaps what has made it so difficult is the fact that it is so easy to relate to the Iranians we've met because, like many of us, they are educated, worldly, modern people but they are trapped in a medieval prison. I don't want to put any of you off visiting, it is a wonderful place for a holiday and a place where hospitality and generosity take on new meanings. In the last few days we were given chocolates and a miraculously fast visa extension by an army colonel, given a free meal in a restaurant because we were 'guests' and a free lift to our homestay by a helpful passer-by. Miraculous acts of kindness by strangers have become the norm for us.

We've now nearly untangled the bureaucratic nightmare that is Central Asian visas (the Uzbek Embassy didn't even stock application forms) and will soon leave for the liberal paradise of Turkmenistan (well at least it's one place ahead of North Korea in the free media league).

We're now in the holy city of Mashhad, a kind of bottleneck for overland travellers to Central Asia. We stay in a sort of a home stay with a ragtag bunch that includes Dutch and Spanish cyclists and a French couple who drove here in a 2CV. We've all had enough of being stopped, greeted and questioned by well meaning but incessant passers-by twenty times a day. The finest variation on the 'where are you from?' question we've heard was the quite wonderful 'Made in?'

To Turkmenistan!

Castles Made of Sand

2012-03-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

We were in a taxi hurtling into unfeasible blackness, the driver barking unintelligible pidgin over the blare of the radio, when it struck me that we were miles from anywhere, there was not a single light on the horizon, not a sound but the roaring engine, the wailing radio.

It was a relief when we finally pulled into a mud-built settlement, lights glowing from behind ancient doors. A man waved from behind a mud wall, with his other hand he appeared to be feeding a baby camel. We had arrived in the oasis village Garmeh. Before long we were stretched out on carpets before a fire, drinking chay and listening to a shaggy-haired Sufi make miraculous rhythms on a pair of clay pots. This was Maziar, a kind of Iranian hippy (if such a thing is possible) who had renovated his rambling family home and opened it as a guesthouse. Everything was made from the desert, mud brick and adobe moulded into a kind of intricate sandcastle. That night we stood on the roof and watched the stars, the only things that disturbed the silence were the yowling of jackals and a tiny stream gurgling a hundred metres away.

When morning came we realised how remote we were. The village was a cluster of mud houses and archways amongst a ring of green date palms. For miles around there was nothing but dusty plains and jagged brown mountains. Next door, a thousand-year-old fortress crumbled back from whence it came, rejoining the dust clouds that allowed one to look directly at the sun, a perfect silver disc in red-brown haze.

We climbed the mountain behind the village and, after surveying the absolute nothingness, realised what an unearthly paradise Britain would seem to these people. While stood on a high rocky crag I let out wolf-like howl (what else would one do on a high rocky crag?) and, a hundred metres away, Nic responded. Except, when I mentioned it to her, she said she hadn't made a sound, she had simply heard two separate howls. There was only one possible conclusion, the jackals had accepted me as one if their own.

Resisting the urge to join my furry brethren, we travelled through sand and dust storms (at times it felt like a strange night was falling) to the village of Toudeshk. Our experience here was quite wonderful and I intend to write about it before long (somehow, despite doing essentially bugger all, I can never find the time).

As per usual I have got overexcited here and run too far ahead and must retrace our dusty footsteps south to the ancient city of Persepolis. It was from these parts that Persian armies blazed west to sack Athens and here, years later, that Alexander the Great retaliated by burning the city to the ground. We have been following in his bloody footsteps since Greece, for it was he who blazed the path that made the Silk Roads possible (we try to avoid the raping and pillaging though- it doesn't seem to go down too well). In Iran, Alexander was depicted as a horned devil, children were warned (and sometimes still are) that Iskender would get them if they didn't eat their greens.

I digress. Persepolis was wonderful and it is far beyond my literary powers to describe it adequately. Bizarrely, the thing that sent most shivers down my spine was the grafitti. Into a archway guarded by griffins, great explorers had carved their names (among them Henry Morton Stanley) and, ignoring the crowds and clicking camera phones, you could almost imagine yourself among them.

