The land of giants – Theo’s blog China exceeds my expectations – even my expectation about how much it would! As soon as we saw the swanky big red bus and the open-faced happily excited Chinese passengers waiting at Almaty bus station, I was confident we’d get over the border and reassured that we’d be […]
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Riding with the sons of Genghis Khan – Theo’s blog (By the time this post is up, we should be finally heading to the Chinese border!) The prospect for our 2 day train trek across the Steppes of Kazakhstan was not looking so great. I’d been placed in a separate compartment from Shan and Rosa;
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Stroking a bat and shaking hands with a bear – Theo’s blog It’s not surprising that when we first arrived, without a hitch, in Southern Russia, we wondered for a moment if we were in some kind of artificial “Truman Show” set designed to enchant and deceive gullible western visitors with its loveliness. But it
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Brief encounters in Georgia – Theo’s blog I’m writing this in the little apartment we’ve rented in Atyrau for our first night in Kazakhstan, reflecting how nice it is to have a space of our own (even if the intermittent water from the kitchen tap is a toxic brownish yellow, unsafe to drink). But I
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Being Here Now – Theo I haven’t been travelling as lightly as I’d like. Our rucksacks seem pretty sorted, and I’m proud of us for that, but I’ve still been bringing a load of expectations and assumptions with me over each border we’ve crossed, and I hope I’m beginning to shed some of that as
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Not “JUST” another rainy night in Georgia Yesterday we found out that it’s one thing to read about “extreme weather events” and quite another to walk through one for 5 km with heavy rucksacks looking for an obscure hostel in a large foreign city as darkness falls. On our knuckle-whitening 8 hour mini-bus Helter-Skelter ride
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Theo – Dreams of Alan Partridge and a squashed tomato On our last night in Turkey, after a fabulous meal of rice and beans and a chocolate birthday cake for Shannon, courtesy of the truly lovely host at a local eatery in Erzurum, I dreamed the strangest dream. I dreamt that I was Alan Partridge,
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Theo’s blog: “Welcome to your personalised Sauna Spa and Wellness experience…” ….was not what the thick-set taciturn man at the dark entrance to the men’s Hammam in Kadikoy said to me, as he wordlessly ushered me in from the street. “English” I say, “Turkish” says he, and hands me a pair of crocks, a towel
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Theo’s blog – The best things in life are free. Today I had two sublime experiences which any traveller in Turkey who ventures beyond Istanbul or the holiday beaches can access, without spending a lira on anything but travel. Having taken a train through the endless folded hills and plains of “the Asian side”, which
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Theo on travelling through Romania One disadvantage of the sleeper-train that spirited us through the night from Vienna to Bucuresti was passing through an entire country in between, yet seeing nothing. All I can report about Hungary is that the border police who woke us loudly at 1.25am to check our passports were younger and more
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