2011 The Rhine Cycle

Nearly home now...

2010-08-31T20:37:00.000+01:00

All that remains of the Peenumunde (in Germany) rocket testing site is the power station, guard house and the staffs housing (which is now normal housing). The Power station has been converted into a very interesting museum charting the birth of rockets through their use in WW2 to modern day. Outside the museum there are replica models of both the V1 doodlebug and the V2 which looks like it has emerged fresh from a Flash Gordon comic book. There is also one of the trams that used to bring workers to the site that survived the war, the Soviet pillage of equipment after the war and its subsequent use as a tram in a German city and eventually was restored and brought back 'home'. Apart from these relics its hard to picture the beautifully tranquil and picturesque site on a headland at the edge of the baltic as a military test site full of rocket launch pads and soldiers. But it once was and the cemetery near by and the monuments to those who died in the nearby concentration camp which provided slave labour for the camp are poignant reminders of this. The museum documents how the research done here eventually led directly to the moon landings and how many of the scientists who worked here ended up in the USA and Russia continuing their work. A plaque also tells us that more people died creating the rockets than they actually killed largely due to the slave labour involved in thru production.

The weather was still lovely when we left and we headed to a stellplatz on the edge of a lake near Wismar which was idyllic. We cycled around the lake and had a picnic on the beach before visiting another gorgeous German UNESCO town Wismar. The town is another old Hansestic league town and for a lot of its history was Swedish and by chance we arrived as the Swedish Army were capturing the town hall and marching triumphantly through the streets! Another festival we stumbled upon! We had a lovely afternoon watching duals, strolling around the streets and munching snacks of various kinds before getting the bus back to our stellplatz.

Poor Linda hasn't had a bath in 5 months so we made a stop in Bad Salzufen - a Therme - which is famous for its salt works. We spent the afternoon lounging in pools of various salinity and temperature and felt very clean after! There are so many German spa towns that You can even buy a book listing all the Stellplatzs which have a Therme next to them! Linda is keen on getting this and is spending a couple of years going from one to the next. I think more than a couple of baths a year is unnatural.

Our last proper stop was of course Dusseldorf where the Motorhome show was taking place. We found some shipping companies who can ship Taffy almost anywhere - which excited Linda no end! We had a wander around, went for our traditional end of holiday pizza and cycled up and down a bit of the Rhine before the weather began to get uncooperative and we had to put our coats on and the heating too!

We are now in Geldern a town we cycled through on our way out that we thought deserved a better look. We plan to stay here a couple of nights and then make our way gradually back to Calais and home.

Gdansk

2010-08-31T19:49:00.000+01:00

What a beautiful city! And as usual, we turn up in the middle of the annual street fair which added to the atmosphere but rather hid the magnificant buildings.

We stayed at a campsite just up the coast arriving mid afternoon and decided to cycle in to the city. Perhaps not the best idea as it was Lindas first cycle since her back problems and it was also 16km away. It was however a lovely ride all on dedicated cycle paths through leafy suburbs and showed us how prosperous this part of Poland is - best get your plumber in now as I can't see them staying in Britain much longer!

The city is an old Hanseatic League town and was once full of majestic buildings covered in decorations and statues displaying the wealth of the city. It was also a free town in 1939 known as Danzig and when Poland refused to give Germany a rail and road link to it was the 'cause' of WW2 with the first shots being fired by the battleship Schleswig Holstein at Westerplatz. Gdansk was a largely German town at the time and during the course of the war was almost completley destroyed which is hard to believe when you see the buildings perfectly rebuilt. When you see Volgograd and other Soviet cities rebuilt after the war it is a real surprise to come to Gdansk and find a lovely old city seemingly unscathed by the war. After a Mexican we cycled back to our camp along the coast where another dedicated cycle path and promenade stretches for miles linking piers and hotels with restaurants and discos. It is done surprisingly tastefully and was our first sight of our last sea of the tour - the Baltic.

We left Gdansk planning to return one day when the fair wasn't on and headed towards the German border stopping at a small farm camp rather than one of the coastal camps that were heaving.

So we are now at a Marina stellplatz about 18km from Peenamunde - the birth place of the space age which we will visit in the morning. Its turning into a war tour holiday this year!

It's unusually hot for the time of year!

2010-08-18T08:55:00.000+01:00

Now we are back in the EU we've spent a bit of time catching up with our families and have learned that the weather hasn't been the best back in the UK.

Well, you'd all better brave yourselves as we will be home in a few weeks and with us the heatwave and an Indian summer will arrive!

Since we left Turkey the first time every place we have visited has been exceptionally hot. People have told us so many times "Its unusually hot for the time of year" that we've lost count! And, when we've left an area we've checked the weather forecast and it has almost instantly gone back to normal. Even now as we crawl slowly back through the Baltic states and northern Poland the weather is lovely despite our weather forecasts telling us it will rain!

We must surely be coming to the end of our luck soon but we are now available for bookings for weddings and parties to guarantee lovely weather for any occasion!

We are now near Gdansk and this part of Poland looks very prosperous and pretty. Its a bit like a cross between Germany and Holland. There are dozens of lakes and it seems every house sits on the edge of their own private lake. The towns look nice too, but we haven't really stopped to investigate. We will have to come back here in the future and visit Latvia and Lithuania too as they are gorgeous picturesque countries.

We have stopped for one night at the Wolf's Lair - Hitlers bunker complex near the Russian border which was blown up in 1945. This area of Poland us inundated with bunkers, but Adolf's is the one that everyone seems to visit. It was absolutely heaving with visitors and we got to walk round inside his bunker, or what was left of it, which was a strange feeling. The bunkers are enormous, even after demolition and are hidden in a lovely forest with surprisingly few birds singing but it was a very interesting visit. It also seems to be the turn around point for motorhomes in drives North. We've seen very few motorhomes since leaving Russia but after leaving the bunker there were hundreds of them on the roads. It seems people view the Baltic states as too dangerous to visit still which is a real shame as, from the little we saw, they are gorgeous.

Our only other stop was to see two enormous railway viaducts which cross a gorge in the middle of nowhere. They were built around WW1 and served a sleepy line the equivalent of Onehouse to Stowmarket which only ever had 3 trains a day. First one was built then a few years later another. It is quite odd especially as the line closed a long time a ago and they now lead straight into a wood.

Farewell Russia

2010-08-11T06:01:00.001+01:00

We arrived at the border at 11am with about 40 cars infront of us and at 17:30 we got Into the customs area! Russia is surely the king of bureaucratic incompetence. The customs have 5 lanes to clear cars so with the queue probably around 10 miles by the time we got to the front we find they have two lanes open. They make everyone open every door, bonnet and boot and don't touch a thing just stare miserably into the boot. You almost think they expect someone to open their boot and inside will be a large bag with "drugs" written on it! Once you've had your car checked you then go through the passport control who swipe your passport and then stamp your customs declaration and you're done so how this can possibly take 6.5 hours to do for 40 or so cars is beyond me, but hats off to the jobs worths they successfully did! You then get to do a similar process on entering Latvia who obviously go to the Russian school of ineffeciency for training. It really does your head in.

It is very easy to see how, with such glaring ineffeciency, it has taken the Russians so long to get the recent forest fires under control and having used up two full days on our visa just getting in and out of Russia it doesn't make us want to rush back.

Still, we are now plotted up by a lake side on a campsite in Latvia. Yes a campsite, with other vans and caravans, its a lovely setting and very peaceful but to me it feels a bit of an anti climax being back in 'civilisation' it feels like our adventure is over and we are both tempted to just drive like mad and get home. But we are planning on having a couple of days to chill out before deciding what we do and where we go next.

Farewell to Moscow

2010-08-09T14:08:00.001+01:00

Like Napolean we left Moscow in smoke a bit earlier than planned. The smoke seemed to have booked in for the next week so we decided we'd leave two days early. We've seen most of what we wanted to and will hopefully get another chance to visit in the future.

So yesterday was our last day in the city and we spent it at the fascinating Museum of the revolution. There's a helpful sheet in English for almost every room and it was really interesting to see how the revolution changed the way of life of the average Russian. We thought it was a bit too rosey eyed view of the past and it was certainly hard to beleive some of the really poor areas we have driven through used to have standards of living that the museum displayed. If they did they must have actively gone out and destroyed all the evidence of the past once communism fell. It reminded me slightly of the intourist Tours from my childhood where everything in the Soviet union was wonderful and everything outside was awful. As a couple of examples, there was a model of a glamourously dressed woman at a restaurant table with a bowl full of pineapples and other fruit and a huge cake described as a normal person eating out. When we came the only fruit you could get - even in the Beriozka shops (tourists only) was not fit for animals let alone posh restaurants. And further on the cause of WW2 was laid at the feet of the west for appeasing Hitler without a word of mention of Molotovs pact with Ribbentrop, the Russian invasion of Poland or Finland. But havings said that it was overall an excellent museum taking you through contemporary Russian history.

And apart from a quick visit to the monastery where we were camped for the last 9 days this morning, that was Moscow! We left late morning and said farewell to the french caravans that had turned up the day before and then drove 300km and we are still in the smoke! Its much clearer but there is still a very noticeable haze but fortunately no smell.

We've loved Moscow, it is truely beautiful city and we are sad to leave it but as for the people, we won't miss most of them at all. Nearly all the Russians we've met here in the service industry are miserable, rude and grumpy. There are a few exceptions of course but generally anyone in the service industry not employed by an American company seems to go out of their way to be obnoxious. We were told this was a left over from Soviet times, but shop staff, cafés, restaurants, museums, transport staff, police almost everyone we've had contact with is grumpy and rude. Even our hotel this morning when checking out was so rude Linda nearly hit the girl! And that is at a Christian hotel - peace, love, understanding and @~#! off and don't come back!

This is really odd as ALL the Russians without exception we have met outside Russia have been extremely helpful kind and generally lovely people. Perhaps it was the smog?

Lenin blinked!

2010-08-06T16:45:00.000+01:00

When we came here in 1972 we went to see Lenin and I thought he blinked! Well this time he looked pretty wooden to me but Linda reckoned he blinked, and we both got told off for talking! We've had a few days of good clear skies and a few days of haze and then one of smoke. On the good days we've managed to get round pretty much everything we wanted to see, the Kremlin and its churches which were fantastic, the armoury with an excellent audio guide and some amazing jewel studded treasures, faberge eggs stunning bibles and silver and goldware that would make either of my sisters in law green with envy! It really was an excellent museum and the value of the objects on display must be astronomical! When you see all these things it makes you have a great deal of sympathy with the revolutionaries. We've been hopping on and off the metro to gawp at numerous stations and there extremely impressive architecture. It is a wonderful underground museum in its own right but the fact that it is so efficient is a tribute to its design under the Soviet era.

St Basils was a real surprise for us as it is in fact numerous little churches in each dome and one larger (but still tiny) church in the middle with a small coridor linking them all together around the central church.

We've had afternoon tea (well a drink and a cake) at some nice cafés but the highlight was the Pushkin cafe which was like having tea at Versailles -and delicious too - but the adjacent pushkin restaurant made the cafe look like wimpys. It was an incredible place with everything covered In gold and the staff in period costume.

There are churches at every turn here and a number of monasteries too. Some are being renovated and these are very intreating as you get to see a before and after and can imagine them in Soviet times.

The All Russia Exhibition Centre was a huge show ground built for agricultural fairs in the 30s and 40s. It is something like the Worlds Fair at Ally Pally with a pavillion built for each republic showcasing their produce. The pavillions are in a variety of styles and must have been some sight in their heyday. The buildings remain impressive but they and the gardens are full of funfair stalls and small stalls selling all sorts of stuff. The hammer and sickle look down on the Panasonic logo and its actually quite sad. To walk up the steps in front of the gargantuan central temple like building and then enter it only to find you are in Blackpool tower surrounded by tacky stalls is a real let down. We loved the buildings and the enormous fountains and statues but felt the park deserved a better fate. We did though in true communist leader style enjoy being biked around the park in a rickshaw. The Ferris wheel in the park is 73m high - that's big - and we thought it would give us a great view over the park. Perhaps it would have done but as we both hung on for dear life with our eyes closed we will never know! The seats for the wheel were completely open and your feet dangled into oblivion.

The cosmonaut museum has very cleverly been built under a wonderful statue of a rocket streaking into the sky. It was built after the monument and houses all sorts of capsules from missions and models etc. Very intersting but all in Russian.

And then there was the day of smoke. We had a good plan for this, we will visit stations and museums. First up Tolstoy - closed for technical reasons, then onto the ice sculpture exhibition - closed for work, onto a station- closed on this line so we had to retrace our steps and get to it on another line. By then we had headaches from the smoke even though we had masks and couldn't face going to the Sakharov museum so headed back to the safety of Taffy and our heath Robinson air purification system we had rigged up which amazingly is pretty effective with the van no longer smelling of smoke! One amusing scene today was of someone taking their mask off to have a cigarette! Bizarre.

Can you see Mos..cough anywhere?

2010-08-06T09:51:00.001+01:00

On our drive up from Volgograd we saw quite a few fields with stubble burning in progress. Some fields had got out of control and burned nearby trees and hedges and one field - not a stubble burn just waste ground - was ablaze right next to a petrol station. The flames were literally within inches of the forecourt and the Russians were happily filling up taking no notice! We didn't see any foray fires and all the crops in the 1000km drive looked very healthy.

The foray fires outside Moscow though have been getting worse and this morning we got an email from the British Embassy in Moscow saying a state of emergency had been declard in the Moscow region and warning us about the smoke. Not that you need an email to notice the smoke, the van smells like we've had one hell of a bonfire in here and it is hazy even iinside.

Outside the church bell tower about 100m away is barely visible. There is little wind and Linda has been taking her inhalers as a precaution. Your eyes sting slightly and your throat gets sore. The trouble with the smoke is it comes and goes, yesterday it was a blue sky baking got day but the evening before it suddenly became Smokey in a couple of hours. Today it is really bad and if it stays like this tomorrow we will probably head off. Today we're staying indoors as much as we can and visiting museums and stations - though even they have smoke in them.

Moscow

2010-08-04T17:29:00.000+01:00

Our campsite In Moscow is at the Danilevski Hotel 2 stops on the metro from the Kremlin and in the grounds of the Danilevski Monastery which is the Vatican of the Russian Orthodox Church. It is very quiet - no loud music is allowed here - and the hotel has pictures of bearded priests on almost every wall. We overlook the gardens and one of the churches here, it really is a perfect spot! it can only be booked through Perestroika Tours in advance of arrival and we are very pleased we did this. Its also about 300m from the metro and a western style supermarket which makes you realise why Moscow is the most expensive city in the world when you find crisps and loaves of bread for £5 a pack and All Bran for £10 not to mention the £2000 bottle of vodka!

We've now been in Moscow for 3 nights and are relieved we've allowed ourselves 10 days here. It is very hot - unusually so we are told, and there is an awful lot to see and do. We've so far been to a museum workshop to see some modern sculptures by Alexander Burganov which was very interesting though we were the only people there. We've visited GUM which wasn't at all like it was when I came here with my parents in 1972 now being full of designer shops and boutiques with surprisingly few customers. It is still a beautiful building, or more precisely 4 long narrow 4 story buildings running parallel to each other covered with a beautiful arched glass roof.

One thing I remember with affection from my childhood visit was the drinks machines on Red Square. These were very popular with Russians and had a glass which you washed out and then put into a little hole, inserted a coin and a fizzy drink was dispensed. You drank it then washed your glass and put it on top of the machine for the next customer. Rather unsurprisingly these are no longer here but GUM has little carts serving fizzy flavoured water which we told was the same. There is now a choice of flavours (all mixed like a sodastream) from bar like optics and each flavour is in a different primary colour. I went for green which we were told was the original flavour (though I can't remember the colour from my visit) and it did indeed taste like the drink I remember! Linda wasn't impressed, though I suspect this had more to do with the colour and the fact that in her mind anything coming from an optic should by rights be alcoholic.

Its been a festival day on Monday celebrating the parachute divisions and Moscow was crowded with ex-soldiers dressed in blue and white striped vests, that often failed to cover their beer bellies and their berets waving flags and in various states of inebriation from tipsy to completely drunk. They've not been any problem to the tourists but the soldiers at the eternal flame had to point their guns at them to get them to climb down from the monument and the police have looked extremely intimidated, especially the group of police who challneged a small group of raucous soldiers who promptly produced a Kalashnikov! It's actually quite fun to watch as the police usually have an arrogant swagger and look at times a bit SS like in their high peaked caps but we decided we'd not be in the city for the evening as even by mid morning some of the parachutists were wanting to take on the armed soldiers in fights. We instead headed off to the sanctuary of the Cathedral of Christ our Saviour, a rebuilt copy of the original blown up by Stalin in 1931 to make way for the Palace of the soviets. The palace was started but war saw work stop and it never recommenced eventually being turned into the largest outdoor swimming pool in the world. The palace would have been 400m high with a 100m statue of Lenin on top and gigantic. Its small hall would hold 6000 and the large one 25000! It is ironic that all of the stalinist skyscrapers that were built around the city - they resemble the building in ghostbusters - now face the new cathedral and not Lenin! The church itself is masive and has a large gold dome in its centre. Its based on the Hagia Sophia and inside its use of gold is breathtaking. Underneath the churcb is another huge church again with plenty of gold but more frescos on the walls and ceilings.

In front of the cathedral is a new pedestrian bridge that crosses the river Moskva and is a favourite place for wedding photos with the cathedral in front of you and the Kremlin to your right. Weddings move from here Further up river toward the Kremlin and another foot bridge which is lined with small metal trees. These trees are bare branches with no foliage just hooks through the branches where couples place a padlock with their names and wedding date on as the leaves. The trees look wonderful with the multitude of shapes colours and sizes of padlocks on them and there are about 20 trees in all.