We next went to Yazd, a whole city of mud architecture. Lane after beautiful lane of courtyards, caravanserais, tunnels and arches swarmed around us, as if it had grown organically from the desert floor. The roofscape was riven with badgirs, intricate chimneys that are designed to suck cool desert breezes down into the houses. Beneath the city ancient qanats still bring water from mountain streams. These are underground channels that were (and occasionally still are) dug by hand, carrying fresh water for miles and miles.

In an old qanat cistern, now an empty dome of mud brick, we found the utterly bizarre Yazd Zurkhaneh Club. Zurkaneh is the ancient Iranian practice of mystic body building. In a circular space a group of sweaty men and boys perform ritualistic feats of strength to a throbbing drum. As the men heft huge weights, swing chains and whirl like dervishes, Sufi prayers and poems are sung. As the rhythms quickened and the exercises grew more intense, I found myself with the peculiar sensation of being rather moved by the sight of a fat hairy man in absurd trousers making himself dizzy.

Though there's much more to say, I cannot ask of you any more of your time (and perhaps some things are best said when outside these borders). We're now amongst the wayward traffic of Tehran waiting for Uzbek visas, planning the next stretch of the journey east.

Thanks for reading and I hope you're all well out there.

Welcome to Iran

2012-03-09T07:02:00.002-08:00

This comes to you via a top secret source (code name: my brother). The Iranian authorities had clearly got wind of the dangerous nature of my prose and blocked this website before our arrival.

Leaving Turkey by minibus, we were dropped at a dusty road, Iranian flags fluttered on the hill before us. Traversing trucks and oversized hessian packages, we arrived at a desk serviced by a stern moustache. Attached to this moustache was an even sterner looking man who began thumbing through our passports in painfully slow motion. I was beginning to think about a different route to China when, STAMP! We were waved through to come face to face with the glowering twin portraits of Khomenai and Khamenai and the grinning faces of black-marketeers. We were in Iran.

Hiring a taxi to the nearest town, we sped between craggy brown mountains and the sun-bleached posters of Iran-Iraq war martyrs. The first women we saw were swathed in black chadors (the black sheet that only shows the face) but soon we were seeing girls with Bollywood make-up, skinny jeans and headscarves clinging precariously to absurdly bouffaned hair. The men, an extremely gentle lot, responded to such a show with faded denim and gallons of hair gel.

Arriving in Tabriz, we stood on a street corner dazed and culture-shocked as neon buzzed to life in every shop window and traffic honked and screeched around us. The comforting Roman script used in Turkey had dissolved into disorientating Arabic squiggles. Before long, the map we had been examining had been whisked away by helpful hands and a gaggle of men swept from the pavement and a nearby electrical shop to spirit us to our hotel. You are never lost for long in this country.

'Hey Mister! Where you from?'

'Engilistan'

'Engilistan? Very good country! You are welcome in Iran!'

This is the conversation we have ten, twenty times a day, once accompanied by a kiss to my head (an old man who sold, and perhaps was, nuts), twice accompanied by offers to dinner and, more often than not, followed by long conversations as we stroll the bazaars or amongst the shadows of heavenly buildings.

The heart of Tabriz was its bazaar, a 7km square labyrinth of vaulted brick that was begun a thousand years ago. We tumbled through its ornate arches to occasionally find ourselves in cathedral-like halls where beams of dusty light shone on piles of gaudy fabric, or caravanserais awash with Adidas shoes. Though ancient, the building still lives. With a shout of 'Yalla! Yalla!' cart-pushers shove their wares through forests of chadors past spices, cow's feet, and 'Louis Vuitton' bedspreads. Faithful spill from hidden mosques into the snow-flecked city.

Then to glorious Esfahan where we saw some of the most magnificent buildings we will ever see, architecture that brings a lump to the throat. Watching the sun set over the blue domes and palaces of Naqsh-e Jehan Square was special (even when distracted by a hundred shaking hands and offers of tea). Esfahan even had that rarest of things, other travellers! We hadn't seen any in weeks.

