Petra is something else altogether, a beautiful city carved into and out of the rocky outcrops of Wadi Musa - the Valley of Moses - and which was the capital of the ancient Nabatean people. It is also an area replete with Biblical associations, in which it was known as both Seir and Sela. The most famous Petran was King Herod, he who lopped off John the Baptist’s head. Earlier, the Cainites (son of Adam and brother of Abel) resided here. Esau (son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham) moved his kin here after a spat with his brother Jacob. And [View Full Entry]

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(To make up for the delay in managing to get the last post up, I've knocked up another quite quickly. I've also included some photos of us - for those who've been asking - that cover the last three weeks or so through Syria and Jordan - enjoy!!) And so on to Jordan. We eventually crossed the border from Syria after a good two hour delay as the border guards proceeded to search every single vehicle intensely - luggage was rifled, engines were scrutinised, door panels were pulled off. We assume that they were searching for arms potentially heading for either [View Full Entry]

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Damascus is one of those cities that conjure up images of far flung exotic locales - its name itself seems to evoke something magical, like Timbuktu or Mandalay. Today, Damascus is a thriving, buzzing metropolis centred around the magnificent Old City. As mentioned earlier, it shares the title for the oldest continually inhabited city in the world (with Aleppo) and everywhere you turned some key site in history presents itself to you. Much of the last week has been spent just wandering aimlessly through the Old City and its Muslim, Christian and Jewish Quarters - checking out the myriad of sou [View Full Entry]

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Well, we’re currently in Palmyra, in the middle of the desert, amongst wonderful Roman ruins and an oasis filled with date palms that surrounds the town. Unfortunately, we both seemed to catch one of the local bugs in Aleppo and have been feeling a little worse for wear for much of the last week. On the brighter side, it’s provided us with an opportunity to experience a lot of the local bathrooms and we’ve certainly gained an appreciation of the finer aspects of Syrian porcelain-ware… From Aleppo, we visited the town of Hama for a few days - a city renowned [View Full Entry]

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Well, a very Merry Christmas to you all from the ancient town of Aleppo in the north of Syria. We ended up staying in Istanbul for longer than originally planned, but had such a wonderful time that we really were loathe to leave at all. It was just lovely wandering around, jumping on and off ferries and trams as we criss-crossed the continents and explored the myriad of fascinating palaces, churches, mosques and bazaars. The food was sublime, the very decent coffees (while hideously expensive) were extremely welcome and the general atmosphere gave us a chance to relax, recharge and restock [View Full Entry]

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Istanbul. Almost Australia’s entire population crammed into a bustling, vibrant metropolis encompassing two continents. It’s funny - we were chatting to a bloke in Tehran who lives in Basel in Switzerland and we found it amusing how he used to go over the border to Germany to do his grocery shopping. Well, last night we left our hotel, jumped on a ferry and had dinner in a different continent… It’s quite bizarre though having arrived here from Iran - you seem to experience culture shock in reverse (counter-culture shock I suppose) - it just seemed so odd to see blo [View Full Entry]

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Well, we’re back from a brief sojourn again to the north-east in the small town of Qazvin, a previous capital and apparently the butt of all Iranian homosexuality jokes. Although I must say that the women here are among the most attractive that we’ve come across thus far, so I reckon that the fellas here play along with it to keep them all for themselves… We finished our time in Zanjan with a trip to Takht-e-Soleiman, an age-old ruin and one of the most important of the Zoroastrian fire temples, secluded away in the towering mountains to the south. There were [View Full Entry]

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Well, we’re sitting here looking out over the snow covered mountains and town of Zanjan as the sun slowly sets, everything shrouded in the white of recently fallen snow, turning what is quite likely a fairly non-descript concretish town into something altogether quite pretty. We caught the train up at the crack of dawn yesterday morning and the snow started about halfway here, a constant and fairly heavy flurry that whipped around the train and blanketed the surrounding countryside in a good foot of snow. It was lovely walking around town with the flakes spiralling down and certainly pu [View Full Entry]

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Well, we’re currently sitting on a carpeted platform (divan sort of thing?) and sipping tea in the central courtyard of our hotel in Yazd. It’s a beautifully restored house in the middle of the old city, covered by a huge tent which diffuses the light and protects the central pond and cluster of bougainvillea, banana and orange trees. If there was a setting for Persian opulence and decadence, this is it… Yazd is superb. One of the most ancient cities in the world, the old city comprises of a myriad of narrow mud brick alleyways running off in all directions. It’s [View Full Entry]

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Tehran - Esfahan Tehran. Twelve million people crammed into a city carved out of the desert and ringed by towering mountains. The only city I’ve ever visited where you literally can’t see the ground as the plane taxis into land due to the intense, hack-inducing, mouth-drying pollution. You can actually see the dense hazy layer hovering just above the buildings... And the traffic. Having been to places like Moscow, Beijing and Hanoi, I thought that I’d pretty well seen the worst that the drivers of this world could throw at you. Nothing compares to Tehran. Sur [View Full Entry]

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