We've also been for our obligatory Indian where we were told that corruption here is still a significant problem but the Mafia has all but vanished. We've been to the Red October Chocolate factory which is now a complex of bars apartments And restaurants with sadly not a chocolate to be found anywhere and walked for miles and miles gazing at the architecture everywhere. We've seen the enormous statue of Peter the Great hanging on to the rigging of a ship Peter Pan style (which we thought was Columbus at first) and visited numerous churches. And of course there is the metro, a fabulous monument in its own right it is functional and beautiful too with numerous stations being worth a visit for the statues, stained glass windows, chandeliers, mosaics or the grand patriotic themes. Our journeys are often broken by us having to hop on and off at a station for a quick look around before continuing on our way! We've only been here 4 nights and have another 5 to go but we already feel we need more time here to do everything!

Visas & Russian Bureaucracy

2010-07-30T17:08:00.000+01:00

Russia is famed for pointless paperwork and the enthusiastic nature of its policemen to fine you (and keep the proceeds) so we have been VERY careful to drive below the speedlimit and not attract any unwarranted attention From the Police. We've been stopped a few times - like everyone else at checkpoints - and found the police to be generally helpful and polite. We've only had one lot try to fine us (for going over a white line which apparently is regarded here as a much more serious offence than say fiddling the country out of a few billion and then buying a football team) but just stick with the "No and sorry I don't understand" and after about 5 minutes they move on to some less obstinate individual. You see them fining people every few miles as you drive. It seems that if you are guilty you get to sit in the police car and watch a video of your crime on the police laptop. And Russians are like moths to a flame for it. They speed happily, don't wear seat belts, undertake and use their phones with gay abandon and all the policeman has to do is stop the next car that passes and its sure to be guilty of something. Its like shooting fish in a barrel.

The bureaucracy though is in a league of its own and God knows (or possibly even he is flumoxed) how they will get tourists and competitors In to Russia for the winter Olympics effeciently.

You need a visa to get in - fair enough, you must apply for it less than 90 days before entry in your country of residence and must state the dates of entry, ok a bit more tricky for us but we managed it as we have 2 passports each, you must then register your visa when you arrive AND stay in one place for 3 nights. If you don't stay anywhere for 3 nights then you don't need to register your visa until you do, and indeed hotels won't register your visa unless you stay 3 nights, but if you arrive in Moscow after 9 nights and haven't registered your visa like us, then you will be fined because you haven't registered your visa because you flippin well couldn't cos they won't let you! But, the great thing about Russian bureaucracy is that it seems unable to cope if you say no. The police backed down from their fine and once we said no to the fine for our visa it was registered no problem and the staff became smiling and helpful from the grumpy and sullen they had started with. It is baffling.

Oh, and we tracked down the tourist information office in Moscow but it closed last year! Unbelievable, this is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, so they close the tourist Information office, that's Russia!

Roads, boredom and the Kamkaz

2010-07-29T15:39:00.001+01:00

We're now half way in our three day drive to Moscow and today the scenery has gone from long straight roads with the odd bend and fields full of Sunflowers and wheat with trees interspersed to trees interspersed with fields full of wheat and sunflowers with the odd bend on long straight roads!

The roads in the morning were pretty poor and we bumped along losing one speaker, some interior trim, 2 broken shelves in the fridge and the hose for the windscreen washer along the route to vibration damage. Its not so much one bang that does it its more attritional. So at lunch we stopped for repairs and found the afternoon roads much better. One thing that never changes on the roads here is the ubiquitous Kamkaz truck. These dinosaurs of the road are a product of the great Soviet Manufacturing Industry and consequently look like they are made from the leftovers of a large Airfix kit , badly I might add, and have a flat out speed of around that of a cyclist, empty. Load them with watermelons (as almost every truck is) and give the truck even the slightest hint of a hill - a signpost will do - and the engine starts to belch out smoke that a destroyer would be proud of and its speed drops to that of a granny on a bike. It would probably double the speed if the exhaust pointed backwards with the amount of fumes that come out of it at the speed of a jet engine. It must take them a week to get to Moscow - if they ever make it, we passed 63 broken down vehicles today, one every 5kms.

Moscow tomorrow!

Stalingrad

2010-07-28T15:03:00.000+01:00

The drive from Elista was through non stop steppe - slightly undulating, grassy and monotonous. You can see Volgograd from miles away on the horizon gradually getting bigger and bigger. The city stretches for over 60km along the Volga, but you can almost through a stone over it widthwise as it hugs the land between the mighty river and a bank of hills that run parallel to the city. Its a 2 hour drive from top to bottom or a 5 minute drive from side to side!

As we had approached the city the memorials to battles pased on the roadside with a Katyusha rocket launching truck mounted on a plinth and on the edge of town an enormous soldiers helmet by the side of the road. According to our guide book the only things to see here are the locks on the Volga which we passed on our way in and the numerous war memorials and museums to the 2.5 million people who died and were wounded here - twice the current population but the city is a great example of Soviet city planning as planners got to build the city virtually from scratch. Wide streets, plenty or parks, grand buildings and monuments to the great Patriotic War in the center surrounded by a never ending army of tower block apartments. The center has a certain appeal, though it is by no means beautiful, but the residential districts look dreary and cramped. Even the river front to the Volga which is simply huge is more like yarmouth in the 60's and quite a contrast to Rostov. There is a nice park that leads from the centre with an eternal flame down to the waters edge guarded by two small Roman temple like structures but this fronts on to a half hearted fun fair. Further down river is a dreadful 70's building resembling a space ship, all concrete and glass and smelling like a public toilet that is almost too hideous for words.

What Volgograd does do superbly is commerate the Battle of Stalingrad and it does this all over the city. There are sculptures - one of a cut away bomb falling onto a mother and child was particularly poignant - plaques, graves, museums and even pictures of Lenin on roof tops lit up like Vegas! But its two most moving places are Mamev Kurgan or Hill 102 as it was known in the war which dominates the city and river and the Flour mill. Like many other parts of the city It changed hands numerous times - the central station was captured and lost 4 times in one day - and has now been made into a huge memorial to the Soviet soldiers, both male and female. The hill is surmounted by Mother Motherland a 80m statue of a woman weilding a sword, a church with the traditional gold onion domes and an underground eternal flame about the shape and size of a very large circus tent adorned with names of soldiers, emblems of presumably regiments and the hammer and sickle. The flame is guarded by soldiers who are relieved by goose stepping colleagues. Behind the Statue is a commerative wall with some token graves in front. The wall is about 40m long and has 7200 names on it. It would need to by 5.5 kms long to get just the names of the Russian dead on alone.

The battle is full of obscene records and startling stories: the bloodiest battle of all time, the most casualties, the shortest life expectancy for a new Soviet soldier -less than a day, the highest sniper kills for one sniper at over 400, tanks being driven out of the factory unpainted and manned by volunteers straight into battle, female anti aircraft batteries holding the Germans at bay for days, on the 14th September 1942 the 13th Soviet Guards Division arrived and assaulted and captured the hill by the 17th all 10000 of them were dead, of the 91000 Germans who surrendered with field Marshall Paulus's 6th Army only 5000 made it back to Germany, one incendiary bombing raid killed 40000 civilians, a long time before Dresden, the pre war population of 850000 was reduced to a post war population of 1500 Dig into the hill even today and you still find metal and bones from the battle. It is mind boggling depressing to Think about.

But, the memorial does justice to the memories of those soviet soldiers who perished here in a dignified and moving manner.

The stalingrad museum is located next to the remains of the Flour Mill which has been left untouched. Its also opposite Pavlev's house, a memorial to a Sergeant and his platoon who held the apartment block against repeated German attacks allegedly killing more Germans than died in the fall of Paris. The museum is an all Russian affair with the only English being the telegram from Coventry to Stalingrad sending its admiration for the heroic city from the worst bombed British city: its interesting and the Panorama painting of the battle in full flow is very detailed and moving but it could do with a few bits in English or German here and there.

There are no memorials to the Germans here, and it took us a while to find that there was one 35km out of town in the middle of nowhere. It is a mass grave to 50000 Germans their names listed on blocks stewn across the land scape and opposite a mass grave to Russians with helmets laid out on headstones some with bullet holes in them. It is nicely kept, though the German side is more overgrown, and very moving.

We left Volgograd in stifling heat and started on the 1000km journey to Moscow. The roads are pretty poor and we barely manage 40mph so its going to be a long journey!

Not that left!

2010-07-24T17:42:00.002+01:00

Not that left!

2010-07-24T17:42:00.001+01:00

We left Rostov in a hurricane and it felt like we were driving on two wheels for the first 100kms as the wind swept across the flat land. Our route was planned to keep us off the main roads and take us on the small roads to Volgograd. These by and large have been of reasonable standard and cut through the now Fenlike farmlands in a series of long perfectly straight roads with a bend every now and then to keep you on your toes. There is very little traffic, few villages just farmland growing sunflowers and some kind of wheat. After a day and a half the farmland begins to give way to steppe and we start seeing cows and horses grazing it.

We've had a few problems with the sat nav since we got to Russia and it was convinced the other day that we were North of Moscow! It must be taking lessons from Linda. Poor Lindas had a hard time of it this trip, the curly scripts of Georgia and Armenia at least had English translations occasionally, but here in Russia most signs are in Cyrilic' occasionally in what seems to be a cross between Latin and cyrilic and only rarely in plain Latin. Add to this womens uncanny ability to say left when they mean right and mens unerring ability to to turn right when told left, only to find that really was left and we thought we had ended up far from our intended route when we arrived in Elista and were confronted by a town full of Budhist statues and temples and people who looked Tibetan! This is however the largest Budhist city in Europe, probably the only one too, and the temple is a wonderful sight with bhudas and pagodas surrounding the main beautifully decorated temple. Every few minutes a wedding party turned up for photos and we spent a lovely couple of hours watching them pose on the manicured lawns and waterfalls.

The town center is a clash of cultures with a Budhist park and temple being overlooked by a statue of Lenin who looks somewhat miffed, either at the temple of the 50 or so games of chess going on beside him! Even The bus shelters are the shape of temples and the information boards look like prayer wheels. But it was a very cheerful place with lots of children and families wandering around, we really liked the place.

Not that left!

2010-07-24T17:34:00.000+01:00

Sochi Bribes and Roads and Rostov

2010-07-22T19:36:00.001+01:00

Sochi was not at all what we expected. The difference between Turkey and Sochi is quite astonishing. It took us a while to find our way out of Sochi and we passed glitzy hotels restaurants and bars in abundance. The roads were lined with trees some palms and loads of fairy lights. It was almost like a fairy land though probably more like Vegas.

We had tried to find the camping but it is very mountainous here and the road winds up and down with numerous hair pin bends and even at midnight is heaving with traffic, so in the end I took a lead out my dads 1970's book of his Dormobile experiences in Europe and stopped and asked a taxi driver. They had no idea about camping, but he led the way to a 'stayanka' - guarded parking - where we spent our first night.

The coast road is probably the most winding up and down road we have ever driven on, its also the only road here as on one side the Black Sea sparkles and the other the mountains loom large covered in trees. So, when they have an accident or resurface you spend hours and hours covering a couple of kilometres - which is what we have done today. What makes it worse is the Russian car drivers who just go down the oncoming lane (or over the pavement) and push in. We witnessed numerous near misses and a few stand offs where an oncoming lorry just blared its horn and made them reverse up the road. So for 11 hours driving we covered 147 kilometres!

We have passed loads of camp sites where the tents are so crowded you couldn't walk between them. The beach is shoulder to shoulder and any flat sand area (lots of the beach is shingle) is used as camping too. It reminds me of Glastonbury, especially when you realise there are no loos! The developments of hotels and the towns have been very modern and quite nicely done. It is though 100 miles of a holiday camp, not really our cup of tea but far superior to anything we had expected. Its amazing how quickly things have developed since the fall of the Soviet Union.

We had been told horror stories of the amount of bribes we would have to pay the Police here and as they have checkpoints every 100km or so and a patrol car every 5 we had thought it may cost us around $1000! The Turkish/Russian couple we met said they had to pay around $200 per trip to Russia - about 600km round trip, but we have passed lots of speed traps and police at the side of the road none of whom have shown any interest in us. We've even stopped and asked for directions and they've been polite and helpful. Early days though.

The roads here are a mixture of western standard dual carriageway and 3 lane bone shakers. The older roads are like being in a bomber in heavy flak as Taffy bangs and crashes over the tarmac and then suddenly lurches sideways as we slip into a groove left by lorries, it can be very noisy and the road is very hard to read as it actually looks to be a smooth surface but in fact is a top layer laid on broken up road underneath. This is gradually being replaced but in a country this size there is an awful lot of bone shaker left!

450km later We arrived in Rostov! We had left the Black Sea and the foothills of the Caucuses behind and passed through hundreds of kilometres of farmland that resembles Suffolk on a MUCH bigger scale. All the agriculture is mechanised and the fields huge and interspersed with lots of trees but very few towns. Much of this is Cossack country and we stopped at a Cossack museum and memorial on the crest of a hill dominating the surrounding landscape. We naturally arrived in Rostov as usual at rush hour. We got stopped by the Police who checked our papers and then told us where to park but we couldn't find it! We narrowly avoided being rammed by a Lada which overtook us, we think he was trying to get us to hit him or was totally off his trolley on vodka but taffy is very responsive and we must have looked as though we were going to turn over from the front as we swerved!

After a stressful exit of Rostov we found another stayanka on the motorway and plotted up for the night exhausted.

The next morning the stayanka owner acted as our taxi and took us into Rostov on Don. He stopped on route at some of the main sites here for us to have a look around and left us at the cathedral which was a lovely onion dome affair. Inside it was full of gold, gold candle holders, gold icon frames, and 3 majestic gold Altars. It was quite a change from the depressing monastery interiors of Georgia. That really is the one site to see here and probably isn't actually worth a trip to Rostov to see but as we were here we enjoyed it. We spent the rest of the day walking sitting and watching the world go by. It was lovely! Rostov is a quite European city in the architecture and certainly not what we expected. It seems prosperous and has some lovely parks and a few gorgeous buildings. The river front on the enormous Don is pedestrianised with cruise boats and cafés bars and restaurants and hundreds of people promenading up and down it.

So our first few days in Russia have been quite a shock. No corrupt police (so far), overall quite good roads, lots of signs of westernisation and prosperity and even the houses look Pretty decent. Huge malls and Hypermarkets (fresh milk and cheddar!) seem to by common to any larger town and the Lada is outnumbered by 'Normal' cars.

From Russia with Love

2010-07-19T21:32:00.001+01:00

We were in bed and asleep by the time the ferry left Trabzon and we awoke to blue skys and calm seas, wtich was very welcome. We are right in the center of the ship and despite the mill pond of a sea its hard to walk straight in the van as the ferry rolls from side to side at any opportunity. We'd hate to be on it in heavy seas!

We arrived in Sochi at around 17:30 and then began the somewhat slow process of clearing customs. First the footies are seen at the bottom of the car deck ramp but not allowed to set foot on Russian soil, then almost like starting a horse race they are given the signal and they rush to form a queue at the customs building losing one or two of the elderly over the edge of the quay in the melee. Next foreigners in cars are seen. Strangely there were 3 German guys all travelling on their own, and two Turks all of them on beasty bikes plus a Georgian car with a Russian girl and a Turkish partner who could only communicate in English! The common language was English and 5 hours after everyone else had long gone home we were the mobile canteen providing food and drinks to all.

In the end after dropping the colleague routine in we were cleared at midnight! We went 10m and couldn't get any further as the car park was jammed and had to wait another 20 minutes for the cars to get moved but tired and in the dark and in the Las Vegas of Russia with the whole place heaving with cars and people and thumping music blaring out of every building glitzy lights covering every inch and palm trees swaying gently to the beat, we had arrived!

Captains log, supplemental...

2010-07-18T21:57:00.001+01:00

We've now been on board for 8 hours and had a lovely time talking to a Russian and a Syrian muslim about everything from Palestine to relationships to politics! It was fascinating to hear their views on us and the west. One thing always seems to Be constant though whoever we talk to in the muslim world and that is how much they like Britain and the west. As it was getting on for midnight we said our goodnights and returned to a lashed down Taffy and checked the ships onboard automatic navigation passenger information system (ie looked over the stern) to see how far we had got and sure enough we are still tied up in Trabzon!!

The best laid plans of mice and men....

2010-07-18T15:00:00.000+01:00

Its certainly made for an interesting 24 hours trying to sort our passage to Russia out. It all really went wrong with the Poti to Novo ferry. We had enquired about that as soon as we arrived in Georgia and got the provisional sailing date of 15th July. We had applied for our visas based on this but the shipping company decided to cancel this sailing and the next one won't sail until the 25th (if it actually sails at all) so we were left with two choices, sail to Ukraine or go on the rust bucket from Trabzon. Oh, and inbetween this we tried the land border! The problem with Ukraine is that last time we went we had problems getting in due to our weight (Taffys that is not Lindas!) and it was only after a phone call to Kiev that we were allowed through the controls. We don't mind this at a land boundary but it would be awful and expensive if we had this problem in a port and got refused entry as we would be made to ship out again. So, Trabzon it is!

We drove down from our overnight pitch high in the Caucus mountains where the overnight temperature was 8C back to Batumi where its a very muggy 30C. In the morning we had the heating on, in the evening the air con! And to make things more fun we parked up again at another TIR brothel and actually had drinks with the pimps and girls who helped us fill up with water and then had the tour of Taffy. We are beginning to think that all TIR truck stops are brothels.