We're now in the poetic if disappointingly unwiney city of Shiraz. At the tomb of Hafez, a saint-like hero of Persian poetry, people gather to pay their respects, recite poetry and lay red rises on the marble. Nic, clearly feeling the mystic vibe, started reciting a poem that began 'Pick-a-nose Pick, picked his nose and made him sick'. Really, I do try to culture the dear girl.

Tomorrow we're off to the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis! That's about the most exciting sentence I'll ever write.

Note: In a previous post, I mentioned a lake of 'scared carp', this was supposed to read 'sacred carp'. I neither take part in nor condone the frightening of fish (or any other aquatic creature) and apologise for any confusion this may have caused.

The Land of the Disappeared

2012-02-29T09:52:00.000-08:00

I didn't mean to write another entry so soon but when you've got a blog in you, it's only healthy to let it out...

Leaving the blissful lanes of Sanliurfa we headed out into the dusty plains. The black tents and tarpaulin of nomad camps sending smoke signals toward the distant mountains. We had organised a homestay in a Kurdish village through a British woman who, having married a local man and given up a high-flying career, had dedicated her life to improving the life in tiny Yulacali. Most people here live on less than a dollar a day, 50% are illiterate, 80% intermarried. The result of all this is a 20-30% infant mortality rate. Apologies if I've begun to sound like an Oxfam advert. The village itself, a patchwork of concrete, adobe and animal dung, lay on an ancient site. A Neolithic settlement mound rose from the muddy ground, paths were littered with fragments of Roman mosaics, ancient pots and flint tools. We were in the land where civilisation began, where hunting and gathering first became passé. We watched some village men rolling flat the mud roof of their house, they were using an ancient Roman column.

We stayed with a kindly family in a house of carpets and doilies. Outside, sheep, chickens and cows scratched the earth. Various relatives came and went (our hostess was one of 16, the oldest 60, the youngest 12) and we watched the daily bread baked over a straw-fueled fire.

As Kurds, the children are forbidden from speaking their own language at school (even though it is sometimes their only language), on a Turkish census form there is not an option to say you're 'Kurdish'. We headed next to Diyarbakir, a stronghold of Kurdish defiance, a place that strikes fear into nationalist hearts. We were received with open arms and soon found ourselves in the depths of the bazaar discussing politics with a group of Kurdish men. Here, the godlike Ataturk, whose face graces every school, restaurant and public park from here to Istanbul was denounced as a 'motherf**ker' (they had a highly sophisticated grasp of the language). They even spoke openly of the silent Armenian churches that scatter these lands and the 'disappearance' of their former parishioners.
In the west of Turkey I had been regularly assured that 'everyone loves Ataturk!'

We spent a few nights in Erzerum, where two metre icicles hang from the eaves and white mountains diffuse into snowy skies before bussing up into the mountains, slipping over the icy roads between sliding lorries. We are now in Dogubayazit, our last stop in Turkey. We are encircled by mountains including Mount Ararat (believed to be where Noah's ark ended up) and overlooked by an amazing palace that looks out over the dusty plains to Armenia on one side and Iran on the other.

Our journey in this fascinating country is coming to an end, soon we leave the the long shadows of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires (in which we've been travelling since Croatia) and enter the ancient heart of another great civilisation, Persia. In a few days we'll cross an infamous Silk Road mountain pass (in years past, the spring thaw would reveal the petrified corpses of unlucky travellers) into Iran...

...no, we're not mad. Trust us.

Mesopotamia Bound

2012-02-27T06:25:00.000-08:00

Şanlıurfa

This was mostly been written sat by a lake of scared carp, a glass of strong black çay before me and a castle rampart up above. Though I'm now in a seedy internet cafe full of adolescent boys playing videogames, please imagine the former. Imagine the lake and the holy carp and the passing Arab women in purple headscarves and flowing gowns, the old men in keffıyeh and baggy pantaloons that smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and clack their rosaries. For we are in the beautiful old town of Şanlıurfa.

