As much as I thought I had a vague route pre-planned through Indonesia, I should have known better than to believe I'd stick to it. In theory this was the easy leg, as travel through Indonesia to East Timor would mainly involve island hopping, with a pitter patter of port to port pedalling in between. But the Indonesian ferry timetables are sketchy at best, and so I would literally have to just board the next east or south bound ferry, wherever that may be going, or risk waiting for days for a specific ferry that may well end up being cancelled anyway. Luckily for me there was a lot of time aboard ferries and less time cycling in the midday swelter, as I had definitely become dis-acclimatised and dis-conditioned during my enforced lay-off. I had lost ... read more

People often ask me, “You're an idiot. You shouldn't travel to Burma”. An interesting question (?) and not the easiest to answer, I'll admit. The headlines will tell you that Burma is a dangerous place and that by visiting you are legitimising the repressive regime. I'll attempt to answer both these points later in the essay. Er, blog, I meant blog, of course. I'm also going to continue calling it Burma, not Myanmar. Just doing my bit for international relations, World peace and all that. Had I leapfrogged Burma and flown directly to Thailand, I would have left a gaping gap in my otherwise terrestrial route. Besides, I couldn't figure out how to create a non-contiguous line on my Google Map tracker, which was reason alone to cycle through Burma. Getting permission to travel was easy ... read more

They have a saying in China that the only men who travel alone are pilgrims or madmen. Disagree if you will, but I must be on some sort of pilgrimage then. Or perhaps I am a borderline maniac. By that, I mean I am a maniac of borderlines. I can't get enough of fabled frontiers; the wilder the better. Borders are the places where cultures clash and connect. Where clans go eyeball to eyeball, breath for breath, with a faint whiff of wonderment and a lick of the illicit. With that in mind, I excitedly climbed the Irkestam pass to the Kyrgyz-Chinese border. But it was a little disappointing. Despite being one of the renowned mountain passes in this area, it did not have the roof-of-the-world feel of the Kyzyl-Art pass or the intrigue of the ... read more

Camels to the left of me, Jackals to the right, Here I am, stuck in the middle of U-zbekistan. A blatant rip off the Stealers Wheels' lyrics it may be, but all three statements stand true nonetheless. Why I'm here, stuck in the middle of Uzbekistan, and how I got here, well that will be revealed soon enough. As chance would have it, there was a clown to the left of me – Guy Laliberté, the Canadian clown, space tourist and founder of Cirque du Soleil, launched into orbit from the Kazakhstan Space Centre not far from here. And there's jokers to the right of me aplenty. I call this chapter “The Stans” but before I reached any of them, there was just the small matter of a “Jan” to get out the way first. Azerbaijan ... read more

Even before I had infiltrated Russian territory I was nearly arrested for taking a photo of a Welcome to Russia sign. This highly photogenic stone-carving was not supposedly posed for photographs. Entering Russia was the bureaucratic, process-driven, lesson in paperwork, that I had been warned to expect. In some ways I'd have been disappointed if it was too straightforward after all that hype. Firstly we had to have our documents inspected at a Border control point, which was followed by immigration, then customs, and finally a checkpoint to make sure the previous 3 gatekeepers had correctly stamped their stamps. To be fair, we had a little assistance from some Finns, who found us the correct papers and translated where necessary. The final border officer actually gave us a “good luck” send off as he waved us ... read more