This morning we crossed back into Turkey after visiting Gonio a complete Roman wall around a field that once was a town similar in nature to Caister outside Norwich, but probably the most enjoyable museum was yesterday in Gori - Stalins birth place who have a museum built specially to commerate the better aspects of Stalins life. It is full of pictures and gifts from other countries and we were told by the guide, in terms that reminded me of intourist Tours in 1972 that the Chinese still adore him. The museum is built around his house he grew up in - literally, and has his 88 tonne armoured train in the courtyard and in true Reed fashion I sat in his chair and started giving my orders, which Linda dutifully ignored as usual!

We got to Trabzon, found our ticket office and had it all booked in around 5 minutes. The next day, after one final night in turkey we arrived at the port and loaded on to the weather deck. We had millimetres to spare all around as we parked up towering over the pasenger deck and will have a fantastic view of the rough seas as we cross.

So farewell from Asia!

The long and winding road...

2010-07-17T12:07:00.000+01:00

We hopefully said our last farewell to the brothel and began the drive north up the Georgian Military Highway to the Russian Georgian border. We have decided to try to cross the land border right in the centre of the caucuses rather than drive to Poti and get the ferry after numerous lorry drivers told us it was the best way into Russia. They told us that despite it going within inches of Chechnya it was safe and so we approached the embassy in Tblisi to check. They said they had had no reports of problems but would advise against non essential travel to this area, however they would consider our driving to Moscow as essential so that was fine then, if somewhat confusing! We phoned the Russian embassy who said the border was open and the road safe for us to travel. We also spoke to Russian lorry drivers who said we would have no problem and this morning picked 2 Russian hitch hikers up who had been through the border and also said it was open, safe and our onward route to Moscow would also be safe. You can't do much more than this so we're off to Chechnya! (well not really but pretty close). Naturally enough when we arrived we were told that the border was closed to Brits! So its back to Poti for the ferry at the weekend or early next week. Whilst this is a bit disappointing - we will only get 3 weeks in Russia now on our visa- it was our original plan and we had left some sites to visit on the way back such as Stalins home town which we will now get to see.

The drive up the military highway was stunning. It was Austria in 3D supermarionation! The road wound its way through valleys with the small hills giving way to large ones, then these being replaced by mountains and in the distance the 5km high Kazbeck mountain getting nearer and nearer. We past a wonderful church sat right on the edge of a picturesque lake (man made) that could grace the cover of any travel magazine and eventually the road began to climb in a series of hairpins into skiing country with very pleasant, if slightly chilly temperatures of 27C.

The biggest surprise of the day however was passing an Italian Motorhome convoy heading south. They looked even more shocked at the sight of us than we did of them!

It has been so hot here, we've been having 3 showers a day at times and Taffy gets up to 40 inside on some days after a long drive with the engine acting as enormous heater. So the cool air in the mountains is very welcome indeed! We are fortunate that our bedroom is air conditioned and we've been able to have the air con on every night to cool us down nicely (around 20C) but it is usually in the 30's by the time we get up outside. It's odd, but in some ways we are finding it harder to cope with than Egypt!

As the road gets more into the mountains it goes over the pass at 2700m and the road is very poor and runs above the lingering snow hiding in shady areas! The road has avalanche galleries but these are only used in the winter as they are in such poor condition so you drive beside them. The mountains all around you are a mixture of colours with grass and snow being complimented with red washed out by the iron rich mineral water and a large area of cream coloured calcium deposits where a broad stream is slowly depositing its calcium forming a meringue like hard wall behind the stream.

The last town on the road north was Kazbecki which is overlooked by the beautiful Tsmini Church high up on the hills above. The town is more of a village and is the first place we've seen evidence of numerous tourists with backpackers using the town as a base for walks up into the surrounding mountains.

A little further north after 11km of dreadful road the border post is contrastingly brand spanking new! We asked if we were allowed to cross here and were told "No English Passports" - just goes to show how reliable advice from embassies is! So we made our way half way back to Kazbecki and found a lovely bit of old road overlooking the thundering river below and pitched up for the night.

Tsminda Church is a two hour walk from Kazbecki and naturally enough we set off and it rained for most of the climb up. Its a really steep walk and quite strenuous but the view from the top is amazing. We had brought a picnic and as we reached the top it stopped raining and we were able to sit and enjoy our picnic huddled together to keep the wind off just like we were in England!

The priests in all the churches and monasteries we've visited always appear sullen and grumpy. they have long unruly beards and their black cassocks are often grubby. They remind you more of teachers about to tell you off for walking on the grass than representatives of God!

The church was a typical church for this region, a separate bell tower and a small stubby square cross shaped chapel. Outside they are beautiful often with ornate carvings and writing on them, but inside they are generally dark and depressing with numerous dark icons on the walls and a solitary throne in the middle for we presume the priest.

We walked down the hill in some sunshine and no rain and were dry by the time we reached Taffy. Parked in front of us was a German Motorhome which we had passed in Armenia! We had a chat to the owners and then set off to spend the night in the pass surrounded by mountains.

We opted for a day off in the morning and caught up on cleaning and repair jobs and defrosted the fridge whilst Linda played on the computer all day! And as the weather closed in we had a roast dinner with stuffed onions, yum! Our lunch had been brought by a couple who stopped to say hello and then returned later with two trays of food! We also had the Germans stop in to say hello and some Dutch tourists as well as dozens of other people stop to take pictures and peer through the windows and door. Just a normal day then!

Halt who goes there?

2010-07-17T12:05:00.000+01:00

Our plan for Georgia was to visit the David Gareda monastery which is close to the Azerbaijan border in the desert like step. We had been told Taffy would easily navigate the dirt road route but when we got to the road we couldn't even get on to it because it was so bad. Queue the arrival of the local drunks in their 4x4. They said there was a tarmac route over a huge hill that would lead back to the dirt road missing out the start section which had been rendered impassable for us by flood damage. They drove off erratically speeding up the hill and round the hairpin bends like mad teenagers. They must have been in their late 50's and were so far over the limit that a blood test would be hard pushed to find any blood! It was the steepest hill we've ever been up and we crawled up in first eventually getting to the top. There is no way that our old van would have been able to get up the hill and we were pleasantly surprised that Taffy took it in her stride.

The road down was just loose stones and we debated whether to carry on or not. The drunks waved us on but eventually we persuaded them that we would not follow them and they broke out the vodka! I sadly declined a drink saying it was due to religious beliefs and they told me that vodka was their religion! They waved goodbye and sped off down the track swerving and skidding as they went. That's when the Georgian Special Forces arrived.

We had wondered why there was a perfect tarmac road in the middle of nowhere, well it led to the Georgian Army SAS basic training camp and the base commander had rolled up to find out what we were doing there. The Major looked every inch SAS complete with gun tucked casually into his trousers almost like he grabbed it just before leaving the camp to intercept us. Not that he needed it, he could easily have killed us both with one hand whilst doing the Times crossword! He asked where we were going and we explained and he said no problem (he spoke 6 languages) he would give us a military escort to show us the way and he would come along too! I explained that we felt Taffy would not be up to the road and so we wanted to camp somewhere, he at first said there was nowhere we could camp within 4km of the base, but taking pity on Linda's horrified look that we may have to drive another 4km of terrible roads, he found us a spot on the helicopter pad on the edge of the hill. The track to the pad was overgrown and had a steep sideways slope, so much that Linda got out and walked it but we were rewarded with a perfect camping place surrounded by 500m sheer drops on 3 sides and fantastic views all round! The Major stayed and chatted to us for an hour or so and even arranged a driver to take us to the monastery in the morning.

The trip to the monastery was a 10km drive over a poor track and we were pleased we hadn't brought Taffy. The monastery was beautiful, it was a mixture of caves, chapels carved into the rock and red block built buildings nestled into the side of a hill surrounded by Russian step. The step is like dartmoor but a lot hotter. There are very few trees and little grows but a thistle and hardy grasses and flowers. It is an uncompromising place and just the type of place you train soldiers. We noticed the soldiers here in full kit doing 4km runs followed by an ambulance. With it being 40C 4km must seem a lot further. The monastery was used for target practice during Soviet times and was in fact one of the first places to have demonstrations to protect it in the Perestroika times. Ironically it was then used by the Georgian military for the same thing leading to more protests and its eventual protection and reuse by monks.

The guide books say that high above the monastery there is another chapel on the peak of the hill and a series of cave chapels with some wonderful frescoes in them on the far side of the hill face. It says some fitness is required for this hike and half way up the masive hill, which really was an aspiring mountain, we found this to be an understatement. It was absolutely baking in the low 40's (we found out later from the Major that the government had issued a heat warning!) and the climb had to be done on very slippery dusty slopes that at times required you to go on all fours! Oh, and did I mention the scorpions and poisonous vipers? We had brought plenty of cold water but by the time we reached the LOCKED chapel we were overheated and worn out. The view was tremendous and we spent a long time in the shade of the LOCKED chapel recovering from our climb. Eventually we were joined by some young Americans who had used up all their 500ml of water and asked if there was any up here! We let them have some of ours but to go anywhere in this heat with so little water was crazy and it was ironic that all of them worked in a local hospital as volunteers.

The climb down was if anything more scary than going up. The 6 inch wide dusty dry path stuck resolutely to the edge of what now was clearly a small mountain with absolutely sheer drops off the side. At times the path had collapsed completely and you had to scramble up the rock face to get over the hole. The cave monasteries provided some shade but with graffiti and collapses were shadows of their former selves and to be honest not worth the 3 hour climb. The one bonus from this hike was that Lindas back held up fine.

So we returned to Taffy drank gallons of water and made our way to our familiar camp of the brothel in Tblisi for the night to be swamped by lorry drivers with offers for tea and coffee like long lost friends.

Return to Tblisi

2010-07-16T08:18:00.000+01:00

We left Yerevan and headed to see the two UNESCO sites just south at Echmiadzin. One is just ruins and a bit disappointing but the other is the Vatican of Armenia and is a complex of a small cathedral surrounded by gardens and priests accommodation buildings and various other churches dotted about the town.

The cathedral seems to be working non stop with people coming in to kiss the icons and light candles as well as get children baptised. It seems a bit odd to see the baptism happening whilst others pray or do the rounds of the icons and all the while tourists mingle freely with everyone.

We also visited the treasury which contains the actual spear tip that pierced Christs side, 2 pieces of the cross and a large section of Noahs Ark! It seemed as though only people bearing the travellers Bible - Lonely Planet who treated these pieces with some scepticism!

Leaving the town we actually felt as though we were on our way home as we now head north for a few thousand kilometres till Moscow! We weren't done with challenges though and headed for 'the worst road in Armenia' to visit Garni temple and Geghart Monastery. The road winds its way up the hills outside Yerevan and passes a view point with a huge Arch which is supposed to frame mount Ararat and Yerevan. The haze over the city however leaves the snow capped top almost floating freely over the clouds and smog below.
The road from here turned into a plasticene road twisted by a toddler. It dropped suddenly in places almost as if the child had snapped the plasticene and then jammed it back together, further along it was twisted and made Taffy lean at alarming angles. It was slow sea sick making going but only lasted a few miles before a proper surface resumed. Cunningly all the local road side vendors congregated on the slow going section and you almost had time to lean out of the window and pinch items as Taffy swayed between the stalls!

Garni temple is a fantastic reconstructed Roman temple sat on the edge of a cliff overlooking the chasm below and well worth the trip. The view alone was breathtaking and we sat for hours just gazing at the river and mountains around us. The temple was in a small walled city and 4m of the 14m high wall remain together with the gate. We camped right outside the gate and had all the local stall holders come in for a tour. We ended the evening at a local bar with half pints of a fizzy red wine overlooking the gorge with just the crickets for company.

Early the next day we drove on to Geghart, a working monastery carved out of the cliff right at the end of the road. We were so early that it hadn't opened which must be a first for us! The church was like most here dark inside and somewhat depressing but there was a service going on which was interesting to watch. The caves had been carved into small chapels with wonderful carvings in them and apparently were unusually carved from the top down.

Our final stop on our fleeting visit to Armenia was at the border where the usual disorder and chaos rained. You queue to get into the compound but cars just wiz around you to jump the queue it is as usual bedlam. When you finally make it inside you park and take your papers to the Customs Broker who has a steam powered PC in an unair conditioned room with 20 people all pushing and shoving to get their papers seen first. It was 40 outside and probably close to 50 in the tiny office. Eventually the PC can take it no more and crashes due to the heat! The official clears the room but we having got to 2nd in the queue stand our ground and he let's is stay in whilst the PC reboots. Eventually completely soaked to the skin we emerge ready to get our passports dealt with. To do this you drive to the exit barrier and then get out and begin round two of the Argy bargy push and shove that is Armenian border control. Of course at this point there is no point in shoving past the person in front as no one is going anywhere with Taffy blocking the controls. This naturally makes no difference to the locals but we were fortunate to have 2 very big American Armenians who were behind us and made sure we got dealt with promptly. And that was it , 10 minutes later we were sailing down the road in Georgia and headed to the David Gareda monastery and an encounter with the Georgian Special Forces as we managed to drive into a military camp!

Yerevan

2010-07-11T15:43:00.000+01:00

The crossing into Armenia was pleasantly hassle free. The Armenian officials were helpful taking us from point to point to get the visa, Taffy x-rayed, the insurance, the Eco-tax and finally to make the payment into the bank for all these things. There was no corruption and all the officials tried to speak the odd word of English. The controls were still the baffling ping pong array of going from pillar to post to get various stamps etc that seem to be a hang over from Soviet times.

Once in, the scenery again instantly changed as we left the rolling hills behind and began climbing into the foothills of the mountains. The road follows the river passing through increasingly impressive gorges and very depressingly poor villages. It seems to be the poorest country we've visited so far but perhaps that is only this area. Small towns have large derelict factories crumbling and overgrown on the edge of town, an obvious Soviet remnant and unemployment in this area is very high. The buses have cylinders on the roof for presumably gas and look 50 years old or more. They drive along with whole panels missing from the engine bays and rust seems to be an integral part of the design.

Many of the homes look abandoned, though we think some are still lived in. The corrugated roof sheets have slipped in places and gaping holes now gaze skywards. Nothing has been painted in years - except a crash barrier on the road that had a team of men painting it black and white - and window frames and doors are often rotting. It is extremely sad.

The scenery however is almost from a fantasy film and you half expect to see a dragon fly past being chased by knights at any moment.

Our first stop is Hagput Monastery which sits on the top of the valley gazing out over the river below and the hills opposite. The hills don't gently drop down into the valley they just seem to vanish below and the hill tops are flat enough for a Soviet town full of ghastly high rise blocks to sit right on the edge looking like a backdrop to a Doctor Who set.

The Monastery is UNESCO listed but has no entrance fee or floodlights at night and apart from some grass that has been cut looks neglected with grass growing out of the roof. Inside the swallows nest freely and the floor has circles of droppings below their nests. It is dark, damp and depressing and we thought a sad state of affairs for a 1000 year old treasure. There was however a service going on in one of the multitude of buildings with a priest and 3 choirboys being the only people present. In its pomp 1000 monks lived here and ran a school and library. Hopefully as Armenia develops they will spend money on this place. At present everything seems to have been done through USAid. One benefit of the lack of official support here is the stalls that surround the monastery entrance. All the items for sale are hand made locally - often by the people selling them - and there is not a sign of a made in China sticker anywhere. The vendors speak some English and say we are welcome to camp there for the night surrounded by cows and chickens, they are as usual lovely people.

The next day we carried on to Hageputs sister monastery Sanahin. This is also perched high up on a hill but is more compact and we liked it more. It is next to a graveyard and at the front is a large plaque perhaps 2m x 1m to a family killed in a car accident. The plaque has life sized head portraits of the 4 people who died and a picture of a lada flying off the edge of a hairpin bend into the canyon below. The girls were teenagers and it is deeply saddening but people still die in droves here on the roads, and ironically as the roads improve the faster they die. That said they are far better drivers than Georgia.

We reached Yerevan around 5pm and it was still 39C. We had left the canyons of the Debed River and driven up through mountainous hills (!) which were covered in a carpet of green but very few trees. The road had passed dozens of groups of beehives by the road selling honey and Taffy had thinned out the bee population quite considerably by the time we started our descent to Yerevan. As a backdrop to our drive the 4km high snow covered mountain Aragats stayed on our right for miles and miles.

Yerevan is another sprawling city and is one of the more attractive examples of grand Soviet architecture - except the blocks of flats which are still crammed together and sag and lean like old men. The central Republic Square, once adorned with a statue of Lenin is now a monumentally huge roundabout. But it is flanked by an impressive array of buildings gardens and fountains. All over the city similar grand buildings,many in need of attention, abound.

We decided we couldn't face a day here as the heat was overpowering so we opted for an evening stroll instead as guide books didn't rate it too highly. However we again were surprised by how modern it was. Apart from the Soviet buildings there isn't a lot to see, but there are hundreds of outdoor cafés and by 10 the place is heaving with families and couples all dressed up strolling about. The cafés congregate around the opera house and are really luxurious with sofas pianists chandeliers and uniformed waitresses all around the pedestrianised square and lake. Like Tirana it knocks spots off anything we have in England and it is such a contrast to the depressing tower blocks on the edge of town.

Even the old Soviet statues and monuments here have been accommodated into the city plan and the large cascade - an enormous series of staircases in gardens leading up to the obligatory Mother Armenia statue on the top of the hill high above the city is brightly lit and bustling with people.