But waıt! I must rewind a week or so through my jumbled memories of the last few towns. From Konya, we headed south to the coast and a castle afloat on the waves. We were in Kızkalesi, where a colony of concrete hotels had made their home amongst Alexandrian battlefields, Byzantine castles and the footprints of Zeus. Along the coast, we dropped into a deep canyon known as the Chasm of Heaven. Followıng a path that wrapped around boulders and twisted walnut trees, we came across the cave of Typhon, a jagged black opening in the rock. Inside, dark waters could be heard a'rushıng. It was said by the Greeks that the underground river was a tributary of the river Styx (over which one crosses to the underworld) and as we slipped over the rocks into the blackness, the deafenıng rush of the water did indeed sound somewhat demonic. As the light failed and the black water slid by, we decided the overworld was good enough for us and returned, slightly disturbed to the sunshine. Its neighbouring chasm, the Gorge of Hell, was positively cheerful in comparison. Having had enough of melodramatically named holes in the ground, we fled east to ancient Antioch through a blur of olive, pistachio and citrus trees.

Antioch may now be called Antakya but we'll forget that for the moment, it's not half so evocative. It is the birthplace of St Paul and we duly visited a rock-hewn church (the ancients here couldn`t get enough of hewing things from rocks) where he preached about his then bizarre little sect. It is perhaps the oldest church in the world. More interestingly for us, Antioch could also be considered the western terminus of the Silk Road, where the riches of the east were shipped off to (among others) Rome.

The highlight of this Biblical city though, was none of these things and it involved a fair deal of robot dancing. The previous day, we had been strolling the rugged streets of concrete, as per usual, we were the only foreigners in sight. We were busy picking our way through vegetable carts and over-excited school children when a car screeched to a halt beside us and a hyperactive woman bowled out. She explained she was an English teacher at the local high school and begged us to come to her class the next day. So, the next day we turned up, sodden from the ropes of rainwater that gushed from every ill-built roof. Students were summoned to fetch us hot tea. We were pretty shocked however, to find that it was all really informal. We were led to our classroom, pushing our way through excitable smiles and handshakes and 'how are you?'s. In class, we asked if anyone had any questions. The first student to speak, a sweet-looking girl stood up and asked `Do you like street dance?`. Before we had time to answer, some hip hop was switched on, a boy was pushed forward and he started to jolt and judder as if auditioning for Turkey`s Got Talent (which, by the way, appears to have been won by a performing dog). It was all entirely and wonderfully mad.

At school

A few hours later, we were bussing through snowy valleys to Gaziantep (Antep), culinary Mecca of eastern Turkey. I will leave the food bit to Nic (click here for Nic's blog) and concentrate on our experience as Gaziantepspor FC's newest fans. Fresh from a rather cultural morning examining some lovely Roman mosaics, we were wandering past the football stadium when we discovered it was match day and were suddenly sucked into another surreal encounter.

I was thinking of getting tickets for the game when we were adopted by a gang of cheeky teenage boys in full Gaziantepspor paraphernalia. They handed us tickets as a gift and guided us toward the gates. They didn't speak a word of English and our Turkish is sparse to say the least, but they were soon inducting us into the stand of hardcore fans. Before long we had linked arms with our fellows, begun jumping on the seats (for they are not for sitting) and singing along with a stand full of fanatics. The crowd is 'conducted' by an angry man at the front flanked by two drummers. He leads the songs and chants, the hand movements and Mexican waves. We were competing with another stand of Gaziantepspor supporters who countered our chants and movements with their own. Police and stewards with full riot gear looked on unbothered as a fight broke out in our stand, but it was largely good natured (if a bit shouty). 'If you cut me, I bleed Gaziantepspor' Nic declared after about 5 minutes. No one seemed to take any notice of the football, they were having far too much fun. Waving goodbye to yet more unexpected and ridiculously generous friends, we headed here to Şanlıurfa.

