I’ve decided to give up on the missing weeks in my blog. I might write up about them later, but without the Guidebooks any more, or Internet access, it’s even hard for me to remember exactly where I went in an orderly way. Anyway, rather than constantly trying to catch up, I’ve decided to post this current one, and maybe later go back over the four weeks that are missing. I arrived in Mumbai airport around midnight Tuesday morning. By the time I got through customs and baggage collection and all it was about 01:00. I hadn’t read up about where [View Full Entry]

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Since I’m still way behind with my blogs I thought I’d pump out another one. This one will be short, because I didn’t do much of anything interesting, but I thought my habit of sticking to a blog entry for approximately each week was working out pretty well (except for the previous two entries obviously). So this relates to the period July 20-26. After the archaeology survey I had planned to head up to Jerash, a well-restored massive Roman city, where retired Jordanian soldiers re-enact chariot races in the amphitheatre, or even up to Umm Qais, another Roman site where [View Full Entry]

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weeks 2, 3, 4 I guess you’ve noticed I’ve gotten a bit behind in my blog. It’s now nearly three weeks since the archaeology survey finished. I’d written parts of it as it was happening, but some of it I’ve written a few days ago. I wasn’t sure what to write, so I’ll just put up what I have now. I don’t have many photos from the actual survey because it wasn’t practical to carry my Digital SLR with me most of the time. Check the captions of the photos, most are probably from weekends or the hike, not that [View Full Entry]

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Indiana Jones never seemed to spend much time scrubbing toilets. I don’t think he ever even had the pleasure of a roommate who smokes in a room in which you can’t open the windows, although it’s probably fair to say that he didn’t have Internet access either. I mention Indiana Jones for much the same reasons that I mentioned Borat in the blog about Kazakhstan - you’re all thinking about it, and every time I say something about going on an archaeology dig, particularly somewhere so close to Petra, someone says “blah blah Indiana Jones blah blah blah” [View Full Entry]

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Once upon a time, in a land far, far, away, a young Jewish fundamentalist was heading up to Damascus to kill other Jews for not believing in their God in the right way. Everybody needs a hobby. While on the way there, he was suddenly struck blind by a bright light from God himself and heard a voice telling him that he had it all wrong. He was so impressed by this that when he got his sight back he immediately changed his name by one letter, to “Paul” (as in “St Paul”) and began to travel the known world preaching [View Full Entry]

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If you want a country has nice scenery, diverse cultures and beautiful scenery, and is easy to get around, while not being as expensive as Europe or Australia, you should all go to Turkey. I think I was lucky to be there in May/June, as it’s been nice weather (bordering on the hot) but the more out-of-the-way places have not yet been overrun by German or Russian sun-seekers. It’s not quite the sort of place I wanted to travel, so I’m not totally disappointed to be heading into Syria now (probably there, or left, by the time you get this), but [View Full Entry]

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Turkey is a nice place for a holiday. Of course I try to avoid “nice” places, but it’s a nice change for a bit. It’s easy to travel in, at the moment it has lovely weather, the people are friendly, and in the tourist areas everyone speaks English and probably German and a few other languages. Reading the maps and guidebooks feels strange to me because you can’t help bumping into somewhere famous. There’s so many places which are of course used as settings for God’s bestselling novel (not bad for a first work, but the sequel was disappointing), and [View Full Entry]

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So I failed in my attempt to get from East Timor to Jordan without flying. I was so close, in fact I was even in Europe. The city of Oral in far northwest Kazakhstan is west of the Ural river, and so is considered part of Europe. In Russian it’s “Uralsk”, but in English it’s usually called after the Kazakh, “Oral”. I went as far as Oral, but I was hoping to go all the way to Kiev. And from there it would have been easy to get buses or the ferry down to Turkey and from there through Syria into [View Full Entry]

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In an effort to avoid my normal boring titles, I was going to title my blog “Kazakhstan is nice”, and then after a few days I was going to title it “Kazakhstan has a veneer of niceness”, but I was already sick of people making the Borat references, so I decided not to reference that film at all and instead go with the title from the Beatles song which got stuck in my head. In his book “In Search of Kazakhstan”, which I mention here in my attempt to sound more literate than I actually am, Christopher Robbins talks about how [View Full Entry]

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I was pleasantly surprised that the train journey only took about 40 hours, rather than the 44 I was expecting. This time I had a “hard sleeper” with a middle bunk - in the hard sleeper compartments they cram the bunks in three deep. So the train ride from Beijing to Urumqi was much more comfortable than the one from Guilin to Beijing had been. Still the beds were very small (almost exactly the same width as my hips) and being on the middle bunk there was nowhere save to put my day-pack in which I keep all my valuables such [View Full Entry]

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