We met an Armenian American (why are Americans always from 2 places? I must remember to describe myself as Saxon English to the next one we meet) said that 10 years ago there were rolling blackouts here and 15 years ago no power at all. He said the development here had been at a phenomenal pace but it is by and large done sympathetically to the existing architecture.

We had been directed to park at a minibus terminal on the edge of town with the lorries. We got a taxi back and had to convince some locals that we knew where we were going before they would let us get into the taxi as they were very concerned for our safety going to such a "not nice" area. We had a very peaceful and Uneventful night with the other trucks.

Cocktail Time

2010-07-05T18:54:00.000+01:00

What a difference a day makes!

A night to remember

2010-07-05T11:46:00.000+01:00

On our way to the border we got stopped for the umpteenth time by the police, but this time the policeman was a little Hitler and tried to steal our camera as it had pictures taken in Armenia on it! Quite how when we haven't been there and have passports to prove it I don't know. Perhaps we'd popped Taffy in a rucksack and climbed over the mountains took a few pictures and then climbed back! His policy was to try and separate me and Linda but we wouldn't have any of it. He wanted to take Jon into the office and told Linda to stay in the van. We refused and said we would both come. He promptly let us go and stopped someone else.

As it happened this would turn out to be the most pleasant experience of the day.

We got to the border at around 4pm and it turned out that there had been an error in our paperwork on entry (not by us) that had left the computer thinking we had already left the country. There was much shouting at us and at people on the phone and then it was decided we would have to return to our point of entry to leave as it was their error! Fine, but passengers of vehicles around here are cleared on foot, so Linda had already got an exit stamp so wouldn't be able to come! I said I wasn't going without her and that as it was their error not mine we shouldn't have to return to our point of entry. They called their chief and an hour later apologised and said we could leave and all had been resolved.

Taffy was not at the car checkpoint where this happened but at the lorry checkpoint. They said their colleagues had been informed and we could proceed happily and kept all our entry papers. I asked them to come with us back to the lorry hall and explain this but they said it was not necessary. So we got back to taffy drove to the checkpoint and they wanted the papers that the other checkpoint had kept! They made us reverse out of the hall and park up again. Eventually they agreed all was in order and we could depart and we broke down!

Taffy wouldn't start as it had apparently a flat battery. We managed to get a jump start after an hour and found that now the on board computer was having kittens and wouldn't let us engage a gear. We daren't stop the engine as we wouldn't be able to start it so tried to get the MAN service line to send a tow truck. Their is a huge dealer in tblisi 50km away so this should be easy. The service centre couldn't find Georgia or contact any garage. We asked the customs for help and they wouldn't, nor would the police or army. They all seamed quite happy for us to Spend the rest of our lives there.

The gardens at the complex were watered by 4 young men who tried to push us up the hill and over the border but fat Taff is too heavy for that but they did arrange for a truck to come and tow us. The truck came and hooked up and got us to the control and the officials wouldn't let it go any further - even 20m to get us on the gentle decline so we could roll to Georgia. So we rolled back to park up again. The very helpful gang of gardeners tried again, this time getting a Mercedes van to come from Georgia through the controls and hook up with us and tow us back. It was by now 4am.

There then followed a very scary tow through the mountains to the garage in the dark, but by 7.30am we were safely in the MAN compound and by about 1pm it was fixed. We started Taffy up and found that the fuel filter was full of rubbish - the fuel here is poor grade and so the fuel filter was changed as well- for an extra cost of less than £2!

Traumatic eh? Not a bit, this would all have been a breeze in the park on its own. What made the night easily the worst experience of our lives was the attitude of the Azerbaijan officials and in particular the boy soldiers. They stole food and drink from our fridge, tried to steal aftershaves and perfumes and demanded Azerbaijan money - which we fortunately didn't have. They spent the whole time learing at Linda and making sexual gesture and even openly masturbating with a hand down their trousers. They constantly talked at you clearing making sexual comments which we fortunately couldn't understand and all the time their officer, the police and customs just laughed. It is easy to see how atrocities occur in war when you see human beings getting pleasure trying to frighten other humans for pleasure, particularly when they are vulnerable like we were. But, we are seasoned travellers and damn it, British. We are the masters of self control with the stuff upper lip and all that and it us vital that you do not react, because that is what they want you to do. If you do then arrest fines and seizure of taffy would all be options open to them, so we remained calm, and tried to organise the tow. Although Jon had to deal with all the people - they won't deal with women, presumably because they are far too high up the evolutionary chain, Linda in particular, had the brunt of the attention from the toy soldiers and didn't react once. The officials were the closest we have ever come to what it must have been like dealing with Hitler's SS in Germany. You are totally at their mercy as law and orders and rules and regulations are meaningless and the power of the gun is the ultimate decision maker.

You will probably be horrified reading this but this is the sanitised version of events. Re-reading this I feel it barely scratches the surface of how frustrating, repulsive and genuinely frightening it was to both of us.

It seems that the people of Azerbaijan and the officials are two different peoples. With the exception of the point of entry officials we saw the police at many places taking bribes and at the customs hall it was free for all with officials basically taking whatever they wanted from cargo and drivers backed up by machine gun toting teenagers. Corruption us endemic here but it us most obvious in the uniformed officials. The non uniformed people on the other hand were some of the nicest we've ever met and we have invitations to return to stay with people which we sadly are unlikely to make as not surprisingly our desire to go through that again is non existent.

Contrast that with our experience in Georgia on our arrival in the early hours of the morning. The police gave Taffy on tow an escort through Tblisi, the policeman at MAN opened the compound early for us to be towed into and then the garage bought us breakfast and one of the English speaking staff spent hours talking to us. After we had been repaired - one of our battery contacts had corroded and come loose with all the banging roads- something that with the speed of diagnosis, appears common here, we parked up near the UNESCO Jvari church and got woken up at 1am by the police telling us it was not safe. We said we'd move in the morning but apparently this wasn't good enough as 4 uniformed officers turned up a little later to ask us to move again. They all spoke excellent English, were not after bribes and were genuinely concerned about our well being. They even gave us a mobile number to phone if we encounter any problems here. So we ended up back at the tblisi brothel we had stayed at on our first visit and slept for 15 hours solid, our first sleep for 40 hours! Georgian police a few years ago were as corrupt as Azerbaijans. But they had a peaceful revolution which reduced the police numbers dramatically and paid them more whilst making them more professional at the same time. Azerbaijan can change if it wants too, and it certainly needs to but corruption there, we were told starts, as with most non democracy's, at the top and it is hard for corrupt systems to change as the people instigating the change stand to lose the most.

Before going to bed yesterday we managed to find a proper supermarket that seemed to import everthing from Germany and we had a great shop - bags and bags of shoping replacing all the things we've found hard to get and getting luxuries like croissants and fresh milk, they even had Strongbow and Cheddar and we have woken up to a lovely sunny day with croissants for breakfast and feel refreshed and raring to go again. We're not quite ready to face Armenia yet -another corrupt country, but I'm sure after a couple of days we will be!

Meanwhile, today is a day of rest and Monday we are back to the MAN garage as the computer is still getting the occasional error and as their hourly rate appears to be about £3 we thought we'd sought that here not at home! This will be Taffys 5th visit to a MAN dealer this trip and 7th to a garage. German engineering!

Sniper Alley

2010-07-02T06:07:00.000+01:00

Last night was the first night we'd found it hard to find somewhere to camp. The main reason for this was the non stop road works which made getting off the temporary road very difficult. In the end we stopped at a police checkpoint and they said we could camp there. At 7:30 the next morning they were banging the door wanting the tour with the chief examining the fridge and asking for a beer! Corruption is rife here and whilst I cleaned my teeth I saw through the bathroom windows two pay offs take place. Having said that all the police ever ask for from us is something English (for which we have pens) or occasionally beer, and they are always helpful and let us fill up with water too.

We decided we couldn't face another morning of roadworks so headed towards the border with Nagorno Karabakh! This area is another FCO no go area due to sniper fire but as Taffy has bullet proof windows.... It also is one of the most beautiful areas of the country. The road ceases some miles from NK and there are checkpoints from the army along the route, our guides say you are unlikely to get past them if they know you are foreign. We drove to the first checkpoint and met a young man who spoke excellent English who told us the army were happy for us to continue on the road if we wanted to but he said that you couldn't get much further and the best views of the mountains were before the checkpoint not after. So we turned around and pulled off onto a grassy layby to plot up. The view was amazing. We are perched about 500m up the side of a hill overlooking a valley below with the near 4km peaks of the caucuses just behind the hills opposite. The peaks have snow on them and in the valley people are picnicking and others harvesting crops by hand. The hills are tree covered and the road here was lined with cafés and picnic sites. It certainly doesn't look like the snipers have put anyone off here! We had a lovely afternoon reading, planning the Armenia section and doing nothing and then the tour parties arrived! Not conventional tour parties but families out for the day. The first family- 10 in a Lada- stayed an hour, gave us flowers, took photos and invited us back for tea. The next group all men 10 minutes and the next lot overlapped with them - more men. Then another family, more photos a few less brave groups just wandered around the outside and then our final double family group who stayed from about 8 till 11! They took photos and invited us for tea and to come back to see them another year. Their 15 year old daughter was the translator And it was a wonderful night. We were exhausted when they left! In total we've had about 60 people tour Taffy today.

We will cross back Into Georgia and then Armenia in the morning and so will lose our blackberry email as it seems neither of these countries have support for uk phones. So you may now have the next 12 days in peace, unless we find a wifi connection that is!

Linda hurt in volcanic eruption!

2010-07-01T05:48:00.000+01:00

We left the fire temple and, as it was a bit hotter, headed to fire mountain! No tiny eternal flame like fire for us on a day when it was 35C, let's have half a hillside of raging fire like an effect from a theme park!

Fire mountain is a hill that was accidentally set on fire 50 years ago and is still merrily burning away. Obviously its not the hill that burns but the gas that continually escapes from under ground. The fire itself is about 20m long by about 2m high and burns much like a gas fire on Full pelt. It must have been a great sight to have seen the poor person who accidentally lit it all those years ago probably throwing his cigarette but down and half the hillside explode as a result!

We spent the night there and came and sat and watched it burn late into the night and dearly wished we'd brought some marshmallows. The cafe was the usual dingy falling down industrial unit which looked in desperate need of demolition and we made the mistake of having tea there as we were overnighting and ended up with more food poisoning!

The next day we headed north to the coast to the resort equivalent of Caister on sea. The beach was lined with restaurants and bars many of which looked nice apart from the rubbish everywhere you looked. This was a bit of a shock as everywhere we had been so far in Azerbaijan was rubbish free. The main town though was a typical Soviet mess. Wide streets and plenty of parks, trees and monuments were the highlights, the crumbling mini tower blocks derelict factories and decrepit roads the low point. In Typical Soviet fashion one whole coastal strip was lined with factories whilst the housing lay behind and where you did have the houses near the beach elsewhere you diverted the lorries onto the beach so they could bypass the town, so we found ourselves driving on sand past bemused holiday makers!

We arrived at the petroglyphs at Qobustan early afternoon and had the whole UNESCO site to ourselves. The carvings on the rocks are in places very clear and have been linked to the carvings found in Norway. The site is high above the plain below and looks like someone dropped a load of very large Lego bricks in a pile. Most of the carvings are done where the blocks have almost formed caves. You can almost picture the artist at work as you admire them.

The car park here overlooks the plains and the Caspian below so we asked if we could stay the night. We were told yes but had our first experience of an attempted con. After having arranged a taxi to see the mud volcanoes the next morning the guide told us we must move Taffy into the museum compound as we would not be safe outside it. I thought this highly suspicious as we had already asked 2 different museum people if we could camp there and they had said "No problem" so I asked him how much this would cost? 10 manats - £9. So we said we would be fine where we were and had a lovely peaceful night with a tremendous view!

After our peaceful night we visited the mud volcanoes by taxi- the track probably would have been ok for Taffy but we would never have found them on our own. They are, as the name suggests, mini volcanoes made from erupting mud forced out of the ground by gas. They have little mud flows down the side of them just like their real volcano brothers and bubble hiss and spit almost constantly. They are fascinating to watch and poor old Linda got a bit too close and got splattered by one of the spitters!

We had decided to head back to Georgia via the inland border with Iran and follow the lower caucuses mountains rather than head over the boring scrubland of the interior. Unfortunately the road was closed and the detour was an unsigned trek across really poor roads. We decided to stick to the main road which up till then had been perfect - naturally it was then being replaced and had road works for the next 250km! We spent a large part of the rest of the day crawling along temporary roads the equivalent of and English farm track! We'd have been better off on the dirt roads.

The Caspian

2010-06-30T16:59:00.000+01:00

After 7927 km we have reached the Caspian. Sadly we didn't come over the brow of a hill and sea the blue waters sparkling in the distance it was more we got off the metro and could smell it - not salty sea air with chips and vinegar from Aldeburg(oh that sounds sooo good!) - but a pungent oily smell. It wouldn't matter how hot you were here in Baku you wouldn't want to go in the water, at least not without the RSPB there to de oil you when you got out. Actually its not that bad, and certainly not as bad as the smell suggests, but you can clearly see lots of little ball bearing size droplets of oil floating close to the shore. That said the rest of Baku is breathtakingly shocking. We have driven through villages with no mains water, stopped to give shepherds water and driven over roads that needed replacing centuries ago but Baku is a cross between Florida, Cannes and Vienna. It has the most impressively decorated motorway you've ever seen, with the 8 lanes of tarmac being guarded by a series of gorgeously decorated walls and mini towers. The centre though is totally immaculate. No litter, every building either completely renovated or in the process of being done, perfectly manicured gardens, an enormous tree lined boulevard along the sea front which runs for at least a mile and an old town with a UNESCO castle wall and palace that is exquisite. The streets are lined with buildings straight from Vienna mixed with a lovely mix of modern glass buildings. There are plenty of pedestrianised areas with numerous parks and all sorts of fountains in a multitude of shapes and sizes. I can't imagine what someone from a more remote area thinks when they see Baku. We loved it!

The new town is littered with large impressive and grand buildings. Theatres, the opera house and the literature museum were just a few highlights. Whilst the museum has romanesque statues lining a first floor balcony with islamic blue tiling, the theatre is a contrasting new glass building sitting opposite an imposing opera house. The old town by contrast is cosy with narrow alleys ancient walls and the UNESCO site. The Maidens Tower - part of the old city wall - provides a great view over both parts of the city and a much better view of the oil rigs off shore which are half hidden by the curvature of the earth and loom like an approaching army. At the top we met 3 Brits working in the industry and one of them came from Oulton Broad!

We enjoyed a long walk around the walls of the old city which look like Disney were brought in to design them, and a stroll down the sea front, a nice mexican where we watched England lose to Germany and then another stroll along the promenade till about 10pm. With the heat here - it was 34C and humid - people emerge around dusk and stay out till well after midnight, toddlers and all. It was fascinating to sit and watch, it is almost impossible to tell you are in an Islamic country. There are families, couples and groups of both men and women promenading with only the very occasional headscarf on view and only 1 burka. Despite being in the capital we only heard one call to prayer and mosques are hard to spot and seem few and far between. People seem much more interested in putting their posh clothes on and going out. Young people in particular could just be transported to London and they would fit right in. The bars all serve alcohol and it seems to be as much a part of their lifestyle as in western society. Whilst girls can where short skirts and not cause any furore men can't where shorts without causing offence which is peculiar. It is however like all Islamic countries a male dominated society, and in my opinion much poorer for it. With the exception of the centre of Baku, there is little effort made to make shops, cafes and streets in general pleasant. Cafes are normally a male preserve and look like a dishevelled garage with a few plastic seats in. They are often dirty and bland. Shops too are muddled and unkempt. No effort is made to 'sell'. It is just assumed you will come there and spend money because that's what's always happened. There is no competition, they are just places to go and get coffee or groceries. You feel that if women were being taken to the cafes it is almost inconceivable that they would remain the same. I can't see many women putting on a posh dress and being happy going to a dingy greasy spoon like cafe! Its not that they need to become Starbucks, just that they need some paint, a few plants and some non plastic chairs! Havings said that the people are extraordinarily friendly and kind. Without exception the men on buses will always give up their seat for any woman, and everyone waves and smiles at us as we drive by. They invite you for meals at a drop of a hat love to talk to you even if all they can say is "What is your name" and are so pleased to get a chance to have a look in Taffy. There is no envy or jealousy when they do this, just a child like sense of delight, wonder and innocent joy. They take photos and laugh. They climb up to the bed sit in the chairs and wow at the fridge. They ask to see the TV go up and down. Its great fun!

Our campsite in Baku was just a huge section of Tarmac outside the fire temple. This was where the locals came to stroll, play football, ride their bikes and chat well into the cool of the night. On our second night here we arrived back at Taffy at around 11pm and had to walk through the whole village to get to Taffy. No sooner had we unlocked the door and we had the local kids at the door all saying "what is your name?". They were followed by their mums who came in for a tour and then the teenage boys and girls - some of whom looked longingly at the picture of Ben - we dished out sweets, surprisingly as many to the cool teenagers as the toddlers, had our photos taken and all laughed non stop even though all we could establish was our names! It was the icing on the cake for a wonderful day.

Nearly there!

