Finally after months of planning we have our Iranian Visas! We kept meeting people at the Iranian Embassy in Cairo who had just returned from Iran and were enthusing massively about their wonderful experiences there. So we booked our bus tickets to Nuwieba. We had decided to travel back to the Turkish border quickly so as to try to get to Iran before it gets unbearably hot. It is ironic we went south last winter becuase Turkey was freezing and İran more so, but we did not miss winter. Now we are defintiely going to be too hot somewhere along our [View Full Entry]

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After seeing a glimpse of the lush green farmland and scattered villages of the Nile Valley on our way to the Pyramids at Dashur I was really keen to cycle up the valley. After so long riding through the desert the site of so much greenery was quite staggering. The intensity of the colours seems to be increased by lack of familiarity. Anyway, due to other plans for the next stage of our journey, and rumours that cycling the Nile valley is nigh on impossible thanks to the over-protective and paranoid authorities in Egypt we dumped the bikes in Cairo and [View Full Entry]

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We had heard so many horror stories about Cairo. People warning and warning. Yes they were all true. It's noisy, busy, dirty and hot. Also though it is exciting, friendly, diverse, beautiful, interesting and fun! I wake to the call to prayer and a few hours later descend from our bargain roof top hotel in a very cool marble 1930's art deco stair well and fancy lift to get take away breakfast. I'm not too hot on architecture terms but Cairo has great buildings and once they were even clean and new. It would be easy to get overwhelmed by all [View Full Entry]

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Our last day in Jordan was supposed to be "easy downhill' riding; from Wadi Rum down to Aqaba on the Red Sea. But then every Jordanian we had met during our time there informed us the road we were taking was "easy" and "downhill", usually also having no clue as to the distances. We were even once told by the police that it was "easy, only 2km and downhill all the way". Needless to say 10km of uphill followed. But today really should have been easy - we were going down to the coast. We had forgotten about the wind however, [View Full Entry]

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We finally cleared the border from Israel back into Jordan to find that we had missed the last bus and all the taxi drivers were wanting to charge us twice the price we had expected to pay. So we started walking and thought we would hitch or find another 'servis' bus somewhere. But typically after walking about 1 km a bus hurtled past us without stopping. We got a lift with a guy who worked at the border in the duty free shop and he took us all the way to our hotel in downtown Amman and even bought us a [View Full Entry]

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When we decided to travel down through the Middle East to Egypt we had no intention of visiting Israel or Palestine. This was partly because we wished to travel on to other Islamic countries who would not grant us entry visas if we had been to Occupied Palestine (as they refer to it), and partly because of our own, particularly my own, political views and prejudices in favour of the Palestinian cause, their right to their own state and the end of the Israeli occupation. I had spent several years boycotting Israeli produce for instance, as my own way of not [View Full Entry]

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We left Damascus at a reasonably early time on Friday morning. This was good; the traffic was quiet as it was Friday and we headed off towards where we thought our road towards Swayda lay. Unfortunately this road was not marked on our map and after asking a few people for directions we were completely lost somewhere near the airport. Eventually we found the right road and realised that we had cycled about 5 miles too far! Any way as soon as we found the right road a blasting cold wind pummelled us from the south. Our friend Ben had emailed [View Full Entry]

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Damascus is the oldest inhabited capital city in the world, at least according to the Syrian Tourist Office. They also claim that Syria (well at least ‘geographical Syria’ - i.e. including Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and large parts of Turkey) is the origin of all culture, agriculture, language, civilisation, writing, and just about everything else, so I’m not sure how true this really is. Aleppo also claims to be the oldest inhabited city in the world - again a contentious claim, and there is apparently a fair bit of rivalry between the 2 cities over which is th [View Full Entry]

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Lebanon is a beautiful country with lush green snow capped mountains rising virtually straight out of the glinting blue sea. At least that's how it looked on our ride from the border down the coast into Tripoli - the second city of the modern state and an ancient Phoenican city to boot. It didn't look so nice with constant pouring rain, grey skies and small lakes eveywhere as a result of the somewhat poor city drainage system. But with many of the buildings still in a state of semi-ruin and even those that aren't riddled with bullet holes and shell damage [View Full Entry]

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We were in Halab/Aleppo for around a week despite planning on only spending a couple of days there. Syria is a great country to visit and I would urge you to completely ignore all western propaganda to the contrary. The Syrian people are without doubt the friendliest we have met on this journey and I suspect they will remain so for some time. Prices are ludicrously cheap and nobody even seems to think of trying to overcharge you as a dumb foreigner - unlike here in Lebanon or in Turkey where you should always question every price and usually end up [View Full Entry]

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