It all changes in Azerbaijan - the weather improves and is bright and hot, and the people all wave and smile! I bush-camp the first night with some fellow travellers. That evening, a local couple pull up in a car and start talking to us in Russian and broken English. It turns out that they're archaeologists who have been living and working on a bornze-age site, not far away, for over 20 years. They tell us they'll come back the next morning and take us to it. As promised, they appear at breakfast and we follow them to their site. Not [View Full Entry]

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Leaving Istanbul on a beautiful sunny day, I travelled across the big suspension bridge joining Europe to Asia for my first view of the largest continent. It looked pretty similar from where I'd just come, to be honest. It took a couple of days to drive the 700 odd kilometres to Cappadocia, in Central Anatolia, passing through a varied mix of rocky farmland to high, snowy mountain passes. You'll have probably seen pictures of the famous 'fairy chimneys' of Goreme in postcards or on tv, but they're a very strange geographical phenomenon formed from soft, sandy laval stone, eroded down to [View Full Entry]

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I finally arrived in Istanbul late in the evening on Monday the 24th March, after a whistlestop transit across Central Europe. I'd seen snow on everyday exept the last, camped outside a service station in Belgium, eaten Brattwurst in Munich, taken the Sound of Music tour in Salzberg (just for my mum, honest...) got drunk on Schnapps in a jazz club in Zagreb, crossed Macedonia in 3 hours, bush-camped on a beach in Southern Greece and spent 7 hours at the Turkish border-crossing trying to get in. An uneventful trip then. I'm woken on my first morning in Istanbul at 5.45am [View Full Entry]

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Less than three weeks to go and I've finally got together the kit, the meds and hopefully all the vaccinations I'll need on my trip ( Japanese B Encephalitis isn't to be recommened). As I've discovered in the last three months, making arrangements to take a year out of your normal life is quite a complicated process. I thought it would just be a matter of cancelling a few direct debits, sticking a couple of boxes in my parent's loft, (sorry folks) grabbing my ruck-sack and going but, alas, this is not the case. When it comes down to it, you [View Full Entry]

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This blog is my way of both keeping a record of my travels (and travel plans) and letting the folks back home know that I'm still alive, roughly where I am, and what I'm doing. It's been two years since my last trip to Africa, after which I thought my travelling days were over. I'd had a good time, but thought that I'd never get the opportunity to go away for any length of time again. It wasn't until the Summer of 2007 when the urge started to take me again and I realised that the travel bug hadn't entirely left [View Full Entry]

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