Our journey into China took us on a 24 hour bus from Almaty to Urumqi. Upon boarding the Chinese owned bus, we were greeted by quite a surprise. The bus contained no seats, only beds. Once the initial shock had worn off we realised that in a country where distances are long and people are short, it makes perfect sense. Fortunately, we are sufficiently diminutive to be comfortable and managed to pass the journey by sleeping and gazing out of the window at the passing mountain scenery. In Urumqi we took a couple of days to acclimatise to being in China, which will, somewhat predictably, go down as the hardest country we have ever travelled in. We never expected it to be an easy ride. However, we were surprised, especially given the country’s ascendancy on the ... read more

As we entered Uzbekistan, we received the most thorough search we are ever likely to, with everything being removed from our bags and inspected. However, unlike at most borders, the guards weren’t looking for anything in the way of contraband, but instead any indications that we were journalists. This being due to a unilateral ban on journalism, a measure essentially imposed in an attempt to reduce coverage of human rights violations. A cheery thought to start a visit to any country. Once in Uzbekistan it was immediately apparent that they have only a fraction of the wealth of neighbouring Turkmenistan. In fact, throughout our stay in the country we often commented how much it felt like being back in Africa, complete with some of the worst transport, food and sanitation we had seen in quite some ... read more

As many of you will know, our original plan had us heading from Syria into Turkey. Our intent was to then travel north to Moscow, in order to get some serious miles under our belt by taking the Trans-Siberian Railway to Mongolia. Unfortunately, failure to obtain Russian visas rendered this impossible. Therefore we needed an alternative plan. After a fair amount of research and deliberation we settled on doing what few people do and turning right when we get to Turkey. Our new route would take us through Iran and the “Stans” into China. On the positive side this would take us through an intriguing and little travelled part of the world. On the negative side we would need to obtain yet more visas and the route would be considerably slower than our original plan. Therefore, ... read more

Our time in Jordan will probably go down as one of the shortest, yet sweetest stays of our trip. It will be memorable for three incredible sites we visited, some friendly people and a couple of mishaps. With all our necessary visas either in the bag, in the pipeline or in our dreams and being in danger of actually being able to speak some Arabic, it was high time we left Cairo. The first leg of our journey took us on a night bus to the sleepy Red Sea resort of Nuweiba. Although a lot less developed than Dahab we didn’t think it was a patch on the rival resort we had visited a few weeks previously. This was largely due to having a dirty beach and nothing in the way of atmosphere. From Nuweiba there ... read more

On our return to Cairo we picked up where we had left off with applying for visas. We reached the conclusion that irrespective of our ability to get Russian visas, we would need a Chinese visa if we wanted to see anything of the country other than Hong Kong. Naively we assumed that few Egyptians would be applying for Chinese visas and therefore, getting a visa would be a relatively straightforward task. How wrong we were. From the what we saw, we can conclude that before long a significant proportion of the billion or so people in China will be Egyptian. With Egyptians not being renowned as early risers, we thought that arriving at 7am, an hour and half before the embassy opened, would secure us a decent a position in the queue. Sadly we were ... read more