2010-06-27T04:30:00.000+01:00

The Khan's Palace at Säki was our first tourist site in Azerbaijan and it is certainly an impressive way to start. All that remains of the Palace is one small two storey building made out of wood and stone. No glue or nails were used in its construction and it took 2 years to build and 8 to decorate - and before you ask, no it was way before my sister in laws time! It is covered in highly detailed bright colourful paint work on all but the floor and originally this would have had a carpet that reflected the patterns on the ceiling. The painting is of flowers, animals and scenes from battles and hunting and is incredibly impressive. The windows are made of thousands of small wooden blocks with coloured glass in each block, they are then joined together to make an entire wall of colourful windows, all made without nails of glue!
Sadly all of the rest of the palace inside the castle walls vanished under communist rule and they nicked the only remaining carpet too which is now in St Petersburg. It is an amazing building and almost worth the trip just to see it alone.

We stick to the edge of the Caucuses as we headed onto Baku and the scenery is a merry-go-round of different landscapes. One minute you will be driving along a french country lane with large deciduous trees lining it, then you'll be in the New forest driving through tunnels of trees and bushes with cows wandering the road. Turn the corner and you emerge into the open corn fields of Ukraine before finding yourself in a bleak Yorkshire moors landscape. All the while the towering mountains loom ominously off to our left, the clouds gently building for the evening storms. It is a fascinating drive. We spent the night at a cafe by the confluence of two of the numerous rivers that snake down the mountains on route to the Caspian. The rivers are no more than streams at the moment, a dark grey colour, but the river beds themselves and large banks sometimes are 100m across or more. When the snow melts these will be mighty rivers and after a torrential night of rain we see just how powerful when we drive through a village underwater from the overnight downpour. The diggers are clearing the river bed and the entire villages menfolk stand on the bridge watching them work. There's not a woman in sight so they all either drowned or are clearing the mess up on their own whilst the 200 men supervise the two diggers! It was very sad to see how much damage can be done when the river was not in flood.

Our next overnight was also at a cafe and we did our usual of asking if we could stay overnight and then buying a drink in the cafe. We decided on the Azerbaijan wine which was ok and got talking -sign language and the odd word of Russian - with the manager and his brother the cook. There was also a lady washer up, two male table cleaners and an older guy whose role we never sussed. This outnumbered clients by 2 to 1 all evening! They were again lovely people. We ordered the wine and got to try a cassis vodka free, we ordered some nuts and diced apples too. We dolled out 2 of our England baseball caps and were rewarded with tea and honey cherries and the next morning a going away bottle of wine and brandy! It almost makes you not want to give them anything as they are so generous when they already have so much less than us.

We arrived in Baku before lunch and were confronted by the sight of thousands upon thousands of nodding donkey oil wells interspersed with pools of oil and a smell of hydrocarbons. The air is hazy and your throat gets a slight sore after awhile but you do get used to it. It was also the hottest day of the trip so what do we do? Head for the Atesgah Fire Temple where natural gas vents had had a temple constructed around it hundreds of years ago possibly more. Naturally all the staff wanted to come out and see Taffy and then they went to get their friends to bring back to have a look too. It was great fun as they giggled and laughed. Again, they were such nice people.

What are we doing here?

2010-06-26T09:33:00.000+01:00

After our previous nights storm we both woke up tired. Linda's back was still giving her a lot of discomfort and the continuous bumpy roads weren't helping it either. I'd got food poisoning in Tblisi and the local Georgians were not 'the warmest most welcoming and lovliest people in the world' that Lonely Planet had promised. They were in fact sullen faced, highly suspicious of us and seemed decidedly grumpy even aggressive. we have never been to a country and felt less welcomed than in Georgia. This attitude was whether we were in Taffy or not and despite the gorgeous scenery we were wondering what the heck we were doing here.

We headed to the border and had Taffy cleaned along the way by 'mister Grumpys dad who even though he was obviously charging us way over the odds didn't have the decency to look happy about it. The police at the border made Linda get out of Taffy and walk alongside it as if to say "and don't come back"

The customs were completely baffled by our documents and spent half an hour passing them from one to another with all the urgency of a hibernating tortoise. They did however let Linda get back in Taffy. Home seemed a very long way away and if we could have pressed a button to be instantly transported to Norwich we would have done. And we still had the Azerbaijan customs to deal with and we suspected they may not let us in anyway!

To get into Azerbaijan you need a visa. To get a visa you need a letter of Invitation and we had got this all sorted out before we left. When you bring a vehicle into the country you have to pay $0.50 per cc of engine size plus 18% of the value of the vehicle on deposit which allows you entry for 30 days. This is to secure the duty should you sell the vehicle whilst in Azerbaijan. Or, you can get a 3 day transit entry which is free. Its a bit odd and I hope no one ever notices the tiny flaw in the scheme.

We had decided we didn't like the idea of the huge deposit so asked for a transit pass to Iran! After a bit of pleading - we have to get Visas in Baku- and the old colleague routine, a free tour of Taffy for everyone of the staff including the head honcho they decided that "for the beautiful lady" we could have 30 days free! They were absolutely lovely people. They found an English fixer for us, helped us fill all the forms in, made Linda come into the air conditioned office to cool down and sit down, offered us coffee and changed money for us at better than the bank rate. They were even lowthe to accept a bottle of English Cider as a way of thanks. It was a breath of fresh air and just what we needed.

The country again immediately changed. The villages and towns were more prosperous and the people waved at us with huge gold toothed smiles on their faces blowing kisses and clapping. Half a mile away we'd felt like we were at a funeral - possibly our own- and here we were at a wedding! Amazing.

To cap it all we spotted a lake and drove off to find a quiet bank underneath the towering Caucuses. The local herdsmen came up with their sheep, water buffalo and even a horse to shake our hands and say hello. It was perfect and just as we left the next morning a local cycled up and invited us home for tea! Now that's what we call friendly people!

Who needs roads?

2010-06-24T15:54:00.001+01:00

The weather we've had in Tbilisi has been nice. Sunny mornings and cloud later on meaning we never boiled. It has been around 30C and even when we wake up it is usually mid 20's, but come the late afternoon it always looks as though we are about to have a tremendous storm but we never do. Leaving Tblisi in the morning was no different and we swept past Tbilisi on the 'M25' bypass along with the occasional truck and car gazing down on the sprawling city below as if we were in an aircraft. Here we passed our Bonus Sea on the eleven seas tour "The Tblisi Sea" this is in fact a resovoir but the maps here refer to it as a sea! We decided not to chane the tour name to reflect this!

The road hugs the top of the hills and in places had simply collapsed into the valley below. Where this had happened it looked like a giant had taken a bite out of the road. The rest of the asphalt was cracked and warped towards the gap and looked as though at any time it might slide on down the hill to reunite itself with the missing section. These bites don't look as though they happened yesterday and have concrete crash barriers round them to prevent you sailing into oblivion. We'd got used to these in Georgia but then we had a new challenge, the asphalt stopped and we were on a dusty track with large ruts and holes in it and we were down to first gear. It wasn't the best start to the day as we had 150km to go to the border! Fortunately after a few miles the tarmac gradually resumed and we continued in bright sunshine through some lovely scenery.

Our plan to get into Azerbaijan was to try the remote northenmost border at Lagodekhi around 10 miles south of Dagestan, another FCO no go area. The main border further south was reportedly full of traffic being the most direct route between Baku and Tblisi. The road north was good and we stopped at a lovely castle for lunch. The area is the main wine growing region and we stopped at a winery too, but decided to give the local plonk a miss when we realised it came in reused plastic bottles! We're far too refined for that sort of thing!!

The road skirts a finger of the Caucuses before dropping down into a huge flood plain at the foot of the mountain range that stretches from the Black to Caspian Seas. Most of the towns are actually in the hills and the road weaves its way along the side of these hills giving a spectacular view of the plains below and the main mountains opposite. It is a very small road and was a "three'r" in our road grading scheme meaning we could never get out of third. We have 6 gears and this is like 2nd for a car- slow going.

The houses that lined the road would have been lovely when new but most were in serious need of attention. They are all small two storey houses with the obligatory tin roof. They are set in mature gardens and almost hide under the canopy of trees. They usually have a balcony upstairs with ornate railings of wood or iron, usually with peeling paint. It looked like many no longer had running water as people were filling bottles at the springs and the network of Soviet pipes that runs above ground beside the street seemed to not be reliable. These pipes are evident everywhere the Soviet union controlled. They run parallel to the street and loop over each drive forming mini bridges. Like much Soviet design, they would serve a purpose cheaply and quickly whilst at the same time being seriously ugly. Most places we have visited with these pipes they are broken, missing sections or just ending in mid air. But here they are normally in tact and they look like they are still functional.

The road was lined with groups of men, young and old, near the springs, under trees, at cafés and just outside houses. Some were playing cards or Yat - a form of backgammon - or just talking. It was the middle of a work day so we assume unemployment here is high.

We dropped down onto the plain and it felt like we were a mouse making a dash across the dining room floor from one hole to another as we headed directly towards the huge mountains on the opposite side of the plain.

We spent the night at a small farm about half way across and had a stressful night with the mother of all thunderstorms going on on both sides of the valley. We were the only 9 tonne lump of metal for 30 kms and there was one scrawny tree near by which may have been a few centimetres taller. The storm lasted around 8 hours and was like a silent artillery battle between the two sides of the plain- Georgia and Russia. Volleys were exchanged every half second or so non stop for 8 hours but to utter silence. The storm crept either side of us and we didn't even have a drop of rain. Inside Taffy, with the blackout blinds down it was like a fleet of police cars were parked outside with their lights flashing. It was the most spectacular of storms and we later learned that it kept local residents in Saki awake all night.

Tbilisi

2010-06-23T15:23:00.000+01:00

After being woken by Daisy the calf mooing and bringing our early morning milk delivery we got a taxi into the city. We touched 100kph in the city centre and the driver was going carefully for Lindas backs sake. It was terrifying, 6 lanes of traffic with closing speeds of over 200 kph, in a city centre, with no seat belts on, one hand out of the window and the other holding the mobile and the obligatory fag, brazenly overtaking into the oncoming traffics lanes and he looked as cool as a cucumber. We were in the foetal position in the rear crying like babies!

When we arrived at the tourist information centre we discovered a unique aspect to their tourist services. Apparently the purpose of the centre is for tourists to give the staff information. Anything we asked them they didn't know about. They even seemed unaware of a tourist Petit train that plies the streets at speeds we liked the look of. In fact they googled everything we asked. All this with faces and attitudes straight out of communist times. Service with a smile it certainly wasn't. This in fact was becoming a trend for the city. Outside the city and especially in the autonomous republic of Adjara (Batumi area) people were friendly, here smile at someone and you'd get looked at as though you'd just sneezed on them. Wave at them and they reached for their kalashnikovs. Lonely Planet tells us they are about the friendliest nation on earth, well not here they aren't! A few of the younger people were ok and our taxi driver was nice, but Tblisi has to be the most unwelcoming place we've been to outside Chernobyl. Which is a huge shame because the city itself is gorgeous, even if crossing any road is like wandering accidentally onto a formula 1 track on lap 2. It is also a building yard - a bit like Berlin a few years ago. All the major hotel chains have bought up half derelict old buildings in the centre and are busy restoring them. The Marriott - where we had a coffee and sorted out our Russian visas- was simply stunning.

The main street if you ignore the motor racing is lined with an array of building types. Ottoman buildings have communist grand architecture neighbours and Parisian buildings sit next to central European styles. The street is lined with trees and benches and every few hundred metres fountains sparkle in the sun. Little child sized sculptures hide between shops and benches and Parisian kiosks sell papers and snacks. We thoroughly enjoyed walking up and down the boulevard watching the older folks snear at the young in their skimpy skirts and huge heels.

Away from the main drag the old town rambles down the hill to the river. We tried to go into a church here and despite being decently dressed and Linda having a shawl for her head apparently God wasn't seeing the likes of us that day! I wonder what Jesus would make of that? The area is a lovely mix of old ottoman buildings with balconies overlooking small winding cobbled streets. Many of the buildings look as though they haven't had any attention since they were built and sag and lean at strange angles. They are still lived in but the stares you get from the occupants on the balconies verge on the threatening. Smiling and waving has no effect.

Some of the streets have been renovated and are lined with bars cafés and restaurants. These are delightful, no traffic, sometimes grapes growing overhead and always sofas and comfy chairs sitting under huge parasols to keep the glare of the very powerful sun off. The old town streets lead to a fantastic new bridge over the river. It is extremely modern and has a swirling glass canopy curled like a sail flapping lose in the wind providing shade but at the same time being totally see through. At the edge of the old town sits a cluster of narrow pedestrian streets on two levels adjacent to the river and in the shadow of the fortress and the towering statue of Mother Georgia high on the hill above. It is full of young Georgians and tourists a like and about the only place we found everyone welcoming. Dozens of trendy bars and restaurants are crowded together here some with huge chandeliers and larger rich coloured sofas covered with scatter cushions on the street.

In the evening the city is brightly illuminated and the ugly TV tower that sits on one of the many hills around Tblisi, has a moving firework lights display with all sorts of colours racing up and down the mast and 'exploding' on the viewing platform at the top. It's an ingenious use of a Soviet relic.

We've really enjoyed Tblisi, especially with Linda being able to sit down every few hundred metres on a bench of at a cafe. But the walk up to the new cathedral that dominates the skyline was too much so we took a taxi. Our experience with taxis here has been frightening and baffling at the same time. We would negotiate a price before getting in and then normally find after a few minutes the driver had no idea where we wanted to go or if he did, no idea how to get there. Our first evening here we got a taxi home and the driver had to stop 3 times to ask for directions. We had shown him on a map where we wanted to go but it seems that no one is able to read a map. We are staying on the equivalent of the M25, we got home in the end, but not before we had stopped to ask another taxi driver where to go and his girlfriend had held my hand kissed me and told me she loved me!

The cathedral though is brand new and enormous. It is roughly a square in shape and layered like a wedding cake with the central dome rising to an enormous height and gold topped. Unlike other Georgian churches it is bright inside with the walls white washed. It is busy with locals doing the rounds of crossing themselves 3 times and kissing each icon in turn. Some people prostrate themselves in front of presumably the more significant icons and others kiss every icon in the cathedral. It is fascinating to watch but you do feel it looks almost superstitious ritual and in some ways reminded us of Islam.

So, stumbling upon a delicious Indian for tea and passing some posters of Wayne Rooney with 'My name is Rooney' on a British Pub we got our taxi back home to the brothel. This morning I went inside the motel to pay. The interior is like a police prison with metal bent and bashed doors leading to each room. The floors and walls are all concrete and are crumbling with some kind of water damage leading to huge patches of fungus like growth. The owners room had a TV a small bed and table and chairs in and looked like something out of Steptoe with all kinds of stuff littered about the place. You couldn't renovate this building, it looks like if you tried to paint the walls the merest touch of the brush would knock it all down like a house of cards. The abandoned buildings in Chernobyl were in better condition than this place. Presumably you rent rooms by the hour here because if you spent the night you might be absorbed by the fungus from the walls. For once we felt embarrassed at the luxury of Taffy, but with one Georgian being worth over $4 billion we shouldn't be the only ones.

The Badlands...

2010-06-21T12:05:00.000+01:00

We left the Botanical Gardens at Batumi in bright sunshine and to hearty waves from the cafe staff. The car park attendant looked particularly chuffed when we have him an extra 5 GEL. He had charged us 2 to park overnight, made sure we were tucked away for the night and buttoned up and introduced us to the local bobby. All for about 70p.

The road was OK but very wiggly. Georgian drivers are notoriously nutty. So on tiny roads winding up steep hills they tear past flashing their lights at the oncoming truck like phasers as if that will somehow make it vanish. I am sure that if we had another cost of paint on the front we'd have it scraped off by now! Georgia's not a tiny country but has very few roads. Imagine England, with just the A1, A14 and M4 as the only surfaced roads in the country. Add to that the fact that the large tracts of the rest of the country is a luscious green and where do you think the cows stand? Not by the road but on it. Do the Georgians slow down? Do they hell! The cars swerve inches past the noses and swishing tales of the animals who continue gently chewing away oblivious to the near death experience. It is little wonder that they have a low life expectancy (cows and people alike) with one of the highest accident rates in the world combined with the chain smoking.

The countryside along the coast is beautiful and very fertile. The towns though are often like scenes from a war film. The roads become almost impassable and the buildings are falling down. You do see some lovely buildings though and the unkind hand of communist architecture is only an occasional blight, not the wholescale obliteration we saw in eastern Europe. With a lot of money and considerable work this area would become gorgeous.

We left the coast road just south of Poti and headed inland to Tbilisi. The road passed through miles and miles of long villages joined seamlessly to one another. All a series of old 2 story houses with tin roofs and tin cladding over the walls. Its hard to judge the age but they all had well established gardens so may well be pre communist and would in their day have been lovely.

We eventually reached Khashuri- the beginning of what we have termed the badlands- and immediately came to what looked like a bombed out bridge, presumably from the Russian conflict a few years ago. A bailey bridge took us past the remains of the bridge piers which looked like they were in slow motion states of collapse.

We decided that asking the police if it was safe here would be insulting. The road was busy, well kept and had numerous police vehicles on it, so sod the FCO we drove on.

The road passed numerous refugee camps - housing those made homeless from Abkhazia and South Ossestia and eventually became a full blown motorway. The camps would not have been Kate Adie TV news material. They were neatly ordered rows of small single story houses resembling the British post war prefabs. They had large gardens, asphalt roads and most had a car. There seemed to be some kind of main large building at each camp, possibly a school.

We reached Tbilisi and being Lindas birthday in the morning found a quiet motel TIR lorry park to stay in for a couple of nights. We parked up at the rear of the motel which looked as though it should have been condemned a century ago. We overlooked a small field with daisy the calf not aware of how lucky she was to be grazing in a field! It was quite nice. During the course of the evening the Turkish lorries turned up and so did some questionably dressed ladies and It turned out to be a brothel! Happy Birthday Linda!