Gazıantepspor - before the game has even started

Nic with the Gaziantepspor massive

On the way, we crossed the Euphrates into what was ancient Mesopotamia ('The Land Between the Two Rivers' - the Euphrates and the Tigris). The landscape began to resemble what I expect nearby Syria to look like, furrowed brown hills, goats and olive trees. The city too feels different, an amalgam of ancient stone and slapdash concrete. We follow winding lanes passed community bread ovens, Arabic archways and ornate balconies to the Fish Pools. It is the birthplace of Ibrahim (Abraham) and pilgrims flock to feed the sacred carp that swim the holy pools (the coals of his funeral pyre became fish or some such thing). It is a beautiful, peaceful place.

Şanlıurfa

Last and best of all is a 500 year old caravanserai that is now tea garden (introduced to us by another new Turkish friend). It is always full of old men slapping down dominos, downing bitter coffee and setting the world to rights. As we sat there with our nargile (water pipe) Nic said 'this is it really' and I knew exactly what she meant.

Havıng finally managed to upload this blog after days of trying, we are no longer ın Şanlıurfa but in icy cold Erzerum (in an equally seedy internet cafe). So, with the smell of Lynx Africa ın my nostrils, I bid you farewell...

In an old caravanserai, Şanlıurfa

Kıds on a bread errand Şanlıurfa

Into the Mystic

2012-02-16T08:09:00.000-08:00

I moved deeper into the cave, there were human bones amongst the rubble beneath my feet. My torchlight couldn't quite reach the darkest corner so I pushed on, the crack of daylight shrinking behind me. 'I am literally Indiana Jones!' I thought to myself. Though I don't know that Indiana Jones would have turned back when it got a bit slippy and I'm pretty sure his wife wouldn't have been waiting outside ready to tell him off for being all dusty. I was in an old rock hewn tomb in Sille, Turkey. Outside, snow sat heavy on the hills and the ramshackle roofs of the village. Nic and Emine, a former student of mine, were waiting patiently outside for my fantasy to subside. We were staying with Emine and her family in nearby Konya. Konya is a city of God, a place where Rumi once ruminated and where his legacy, the Whirling Dervishes, still spin themselves into a holy trance. The city streets were thawing, meltwater dripped from the mosques, medressas and mausoleums. We went to watch one of the weekly dervish performances but it felt more like watching prayer in action than a dance piece. Thirty dancers unfurl like flowers and whirl across the floor, arms raised to heaven, minds in commune with their creator. It was unlike anything I have ever seen and strangely moving. The highlight of our trip to Konya though was staying with Emine and her family. For a few days we had a warm home and a new set of brothers and sisters. We sat on carpets around a round table guzzling çay and being force fed the most delicious food. So insistent were they in their fattening of their English guests that I began to wonder if we were not part of some human foie gras experiment. The level of generosity was quite unbelievable, we were not allowed to pay for even a single bus ride. It was all quite wonderful. I seem to have got overexcited here and somewhat messed up the chronology. We had spent the previous week on the Med where green mountains gather at the coast and stretch their rocky limbs languidly into the turquoise waters. The landscape is strewn with ruins, tombs are carved from cliffs, Roman amphitheatres scooped from rocky hillsides, bizarre burial chambers hide amongst the trees. We were staying with Nic's aunt and uncle overlooking a foaming sea. After a day of glorious sun, the clouds that have doggedly followed us for weeks swept from the mountains and unleashed hell. The gods, it seemed, we're against us, so where better to go than to the Chasm of Heaven? That divine depression and its less appealing neighbour The Gorge of Hell will have to wait for the next missive as these fingers they grow tired. Like dervishes, we whirl ever closer to our own slice of heaven...

From the City at the Centre of the World

2012-02-05T07:46:00.000-08:00

Our boat left Istanbul as the dawn broke on the shores of Asia. The morning call to prayer that echoed out over the rooftops was answered by the melancholy calls of foghorns out to sea.

To find out what I thought of Istanbul, you can choose either Paragraph A: the simple version, or Paragraph B: the wordy, pretentious version.