Nothing for it, it's back to Europe then!

2010-06-20T13:57:00.000+01:00

After 2 extra nights in our lay-by watching it rain and the dolphins consider becoming land species we decided it was time to head back to Europe. So, 40 minutes later we were jostling for positions at the Turkish border with a dozens of other vehicles. On the way to the border we past miles and miles of parked trucks. As we edged forward one car space every 5 minutes or so we thought it must take weeks for those lorries to cross the border. It was in the end pretty painless especially on the Georgian side but as usual the Turkish controls were bedlam.

Once again as we crossed the line on the map the scenery, houses and people all changed in appearance. Gone were the endless blocks of apartments crammed together and back came single story buildings. The dramatic backdrop of mountains that we hugged along the Turkish coast were replaced by lowlands and the plants became almost tropical. Palm trees and what look like mango and banana trees replaced the hazelnuts trees tobacco and tea. As for the people it was like going home. The men and women dressed 'normally' and there was a much more even mix of them. We'd got used to the cafés and beaches being largely an all male domain but that seems to have gone too.

Our first town was Batumi. We came to a roundabout and naturally picked the wrong exit and drove through the centre of the town. The roads ceased to exist and you drove on a mixture of potholes, mud and rubble. Taffy swayed around like we were in a force 10 storm but eventually after a few miles of this we took another wrong turn and ended up back at the first roundabout! The town itself was a falling down almost shanty town Affair with bustling food markets and second hand clothes stalls spilling over onto the muddy street. It felt incredibly poor.

We had another go at our roundabout and this time a couple of streets away from scenes form slumdog Millionaire we rolled up in Las Vegas. The sea front boulevard is immaculately kept lined with plants and palms, fantastic new 5 star hotels, pools, tennis courts water parks and a Ferris wheel. It is an impossible contrast to the shopping centre, but if it attracts the tourists it will bring the money to refurbish the rest of town. Some of the old buildings would shame Vienna. They are brightly coloured, with incredibly ornate facades and simply stunning. If this is a glimpse of the future of Georgia then it will be the new millionaires playground.

We found the tourist information and found that they had 'abolished' the campsite. We are rather hoping this was a bad translation rather than some Aldeburgh inspired initiative! They told us to try the Botanical Gardens who kindly let us stay here overnight. We staggered over to the cafe for a drink - the bar lady introduced us to her family, came in to see Taffy and gave lindas back a massage! And we had a bottle of wine for £4!

We've restocked with food where we had the whole store in stitches when I said 'moo' to get milk and for £9 got 6 bags of food including beer! The store owners family then came for the now customary tour of Taffy and we gave the eldest lad a bottle of Strongbow which they all loved!

The Police have been along to see us and told us to keep our windows closed at night and that they will keep an eye on us so we would like to say everyone here has been incredibly friendly and kind and indeed we would had we not had the misfortune to speak to the British Embassy.

We asked if we could have our visas sent back there. "No"
Could they tell us if the M27 was safe to drive on "No"
Well it says on the FCO site to liaise with the Embassy if you are going to areas on that route so can you tell us anything about these areas we should know "No"
They said that everything was on the web site. But it says on the web site to speak to you. Everything is on the web site. Hopeless. Now Mr Cameron, if you really want to save a few million why don't you abolish the British Embassies, after all everything they can possibly tell me is already on the website!

The FCO is notoriously safety conscious. If someone breaks a toe on a beach somewhere the FCO will issue a travel warning. When you read the travel advice for a country it almost always scares you half to death. When you arrive you usually find that you are made to feel very welcome and in fact feel more scared in London! Many seasoned travellers we have met now ignore the FCO completely. It cries wolf too often and its warnings lose their effect. We like to travel safely, but wherever you go there is always some danger. One of the things we find about travelling further a field is the warm welcome you get from the locals. We met a man today who had never met anyone from England, a boy who had never seen a map in English and all of them went out of their way to make us feel welcome. You certainly get the impression that if they thought it would be unsafe for us to stay here they would have made it clear to us. We find this local contact is a better indicator of how safe an area is, that and you own gut feeling- if it doesn't feel right we don't stop.

That said we aren't aiming to go to Abkhazia and south Ossestia the two breakaway republics in Georgia, but it would have been nice to have spoken to a British Embassy official who could have given some perspective to the warnings the FCO dish out.

So we have decided to stop and ask the police what they think when we get near the areas that the BE say we should talk to them about and then do what they say. If they think we are in any danger they will I am sure give us an escort or stop us driving there. Here ends the Reed rant!

Hold tight... Ooops!

2010-06-16T16:49:00.001+01:00

After a lovely night in our roadside plot up by the crashing waves of the Black Sea we were just having our customary tea in bed when the heavens opened in what can only be described as a storm of apocalyptic proportions. Within a few seconds the water was coming through the air con unit as if someone was pouring a bucket of water straight into the van. Clearly our tiny roof drains were totally inadequate and it was all hands to the buckets.

It is hard to imagine how much water was gushing into Taffy but suffice it to say I never want to go into a submarine! Quick thinking was required - that or arm bands - and having just been described in an email to Linda as a 'special breed' expected too.

A couple of Lindas friends have recently had man problems and been chatting with her on email. So our email has been full of certain statements about Men being born out of wed lock! So Linda thought she would defend me a bit - Hence the origins of Linda's statement. So I thanked her by promptly trying to kill her!

My new found ego fuelled by the "Special Breed" tag lept into action and I yelled hang on and drove the van forward stopping suddenly to jetison our on board roof top swimming pool. A sound plan I am sure you will agree. One oversight though being what Linda, two buckets in hand standing dead centre of the van, was supposed to hang on to and with what? So, all progressed well during the forward bit of our doomed journey but Linda continued forward as Taffy stopped and complete with 2 full buckets of water fell on the floor banging her back quite badly and as she couldn't move nearly drowning in the slopping water freed from the bucket. My title of "Special breed" having been held for a good 10 minutes was replaced by another which didn't sound so nice.

Anyway, Linda is now resting in bed and is just badly bruised and no serious damage (except to my title) has been done. We will be staying in our layby for today and we will see how Linda is in the morning.

PS. Some of you may feel it is unfair to poke fun at Linda when she is flat on her back, those of you who are married will realise its the only time! I did read all this to Linda before posting to the Blog and she laughed out loud, screamed and clipped me round the ear!

Still, every cloud has a silver lining - beans on toast for tea me thinks!

The Black Sea coast

2010-06-15T14:48:00.000+01:00

The drive along the coast to Trabzan is lovely. The road passes through numerous towns, some of which looked much nicer than Unye with promenades along the sea shore and cafés in parks with plenty of trees and grass. It is certainly much nicer than our guide book lead us to believe. It was in fact nice to be driving as today it is so humid and hot its almost unbearable. Putting the electric cable away this morning I had sweat running down My face in just a couple of minutes and was glad to retreat to the air conditioned luxury of Taffy. Its not the heat that gets you its the humidity.

We parked up in Trabzan with ease despite Rough guide saying its impossible to park there. I don't know what they were driving but it must be very very big if they couldn't park it!

We walked into town which was a jumble of houses and shops on the hillside with a very pleasant Centre with a few old buildings thrown in and a Burger King which did Veggie burgers! yum! We found a ticket office for the ferry to ask about our crossing into Russia for when we return this way in July and there then followed a discussion with various people about whether we would get on or not because of our height. In the end, as the ferry was in port, we all walked down to the dock to have a look!

When I say ferry you will need some help picturing it. Think of P&O's Pride of Dover and Pride of Calais only smaller, a lot smaller. Well this is more like Pride of Rackheath.... Only 50 years ago and after it had served in the Falklands war and then not seen a paint brush since the fire shortly after it had been refloated after it had hit a mine a few years back and you'll get the picture! It wouldn't surprise me if my Mum and Dad went on it in their Bedford Dormobile 30 years ago and even then it would have been old. It is a roro ferry though and we have to go on the top deck. There are only 2 decks and the ramp to the top deck takes up half the ship and it looks like they will have to clear chairs and tables away to make room for us. We will fit on with a few mm to spare I think but we will roughly double the gross weight of the ferry whilst at the same time blocking any view from the bridge. We are roughly 1metre taller than the funnels and will double the number of toilets on board! On the bright side we can sleep in Taffy - presumably because once on the top deck we won't be able to get out of Taffy without falling overboard! Suddenly Crossing into Russia through Abkhazia looks a safer route than sailing! Still all that's for July and we now know the price and can look to see if the ferries from Georgia to Russia are running again as an alternative.

After the port tour we headed to the Sumela Monastery up in the cool of the hills. We parked at the Monastery car park which was so sloped it felt like Taffy would capsize, so we took the opportunity of practising our abandon ship routines in preparation for our eventual ferry crossing!

Rain RaIn go away!

2010-06-14T17:33:00.001+01:00

If the rain in Spain falls mainly on the Plain, then the Torrents in Turkey target Taffy! By the time we reached Unye poor Taffy was black. The rain has followed us each day and even now on a lovely little campsite overlooking the Black sea a thunderstorm is passing by. The drive from Istanbul took 3 days and we are now about 2/3rds the way across turkey. It is a very big country. The road here is currently being dualed and we have driven over 500kms in non stop roadworks. We will never complain again about English ones.

The towns are all modern clusters of flats and don't look very appealing and the villages often look almost uninhabited or falling down. Some of the houses have wattle and daub type walls with holes in them and look like they could be anything from 50 to 400 years old. All these places though have numerous mosques. One town around the size of Stowmarket (20000) had 15 that we counted as we past through.

The mosques here haven't been as disturbing to us as last year. The call to prayer is quick a couple of minutes or so, and there haven't been any sermons over the speakers like we found in Egypt. They also dont seem to be as fanatically sung. They still wake us up at 4.30 though! When you are in the country they are, during the day, not unpleasant, but when you get to a town the staggered starts of each mosques calls and the fact that they always have their loud hailers turned up one setting too far so they all sound distorted the cacophany of noise is should we say an aquired taste!

The scenery has been ever changing. We've gone from flat lands to Small mountains and been through valleys filled with paddy fields that looked more like Vietnam! We still see motorhomes but they are all now travelling in groups and we are the last individuals around!

This part of Turkeys coast is described as being full of prostitutes and sprawling growth. Whilst the towns have been modern high rise and unappealing the coast we are on is pleasant. The beach is a bit untidy with rubbish washed up from the sea and you wouldn't venture in the water for fear of emerging like a sea monster from doctor who! But our site overlooks the sea and from under the trees it is very peaceful and idylic.

We've spent 4 nights here and have caught up on the washing and even managed to get Taffy cleaned! We've cycled both ways along the beach from our camp and sat under the trees reading our books. Our most ambitious cycle was to Unye 20kms away. We tried to cycle there on our first day here but got half way and it started to rain so we headed back. Two days later though we tried again. It was around 34C and humid and it was into a very strong wind along a busy dual carriageway, some of which we did on the wrong side of the road!! We survived and were pleased to get to Unye as our guide book said it was a nice town. When we arrived the smell from the sea was overpowering and the Ice cream we bought chewy! We cycled upwind and found a cafe overlooking the sea and had a very pleasant drink before holding our noses and heading home. Naturally on our return to camp the whole family came to greet us and give us drinks to cool us down.

We are still the only people here and the owners are lovely and kind - they keep wanting to take us places in their car and all we want to do is chill out! Fortunately they don't seem at all offended when we decline their kind offers. They say in a couple of weeks there will be 150 tents on this site! It is around the size of 2 tennis courts! We are glad we will be elsewhere!

We will move on to Trabzan in the morning and find out about the ferry and after a few days chilling are now ready for the final outward leg of our journey.

Last stop in Europe - Istanbul

2010-06-11T15:30:00.000+01:00

We loved Istanbul. It is everything the guide books tell you and more. Being able to walk into the city in 5 minutes was excellent, though our plot up beside the sea sounded a lot more idyllic than it was. The car park was where the local lads brought their dates each evening until about 2am. They seemed to think the best way to impress them was to deafen them and the van would vibrate every time one of the more amorous lads drove past. When they had finished for the night the resident pack of dogs would hold extensive barking sessions. Fortunately sleeping pills, air con and walking for miles and miles each day make you tired enough to sleep through most of this so despite the distractions we didn't fare too badly.

Istanbul is unlike any other part of Turkey we've visited, denslet populated, hectic, dotted with large western style shopping malls and it is huge. You drive for hours just to get from one side to the other, most of the time on motorway and most of the time at speed. It wouldn't surprise me if it was 40km wide as we spent all morning driving in (before getting lost) and another morning driving out(after getting lost again). Apart from the city centre itself it appears to be mainly apartment blocks, some high-rise, some 5 or 6 storeys crammed together for mile upon mile.

The old town and the main attractions are mostly within easy walking distance of each other and despite its vastness and the terrible traffic, the centre is calm and mainly car free.

The Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia dominate the skyline and sit opposite each other separated by a small park and some lovely fountains like a pair of fighters sizing each other up. A constant stream of coaches drops tourists between them from dawn to dusk and the numerous street vendors try to sell them everything from wooden recorders to something sticky that you are supposed to eat! Unlike Egypt the sellers don't stick to you like glue and seem content to accept a no thanks and move on.

The Hareem that Linda had promised to take me to when we got to Istanbul turned out to be in the Topaki Palace complex and sadly also no longer in use! We found the palace a little disappointing after the previous days visit to the Blue Mosque, though the Hareem was well worth the additional entrance fee to see. It didn't help that it was raining and we had no coats but it was almost unbearably crammed with tour parties and it was hard to get to see many of the items on display without a lengthy wait. By the time we left in the afternoon the crowds were thinning rapidly so we probably timed our visit wrong.

Our visit to 'the New Mosque' which is a few hundred years old, coincided with the Friday lunch time prayer which we were allowed to watch. It was fascinating with people coming and going during the service almost constantly. The only bits we understood in the sermon was the word "Jihad"!

One thing that everyone does when they go to Istanbul is go to the Grand Bazaar. We had been told by someone that the sellers were a lot of hassle and we were expecting Egyptian 'limpet' traders but they were nothing like that. They were funny, good natured, helpful and most spoke good English especially to Linda as she kept buying things.

Apart from the Indian we also feasted on a very good Mexican and visited numerous lovely cafés - "Home Made" being Linda's favourite.

Our route home each night would take us through the old ottoman district. The houses here are a brick or stone ground floor with wooden floors above, often brightly painted. the narrow streets slope down to the city wall which runs next to the sea. The area today is full of restaurants and small boutique hotels and even the odd hostel. Almost all of which sever breakfast on the roof terrace! They looked lovely and we were tempted to have a mini break from Taffy but Linda had already spent us dry in the bazaars.

One of our most memorable moments of Istanbul was nothing to do with its tourist attractions, bazaars or restaurants. We were walking through the site of the old Hippodrome and we're accosted by a young man from Turkcells -O2 for Turkey. He wanted to show us how to manually tune our phone to Turkcell which we weren't interested in. But we got chatting, went over and sat on a bench, bought some drinks and eventually about an hour and a quarter later had all 3 sales reps chatting to us about everything from cream teas to religion when their parents turned up to meet them. We were introduced to them all and had a wonderful afternoon chatting to them. Apparently Spain will won the world cup and England will come third!

Leaving Istanbul after only 4 nights was hard. There's plenty more to see but the torrential rain and end of the world thunderstorms convinced us that we should see the rest outside the monsoon season! So we meticulously planned our exit route, drove 2 miles and reached a bridge we couldn't get under! Fortunately we picked up a motorway sign Quickly and found ourselves at a toll point that only accepted smart cards and tags. There did not appear to be any place to pay with cash or card and we got stuck at a barrier unable to reverse due to the queue behind us and unable to get through. The help button at the barrier connected me with the cousin of the shouting policeman we first encountered at the border and we were looking suitably confused enough for a fellow driver to run over swipe his card and then drive off having paid our toll! The Turkish people (with the exception of the shouting policeman and his family) are undoubtedly some of the kindest most generous people we have had the privilege of meeting.

Farewell EU!

2010-06-11T15:22:00.000+01:00

The Turkish Greek border crossing was fun! You leave Greece easily enough and then get to the bridge linking the two countries where there are plenty of armed soldiers in full combat gear at each end and the middle. The two opposing countries soldiers face each other in the centre of the bridge it reminded me of checkpoint Charlie in Communist times. The Turkish side - like last years entry point from Syria - had a brand new customs hall. Oddly the first Police checkpoint has the booth on the passenger side of vehicles. Linda handed our passports to the policeman who flatly refused to accept them from her - presumably because she was a woman - and someone had to come and tell me to get out of Taffy and walk around with them. After shouting at me for a few seconds to make himself understood he gave them back pointed and shouted a bit more for effect and I got back in Taffy and drove to point number two! I'm not really sure what he was trying to say but I'm pretty confident that the impression he left on me was not what he intended. Shouting no longer bothers me - we've been in too many borders and had too many police checks to be fazed by that. Now if he'd pointed his gun at me that would have been a different story!

Moving up to booth 2 it was at least on the drivers side and the official was slightly less obnoxious. But the organisation was hopeless. In order to get past booth 2 you need a visa (fair enough) but to get one you have to go inside a building to buy it (again fair enough) but that means you then have to drive past booth 2 and 3 and park and then walk back, get your visa and then visit each booth on foot fighting with the other people doing the same as you and those visa exempt people in thru cars! Chaos ensues together with lots of pushing in and jostling for positions. Eventually we manage to get to booth 3 where the happy chappy decides its time to make a phone call on his mobile and shuts the window on us for 5 minutes whilst he chats away about goodness knows what but it looked more a social call than work. After he had finished with us we then have to visit the booth opposite him (presumably so if you had got this far without getting out of your car you would be forced to do so now!) and get a stamp on the visa. It was a funny old setup and its hard to see how it will cope if through traffic is ever more than the 1 car every 2 minutes that we saw despite the fact we saw around 25 staff members, nearly all smoking like chimneys and not a woman in sight. Its interesting that when we crossed into Tunisia last year we were told that it used to take hours to get in but since they had accepted women into the job it was now much more efficient and quicker! We've crossed many borders in our vans and they are always interesting experiences. We've had rude and unhelpful - USA, slow -Ukraine, bureaucratic nightmare - Egypt, but Turkey has managed to roll all these into one! Oh, I forgot to mention that after all these checks you still have to pass a last booth and hand all your papers in again before you are allowed to drive underneath the welcome to Turkey sign!

The roads immediately changed from the smooth asphalt of Greece to a patchwork quilt of potholes and patches but we instantly encountered a large hipermarket - Kipa which is really Tesco and resupplied.

Our first night in Turkey was spent at a 'Camping' by the road. It was an overgrown field with an old Bedford truck abandoned in it and a small shanty town leading to the beach where the Jelly fish were so tightly packed you could hardly see the bottom. This didnt stop the locals from swimming though!

Our master plan for getting into Istanbul was to arrive on a Friday morning as we had found last year this to be the quietest times in Islamic cities. I can't tell you if Istanbul is in fact quieter on a Friday morning than any other time but if it is I'd hate to drive in it on a different day. We missed our turn off and ended up right in the very centre of the city. Everytime we tried to get out we encountered a low bridge and eventually found ourselves in streets so narrow our mirrors past over the top of parked cars, people had to be phoned to move others and passersby lifted motorbikes onto the pavement to let us by. I'm not exaggerating to say we frequently had less than 1cm clear on each side of Taffy to squeeze through. But we survived and certainly provided the locals with something to talk about! We did eventually manage to reach our destination and parked up almost directly below The Blue Mosque! Well worth the nightmare drive.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around and enjoyed a lovely Indian meal on a roof top terrace overlooking the Hagia Sophia in the evening. It was hard to believe that earlier that day we had thought about giving up on Istanbul after we encountered our third low bridge!

We slipped through Greece

2010-06-08T11:01:00.000+01:00

As usual we've spent far too long in Germany and so we decided to drive through Greece in a couple of days. We left Macedonia and re-entered the EU to find the landscape change immediately once more. The farming became intensive and properties looked more prosperous. You wouldn't believe there was any crisis in Greece from the little we saw. We picked a stellplatz en route and found we had by chance stopped at the site of Alexander the Greats fathers tomb. This was only found recently and was completely in tact with the burial artifacts as they were almost 2500 years ago. The jewellry was exquisite and some of the gold items were huge. Linda was feeling very hard done by but at least she doesn't have to voluntarily sacrifice herself once I die like Alexander the greats fathers wife. It really is worth a visit and we were lucky enough to have the museum, which has been built over the tombs to preserve them in situ, to ourselves and were relieved to see thousands of kids forming up outside when we were leaving and not as we arrived. Visit early us our advice!

Google maps once again helped us find a wonderful overnight stop near the Turkish border for the next evening. Scouring the coast on the satellite view we found a small deserted beach and headed for it. We parked about 10 m from the waves and had a lovely peaceful night in preparation for Istanbul!

Ohrid - the Cinderella Town

2010-06-02T18:08:00.000+01:00

Lake Ohrid is another UNESCO site being one of the oldest lakes in the world. The town of the same name also a UNESCO site, has a large dominant castle overlooking the dozens of bars restaurants and Yarmouth sea side tack shops heaving with thousands and thousands of people. The walk up the hill to the fortress weaves it way past exquisite churches, a roman theatre and a large excavation of a byzantine church and by the time you reach the summit the number of visitors could fit in a mini bus. It crossed our minds that many of the visitors to Orhid may not even know of the existence of the castle let alone have visited, preferring instead the unrelenting thud thud thud of karaokes and piped music to the wonderful views from the castle walls.

Orhid is picturesque, quaint and full of charm but it is teetering on the edge of becoming another Benidorm. It seems keen on driving away tourists attracted by history and culture and replacing them with the party people. The cruise boats lined up on the quay play thumping music to attract customers and the castle itself is the last refuge safe from the incessant disco beat.

Cycling down the shore a few kilometres we found a lovely cafe with decking out into the water and comfy sofas to lounge on under sun shades. Even here the cafe music was inaudible because of the music from Orhid.

Our cycle from our camp to Orhid and back was 45km and a lovely ride even if we only managed to cycle halfway up to the castle and to walk the rest of the way! Most of the ride is on pavements or minor roads and despite the mountains that circle the lake flat.

Even at night 10 miles away across the lake in our beautiful campsite on the edge of the water the disco boats keep up the noise till well past midnight and even with Battlestar Galactica on our tv we could still clearly hear it.

Despite the noise we eventually spent 4 nights on our tiny camp. The party nights Friday and Saturday gave way to a silent Sunday and Monday and in any case we have a wonderful bedroom air con unit that uses hardly any battery and allows us to keep Taffy buttoned up on noisey nights and still get a good nights sleep.

Orhid appears to have made its choice with tourists though, and you can't help but wonder if it is the right one. Competing with seaside resorts is cyclical as the Costas will testify as their visitors have switched from Spain to Turkey. The huge advantage Orchid has is its heritage and nature and if it drives visitors away who come for this reason it will find it difficult to survive when the party people decide Albania or wherever is the new cheap party place to visit.

Despite this we liked Orhid though if we visit again we'll avoid the summer or leave well before midnight.

Albania

2010-05-28T16:10:00.000+01:00

We arrived at the border a little apprehensive. We'd heard horror stories of Albania and our expectations were low. These were immediately reinforced when we came to a single lane wooden bridge and found ourselves covered in kids. It was like a scene from a zombie film with them banging on the windscreen and hanging from the mirrors! I've seen Shaun of the Dead so out came the cricket bat.... We are always prepared for the throngs of kids who stick to Taffy like limpits in poorer countries and have a large selection of English sweets to pass out to try to get them off! We shook most of them free with the sweet Manoeuvre but one determined kid was still hanging on to our wing mirror as we got halfway across the bridge flapping like a flag on a windy day. A quick squirt of the windscreen wipers and he went flying over the railings and into the river below busy opening his wine gums on the way down! I expect he was used to it.

Albania camping was our first night stop. Run by a lovely Dutch family it was the best campsite we've stayed on all summer. It even had a pool which the resident duck loved! We made this our base for a couple of days and went cycling in the area- much to the amusement of the locals. The area was flat and had a lot of brightly painted new villas as well as some ramshackle houses. The Dutch family came here to provide help to the locals with health care and even accommodation in the winter so the area is by no means well off but there were numerous villas that wouldn't have looked out of place in Florida and the school children looked well dressed and happy though that may have just been them laughing at us on the tandem! We really enjoyed our time there but eventually decided we had to at least look as though we were serious about heading to azerbaijan so moved on to Tirana.

Our camp here was Hotel Baron just south of the city and meant we had to fight our way through the bedlam that is Albanian driving. People just drive for themselves and consequently everything just crawls along constantly pushing and shoving to gain an extra inch. Linda navigated is through perfectly and we squeezed into the hotel car park after the owner had brought us a ladder and a saw to trim the trees back! They taxied is into the city and we got our next surprise. We had expected a delapidated city in true ex communist traditions but we found streets full of cafés and restaurants decorated to standards St Tropez would be envious of. There were chandeliers, courtyards with trendy sofas under a canopy of trees and some of the most fantastically furnished interiors we have ever seen. These cafés were not isolated one offs but the norm, and there were dozens of them. You would be hard pushed to find anything to match these in London and certainly Norwich has nothing in the same league (though being Norwich it's used to that). We sat in a park and had a drink beside some wonderful fountains and whilst the sites to see can be as the guide says, on one finger, you could spend a month going from cafe to cafe! The city itself is full of new high rise offices and flats many of which look very modern and very expensive too. There are numerous old Soviet style flats though they appeared to be in much better condition and looked after than blocks we have seen in Romania Bulgaria etc. We had a really nice day wandering around.

Berat is 3 UNESCO sites in one! That was our next stop about 150km drive from Tirana most of the way on good dual carriageway but the last 30 on a road in desperate need of replacement and we spent a long time going at 20mph. But the trip was well worth it. The old town is a well preserved Ottoman town nestled on the side of a hill overlooked by a castle which in turn has another inhabited Ottoman town inside it almost perfectly preserved. From the castle you overlook the river below and yet another Ottoman town on the far river bank. One day this site will be one of the most visited in Europe. We had the place to ourselves and in the evening went promenading up and down the main street with what seemed like the whole town.

The drive to Macedonia was easy and as we entered the mountains very picturesque with the road snaking its way up the side of one mountain for what we think must be Taffys highest border crossing yet. Our last view of the country was of numerous enormous Albanian mushrooms flanking the road, not of the Yuck I don't like mushroom variety, but concrete pillboxes. These litter the country and there is 1 for every 4 people apparently. A monument to a past that Albania is rapidly leaving behind.

And its goodbye to Taffy!

2010-05-23T12:30:00.000+01:00

Meet Taffy II. !!

Entering Montenegro you are immediately struck by how crowded it is, how much new development is going on, the many road works and the prosperity of the place. Again, a simple line on the map makes so much difference to a persons life.

Kotor is a UNESCO world heritage walled town perfectly preserved with narrow paved streets, tall houses, churches and naturally an enormous castle sitting above it on the side of the mountain. It is at the end of what Montenegro calls the most southerly fjord in europe, but is in fact a Ria (a steep sided sunken valley flooded by the sea) not a fjord as it as not formed by a glacier. Never thought my Geography A level would come in useful! It is unquestionably a gorgeous town in one of the most picturesque 'fjords' we've ever been to. We spent the afternoon wandering through the squares and in the evening returned to eat out at a little Pizzeria under the towering gaze of the illuminated castle walls. We parked about 150 metres from the town right on the edge of the water and easily had the best bedroom view on offer surpassing that of the enormous cruise ship 'the World' tied up a stones throw away.

Budva is not home to a beer but another picturesque walled town this time nestled on the coast in a small bay. Much more touristy than Kotor - which took some doing - it was surrounded by hotels and nice beaches and apparently in a few weeks will be heaving.

A few kilometres further down the coast is Sweaty Stefan (Sveti Stefan really). This tiny town is a dalmatian Mont St Michel and is nowadays a large hotel. You see pictures of the town on most montenegran tourist literature. All these 3 towns are within 20kms of each other.

Our second night was spent at Lake Skadar. We headed to the visitors centre aiming to overnight in the car park and found it to be a few boards, a couple of stalls selling boat trips and a hotel. Not quite what we expected! Fortunately we were collared by Mark a local hotel owner who said we could stay behind his hotel for nothing, again right on the edge of the lake and with a wonderful view too. We met two germans Anita and Rainer and arranged a morning boat trip to see the local birds on the lake - the biggest bird reserve in Europe. The drawback being it sailed at 7am and the highlight was seeing the Dalmatian Pelicans! After a cooked breakfast we spent the day doing odd jobs and recovering from the early start and the over indulgence of our second breakfast!

Montenegro is another real gem. It looks like Slartibartfast practiced on Norway before doing here. The country is a mixture of mountains, lakes, breathtaking coastline, picturesque towns and stunning coastal road. For those ill educated in the works of Douglas Adams it looks like Disney were asked to design a Mediteranean country.

It also had the most challenging roads we've encountered for Taffy. One campsite we couldn't get to because the road sloped sideways so much we thought we were going to topple over, another had a welcome arch which we eventually almost got stuck under and had to reverse out of and then backwards down a tiny lane! We had to stop to measure a tunnel with a stick and then Linda had to go through it and stop traffic so Taffy could sit in the centre of the road as we went through. And when we stayed at the national park we had navigate a tiny right angle bend with a gaping hole in it that went through to the water with our rear wheels about 1mm from the hole! I was ably assisted by a few locals all shouting their advice but I have learned to ignore everyone except Linda as that means I have someone to blame when it all goes wrong!
Albania next.

Emergency Update!

2010-05-19T08:40:00.000+01:00

The sun is out!

Rain rain go away!

2010-05-18T12:04:00.000+01:00

We turned up at the station at about 9:20 and an hour and forty minutes later the train turned up! Fortunately Zagreb isn't the largest of cities to visit and we easily walked around all the main sights in the afternoon. You can see a grand city struggling to get out in the centre with little evidence of the horrid communist concrete monstrosities. A number of the older buildings plaster is falling off and in some empty shop windows, signs in English, just small enough to make you wander over to have a look at them warn you of the danger of falling tiles!

But many of the buildings have been renovated beautifully and many more are surrounded in canvas being done up. Like LJubliana, Zagreb will be a majestic city in a few years time.

We eventually spent 5 nights at our campsite near Karlovac. We met a Welsh couple who we got on with really well despite their Welshness and spent too much time in the bar!

We moved on to the Plitvice National Park to see the waterfalls and generally be fleeced by the Croatian tourist industry. Parking £9 entry £15 each and a bottle of fanta £2 a bit like being back in the UK. The park itself was amazing with hundreds of waterfalls and it seemed the entire school population of a small country being eagerly followed around by hordes of Japanese tourists taking photos of everything. We always thought we took a lot of pictures but I am sure some of the tourists had their cameras super glued to their heads. It was one do the few days when we had some sun and with the waterfalls creating rainbows and the unusual colours of the lakes and greenery it was a great day.

We left the lakes and drove south to Split after a night of torrential rain. Tents had been moved into the toilet blocks and Noah would have been hurriedly rounding up animals had he been there it really was almost biblical.

The road runs near the border with Bosnia and we passed many abandoned houses with no roofs and nature gradually reclaiming the land. It was quite strange.

We arrived at Split and managed to park up virtually with our van on the beach, got out of Taffy And who should be standing behind the van than our stalkers the welsh couple! So another evening in the bar whilst the North sea crashed along the shore and the arctic wind blew steel grey clouds across the sky hurriedly until it could find one full of rain to empty on us.

The next morning the camp site was a wash and the coastal road past fields and campsites invisible under a grey blanket of water. We even went through towns where the fire brigade were pumping building out.

The sun peaked out just as we past Dubrovnik presumably so we could see the flooding more clearly before vanishing again behind the advancing March of more ominous black clouds. Come to sunny Croatia it says on the tourist literature - we'd love too if we knew where it was!

We are now holed up like Scott of the Antarctic just north of the Montenegro border overlooking a bay that looks more like Rockall in December than the Adriatic, its cold windy and just stopped raining - but only to allow it to hail instead. "I'm going outside I may be some time"

PS. When I spell checked this it tried to replace Adriatic with sadistic.

Leaving the EU

2010-05-10T09:42:00.001+01:00

After the successful catendectomy we drove on to Ljubliana and for someones benefit I feel obliged to point out it is the capital of Slovenia not Estonia! No names but you know who you are Ali.

Crossing the border we began to lose the German Motorhomes (not that they were following us or anything) and we weren't surprised when we arrived at the campsite to be joined by a young British couple. We were however surprised when another British couple turned up in there caravan - they must have been at least in their 70's. That made 4 brits on a campsite, we haven't seen that many Brits on a campsite since Luxor, well, not outside the UK.

Ljubliana is a gem. We cycled in from the camp on dedicated cycle paths with the right of way over cars and arrived in the middle of a festival celebrating the countries of the EU being held by schools. There was singing, stalls with food from each country (except the UK - presumably because they didn't know how to cook Chicken tikka Masala) models of famous features and a great atmosphere too. All of this being held on the river bank right in the centre of the city.

Much of the centre is still being renovated and it is in places a bit of a building site. But the finished areas are wonderful, large grand colourful central european buildings built in the 18th century looking over street cafes and cobbled pedestrian streets. It is a mini Budapest and in many ways much nicer. It is a small city so has a compact centre and retains a charm and quaintness that larger cities do not. We loved it and plan to return when it is finished.

The caves at Postojnska were our next stop. Jon said he'd never seen anything like them - at least till his brother phoned later that night to say he had been to them too - with Jon and their parents when they were at school. They really are spectacular especially seeing as you have to take a little train into the mountain to see the best bits. The train weaves through tunnels and in and out of small caves beautifully lit filled with Stalagmites and Stalagtites. It fare races along and feels almost like you are in an Indiana film, especially as there are two tracks side by side that often split and take different paths and tunnels.

As we left the EU and crossed the bridge into Croatia the budding prosperity of Slovenia was replaced by roads that were a patchwork repairs from the last 20 years, houses in desperate need to renovation and tin roofs. The bridge into Croatia looked as if no one knew who owned it and would eventually fall down because no one was prepared to repair it. It us amazing the difference 10 metres of bridge and the words "Welcome to the EU" can make to a countries prosperity and in turn to an individuals life. It really is as simple as one side of the river you were in Oxfordshire and the other side the third world.

The road to our campsite at Karlovac was tiny. Taffy had no room either side in patches and we couldn't see road at all in the mirrors underneath us. Eventually it widened to our relief, which was short lived as we viewed the pontoon bridge. Crossing it was fun linda was hanging on to the door and the car behind waited until we were nearly off before following!

So Zagreb next.

Is that a cat?