Paragraph A: Istanbul is amazing!

Paragraph B: From the water, the city appears to be a crust of concrete and cables but, through this mess, sprout delicate minarets, clustered domes turning white in the snow. Look deeper and you can find bazaars ancient and alive, streets of European grandeur and bohemian intrigue. Beneath the winding messy streets of steaming snack stands, turning doner and cold-huddled crowds, lay sewers and cisterns built by the Byzantines over a thousand years ago. This is a place where one's daily commute might mean taking a ferry to another continent. A place where you can smoke nargile in ancient tea gardens and watch old ladies lower baskets to the street to filled with bread by a local boy. A place where you can eat mezze and fresh fish sandwiches into the night! Okay, I think I'm done.

Crossing the Sea of Marmara, we arrived in the city of Bursa. There too, snow fell in drifts on the surrounding hills and the sprawling bazaar. We stood pilgrim-like in an old caravanserai that once received camel caravans from the east and is still a centre for silk (though now Turkish-made). We took a bus into blizzards, cars and trucks lay crashed in the central reservation, slowly turning white. They're seriously unused to the snow. The news has become a montage of 'hilarious' clips of cars spinning out if control on the ice. True car-crash TV.

Nic at Ephesus (with all her friends)

We arrived unscathed in the town of Selcuk and found a bed just minutes from one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis. Once the largest building in the world, it is now just one solitary pillar standing in a field, a handy pissing-post for stray dogs. Up in the hills, the Virgin Mary is supposed to have ended her days. But the real reason we were in Selcuk was to visit the ancient town of Ephesus, an amazingly well preserved city of ruins nestled in the hills. If, like me you live life pretending you're in an Asterix book, it's a dream!

The next day we found ourselves on a hillside of brilliant white, barefoot and baffled. We were in Pamukkale where strange mineral deposits have turned a whole hill white with a pummice-like crust. At points hot water bubbled over out feet (you must walk barefoot) and at others they plunged through ice. It was the most wonderfully surreal experience.

A bronzed adonis takes the waters at Pamukkale

My abiding memory of Pamukkale however, will be lying in a naturally hit pool amongst submerged Roman columns, the steam rising to the amphitheatre above. Okay, so there was a tour bus of German tourists gawping at us from under their 'authentic' Turkish turbans and a nearby cafe thumping out dreadful Euro house, but it was still truly magical.

I'm going to sign off now as I'm sure we're all dropping off. We're now staying with Nic's auntie and uncle in Kas and the sun is a'shining. Hope you're all well.

A Short Note on History

2012-02-01T07:27:00.001-08:00

Now that the beaten dust of the old Silk Road lies beneath our feet, I thought I should explain exactly what the Silk Road is and why one may want to follow it. So, with my rather wordy travelogue on hold, I shall give a brief (if probably quite wordy) history.

The Silk Road was actually a series of trade routes linking the Far and Near East. The main route began in Xian, China and stretched across Central Asia to the Mediterranean. The Chinese were the only ones who new how to produce silk, so that any silk that turned up in a Constaninople bazaar would have to have travelled by camel caravan through storms of dust, snow and marauding nomads. From just before the time of Christ to around 1400, goods and ideas were exchanged between East and West. This included silk, teas, spices, Islam, Buddhism and, rather less romantically, the bubonic plague. The route is still encrusted with ancient trading cities and caravanserais. Caravanserais were like rest stops for weary travellers where sleep could be caught, goods exchanged and, in my overly-romanticised mind, where turbaned men smoked shishas and watched the stars in flickering fire light.

We are now stepping into the shoes of Alexander the Great, of Marco Polo, of the Hun and the Mongols, of the great Morocaan explorer Ibn Battuta, of a load of hairy hippies in vans.

So, don't think we're just bumming around the world for a few months, we're bumming along the greatest trade route of all time!

I shall write a proper entry soon and will hopefully include some pictures so you don't have to bother with the reading bit (we haven't had the facilities to include pictures for a while).