2010-05-05T18:35:00.000+01:00

We left Würzburg and began on our route south towards Georgia, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (again) before coming back to Europe. There is something ominous about our destination this year and that could be that the list of countries above also spells GARAGE!

We had driven a few kilometres out of Würzburg before we noticed the noise. It was a weird screaming from the engine - a bit like we'd got a cat stuck inside the gearbox. Uh oh. Just the sound of the new part bedding in perhaps? By the time we reached Munich the cat was in agony and clearly wasn't bedding in but more likely Checking out one of its nine lives so we decided it was time we visited another garage!

Every time we stop in Germany and look for a garage there is always one within 2 kilometres of us. Hopefully this isn't because MAN trucks only go for 2 kms before needing attention (though at the present rate of problems we haven't ruled this out yet).

Again the garage was very helpful and had an engineer look at it for us immediately. We drove round with the floor up in Taffy trying to see exactly where the cat was and eventually it was diagnosed that the garage in Würzburg hadn't put a screw in properly which they did for us. They tested Taffy by taking it out for a short drive and as we watched her drive off we both couldn't help secretly hoping they might not bring her back!

Still, all is fixed now and we were pleased to not find any stray cats in the engine. We have now been away for 20 nights and have visited 3 MAN garages and 1 motorhome repairer! Lets hope that's our last garage of the trip!

Last problem before Georgia!

2010-05-04T11:23:00.001+01:00

Well the overland brigade will tell you time and time again that newer truck Chassis are a nightmare because of the electronics and computers and we were beginning to agree with them after our spate of dashboard errors. But, we thought, what if the errors we get are genuine and its the garages in the UK that are failing to understand the diagnostics properly? One more visit to a MAN dealer then!

The dealer in Wurzburg was very swish compared to Norwich. Lots of new workshop bays and engineers who could actually speak German and English, as opposed to the English variety who spoke a kind of what you may generously call effin English. The manager came out to deal with us and got his engineers to plug in the diagnostic PC. After a brief consultation they explained there was a part that was broken. It was still functioning but would get worse and worse until we would break down. To replace it would take 6 hours and cost a small fortune, but after a few more phone calls to MAN he informed us that MAN would pay 62% of this.

So we are back in today having the part replaced. For once we are pleased with the electronic system. Had we had an all mechanical truck then probably the first we would know about the malfunctioning part is when we broke down half way up a mountain in Georgia but the diagnostic computer had spotted the malfunctioning part earlier and hopefully saved us from a worse fate.

We've had to spend the weekend here waiting for the part to arrive and its a Holiday - May day - so the village we are staying at held a festival where the young men of the village erected a huge silver birch tree outside the fire station. The young ladies helped the children decorate whilst it lay flat - completely blocking the fire engines from being used - and then it took about 40 minutes for the guys to lift it into place. Being Germany there was an endless supply of huge hot dogs and frothy beer and our wine was served in half pint mugs! It was an excellent evening.

The weather has now gone rather damper and cooler so on Tuesday we will head south - no really this time!

Just one more day....

2010-05-02T10:34:00.000+01:00

We're now at Kitzinger near Wurzburg on the Main. Taffy is parked facing the river in a lovely stellplatz a short walk form the town centre or more importantly, the Ice Cafe where we end up each evening for an ice cream! We've cycled up and down stream for the last two days in glorious sunshine by the edge of the river on dedicated cycle paths passing numerous Disneyesque walled towns with the temperature in the high 20's. The river had carved a small valley that is now lined with vines and is in our impression the loveliest of all the rivers in Germany.

We'd planned on staying 1 night here but tonight will be our fourth! We'll begin hearing south again tomorrow, honest!
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And then there was the tyre....

2010-04-22T21:09:00.000+01:00

High speed blow outs are not something you'd relish at the best of times but after the last few days of Taffy problems it came as no surprise that in single lane road, in the middle of Düsseldorf, at rush hour, travelling at nearly our top speed we should have one!

The fact that we'd just spent 4 hours in the Museum of Modern Art, much to Jons dismay, rounded the morning off nicely. Jon did toy with the idea of taking the remnants of the tyre to the museum and trying to sell it to them for a few bob to go with the TWO piles of bricks that they had on show but considered it too high brow to interest them.

Of course we caused more of a sensation when we bumped up on the curb right outside the Bundersbank and parked about 6 feet from the main entrance. Perhaps we should mention at this stage that we were on Tilly the tandem and not in Taffy and our top speed is 22kms! We actually found a bike shop nearby and they put a new tyre on and all was well!

The museum was a wonderful old courtyarded building with a modern roof covering the whole thing making it resemble the Reichstag a bit. Linda really enjoyed the exhibits and Jon decided he had just didn't get it at all. His favourite pieces being the completely black canvas which disappointingly was not entitled Black cat in Coal Shed, the two piles of bricks and the rumbling room with the stools in. There were some Picassos and Dali paintings too which set Jon off ranting on about those two having a lot to answer for....

We are still parked up on the quay and are next to a wonderful Action Mobil van shown above. The caption for the photo is "Both these vans have been to Egypt, but which one went on a fully escorted tour..."
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Hey Ho Its the Revenge of the Tanks!

2010-04-20T20:50:00.000+01:00

After resolving the electrical issue in England we spent a lovely day in Calais and headed to Belgium to fill up with diesel. No sooner had we filled up as it began to pour out or the underside of the van! We examined the tank to find that fuel was leaking out of a 10 x 15cm plate on the rear top of the tank. This plate houses the 3 fuel pickups for our cooker and two heaters. These pickups go through the plate and In to the tank through 3 holes under the plate.

The plate had been siliconed and screwed to the tank and the silicone had reacted with the diesel effectively melting. This meant the plate was simply being held on to the tank just by screws, so once we had filled with fuel it just poured out between the gap. It also would do that every time we accelerated forcing the fuel to the rear of the tank. So, time to find another garage!

We were very fortunate to find DG Motorhomes who specialise in monster Sporthomes making Taffy look tiny! They spent a long while examining the tanks and then locating a plastic welding company for us. We visited Akaterm, the plastic welding company and they had a look - getting the MD to come down and give his opinion before agreeing they could help us. They arranged for DG to remove our tank on Tuesday and send an engineer to the garage to do the welding. That was Friday and so over the weekend we had to drive 800kms to lower the fuel ready for the work. The work was carried out Today. Just to add a bit of fun we found that the fixing nuts originally used were loose and couldn't make a fuel tight seal so an engineer was sent out to the nearest town to track down suitable replacements.

The tank seems to be fixed though we cannot fill it completely till Friday. To give you an idea of how much fuel we lost on each fill up our MPG suggests we lost around 30 - 40 litres for every 200 we put in.

Anyway in between driving from Belgium to Germany to Holland to Belgium to use our fuel up we had a lovely day in Geldern cycling and are now heading to make an Ebay delivery tomorrow night in Düsseldorf....
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Once more into the garage dear friends...

2010-04-14T20:28:00.000+01:00

We've not even left England and we're already in the garage having work done! Our step,screen and 12 volt accessory socket stopped working. Jon took the dash to bits and we tested all the fuses and they were all fine. So we pulled in at a MAN garage in Maidstone and they tested the 24/12 volt transformer and they said it had blown. We saw them test it and agreed reluctantly to have a new one fitted at the bargain basement price of £400 (excluding labour),

We weren't really convinced by the transformer overloading and burning out as the fuse protecting everything hadn't gone, but we're not mechanics. Jon wouldn't let it lie though and made them retest the old unit once it had been removed, and guess what ...it worked fine.

So the new one was removed and the old one replaced- we're not sure what's going on but we're thinking a loose connection - though MAN say this is unlikely.

Of course this isn't the only MAN error we've had on the way down. Our dashboard computer which had a few errors in Jordan last year has already had two errors telling us the engine is breaking / blowing up / missing. This only happens when we are going up hill and stop accelorating as we get to the top. We've decided to ignore these for the Time being and see how they develop.

Anyway, we're now at Dover waiting to board the ferry, which on todays form is likely to sink so this may he our last blog entry - phew I hear you cry!

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And we're just about ready.....

2010-04-01T17:15:00.001+01:00

With a week to go Taffy is still in the Garage getting tanks mended and a leak in the shower tray sorted out, our passports are still at the Emabssy getting the Visa for Azerbaijan and we're still waiting for our currency to arrive! We haven't even got the 2kilos of cheddar yet! Though I am relieved I saw the Heinz Baked Beans and Tea Bags being packed the other day. We've only had about 6 months to plan all this and as usual we're cutting it all fine! Still that's half the fun :-).

We've now begun our 'farewell tour' saying goodbyes to all our freinds and family, we've update the web site and now the blog and registered with LOCATE on the FCO website and we plan to be on the ferry week commencing 11th April. No turning back now......

Was that Turkey, or Bulgaria or...

2009-06-17T19:07:00.000+01:00

We were suffering a bit from "monument" shock and also getting tired of being woken up at 3:30 daily by the call to prayer and this together with us receiving news of a death in the family made us change our plans and decide to give Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia Slovenia and Austria a miss and head for Munich - a cheap flight airport making getting back for the funeral easy.

Scenery wise and from the motorway they looked stunning, especially after months of sand and flat roofed ramshackle houses with litter strewn all around to be confronted by lush fields, mechanized agriculture, mutlicoloured houses with red tiled roofs surrounded by trees was like entering the promised land. Its a good job Moses never made it to Europe else he would have asked for his money back!

The progress in Bulgaria and Serbia was clear and the countries looked much changed from our last visit and Croatia looked more like Germany than what we remembered. Turkey too looked modern, well organized clean and very very western. You would have been hard pressed to tell you weren't back in the EU at times.

We really look forward to returning to all these countries in the future and certainly from the little we saw Croatia and Turkey are ready to join the EU.

So here we are - 6 days after leaving Syria back in Munich And heading to a therme for Linda's birthday instead of the Hagia Sophia, but in many ways We are pleased to be back in civilization and are looking forward to recharging our batteries and setting off again in September.
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Damascus and straight on for London

2009-06-15T18:13:00.000+01:00

Our drive from Bosra was very unusual as we passed through a few towns that were not only Burka free but there were very few headscarfs visible and plenty of ladies walking around and even a few ladies in skirts! It's odd how you get so used to driving through towns and villages and seeing 90% men and the woman you do see are covered head to toe, sometimes not even with their eyes showing. When you do reach a 'normal' town it's quite a shock! What was more interesting though was how these towns seemed busier, more alive and less lethargic than the others, and how the shops seemed more modern and more appealing, more designed to get your attention and get you into the shops with large plate glass windows and displays, whereas in the other towns the shops were little more than a doorway with a rack outside.

Anyway, Damascus must be the first capital we didn't drive through the centre at rush hour but it was still bedlam on steroids. We found the campsite without a map just using the gps! Which we thought quite impressive. The site itself was a little oasis of green grass and trees due to be demolished in 2 weeks!
Damascus is a real gem. Easily the nicest city we have been to by miles and we spent two days wandering around the souks and seeing the sights. We would love to have stayed longer but you pay $100 a week diesel tax in Syria so everyone limits their trips to one week when you really need about 11 days and we therefore headed on to Hama to see the Norias - the waterwheels. We spent a couple of hours in a cafe with a drink watching these ancient wheels turn and creek and groan like mad, whilst the youths climbed all over them and even dived off the top, just for us!

Our next stop was the cavalier castle at Crac de Chevaliers which was great fun to wander round and climb all over. You can climb onto all the tower roofs and ramparts and unlike Europe there are no safety rails and also no walls to stop you walking over the edge and yet small kids climb around without their parents being at all concerned. When we left we saw our first sign post for London!

We tried to visit Aleppo as our final stop In Syria but got kicked out of everywhere we tried to park and as we were both feeling unwell with tummy bugs we headed for Turkey camping just outside Aleppo at a lovely campsite run by a Belgian lady.
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Jerash and southern Syria

2009-06-13T19:44:00.000+01:00

Jerash is another wonderful Roman ruin with a twist - there is still chariot racing taking place and gladiator combat every day in the Hippodrome which we naturally went along to see. This was thoroughly enjoyable and obviously the gladiator contests were choreographed but looked vicious nonetheless but the racing seemed pretty genuine. We even got to watch a small section of a legion demonstrate marching and combat techniques. Excellent stuff, apart from at the end of the show we found ourselves trapped in the seats surrounded by an American student leadership trip with an evangelical organiser giving a pep talk to the students in true American style complete with numerous incorrect statements. I had to hold Linda back but in the end we could take no more and had to get people to move to let us out.

The ruins themselves are not in the league of Leptis but still fascinating with the enormous Hadrians Arch dominating the main road. The oval plaza surrounded by two curving colonnades that leads into the city proper is unique and also extremely impressive.

We spent the night camped outside the tourist police station with our very own English speaking policeman to look after us.

The next day we headed into Syria and were met by the most efficient and easy border crossing we've had all trip, which was a pleasant, though unexpected surprise. About 90 minutes after getting to the Jordan departure gate we were driving to Bosra. When we arrived we were collared by a guide, who despite us saying we didn't want a guide was kind enough to find us a place to park overnight and join us for a drink in Taffy. Bosra has what must be the best preserved Roman Amphitheater in the world. It is in almost perfect condition and we spent ages just sitting in the posh seats admiring it. The town itself is less interesting, though the ruins live side by side with hovels where people still live, and the Decumanus is still in use daily with children playing on it and locals cycling on it. It has recently been uncovered down to the Roman tiling complete with ruts from roman carts from its more modern height 2 meters above.

Naturally enough as we were sitting in the local cafe having a juice a British couple - Gary and Kim - turned up. They'd had a lousy few days in Syria including a terrifying incident having a yelling teenage guard point a machine gun at them.

When you've had a few bad days and you're surrounded by an alien environment like Syria you want to find something 'normal' to settle you down again and so we offered them the use of the shower and Linda cooked them supper and a cup of tea! We chatted until about midnight and the next morning Kim cut Linda's hair which was driving Linda mad.

Kim and Gary were driving to Australia and had originally planned to go through Iran, but after the recent diplomatic spat involving the Iranian President and the west visas were not being issued to Brits so they were hoping to go via Saudi!
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Amman

2009-06-06T15:34:00.000+01:00

Jon spent 4 hours lying under Taffy cleaning up the tanks and then sealing the splits. Initially it seems to have cured the split tank completely, but the original leak is still dripping, not as badly thankfully. Now we are in Amman we've got another few tubes of Epoxy and will have another go at sealing this.

Amman has a more modern feel to it and is a bustling newish place teaming with people and shops set on 7 steep hills. Naturally we arrived at the city centre at rush hour on Thursday evening - the busiest day of all and wound our way to the camp site at the Theodore Scneller School through a hectic city centre.

There's not much to see here, most other tourists we've met said you need half a day which is about right. The Roman temple on the Hill dominating the city is mainly in ruin but would have been very impressive once and the Amphitheater and Odeon in the valley below are largely complete and still used today.

Shopping wise Amman is great with hundreds of shops and market stalls all noisily hawking their wares. We spent a few hours wandering around getting a few things before heading off to the tranquility of a western style supermarket to restock on things we find hard to get here like fresh milk, strong cheddar and a loaf of bread!

We're having a day off today catching up on jobs (we broke the step again which Jon intends to fix) before we move onto Jerash and then Syria.
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Karak & The Dead Sea

2009-06-05T18:50:00.000+01:00

Our next destination was Dana National Park which is set in Jordan's "grand canyon". Unfortunately we were too big to stay in the park and so we plotted up on the edge of the canyon at the top.

We've been having more trouble with our diesel tank with one of them splitting down the seam at the top. Having just about repaired the first tank this was not a pleasant surprise. Whilst Jon was under the van inspecting the damage, a car pulled up with two men and a baby in. They asked Linda if they could look around and once comfortably settled inside asked her to make some tea for them!! They were very pleasant and used all our reserves of sugar in their tea! Later that evening as we were getting ready for bed they returned with their entire family (excepting the wives of course!) to show them the van. We think they wanted us to go to their house for a meal but we had just eaten and when we successfully managed to explain we were veggies (because of our religion) they quickly left us alone! It was very funny explaining we are veggies, we have this written down and explained in Arabic and we showed them this. "Why?" is always the first question but once you get past this they keep saying "no fish?" followed by "No meat?" and repeated many many times as if by this process they can make you normal!

During the night the Police tried to move us on, but we told them we couldn't move as we had just epoxyed our tanks and wanted to let it set overnight. After much "Not safe, you must go to hotel" followed by "No" they gave up and left us alone.

As we couldn't visit the park easily we headed off to the Dead Sea on a spectacular drive winding through the mountains until we arrived at Karak.

Karak is a crusader castle captured and improved by the Muslims in one of the crusades. The Christian sections of the ruin are conveniently built in a dark rough stone and the Muslim parts in a smoother white. It is set on top of a hill commanding great views over the plains toward the Dead Sea. Its main attraction to us was - its not Roman or Egyptian! We really enjoyed wandering around something different after having spent the last few weeks visiting numerous Roman and Egyptian sites. Much of the castle is underground - it has 7 floors most of which seem to be hollowed out of the rock. Of course the other attraction was the nightmare one way system and incredibly narrow streets we had to wind our way through to get there. We were followed to the site by a coach which had to stop and ask a car to move before he could get through a gap we had just sailed through with a clear centimeter on either side of us to spare!

The drive down from Karak to the Dead Sea is lovely as the mountains just stop with no foothills and you suddenly find yourself 400m below sea level. The cool air of the mountains is left behind for the stifling heat of the Dead Sea.

We stayed at the Amman Beach Resort car park where we got electricity and filled up with water, which is so salty we can't drink it! The resort is a posh pool club and beach next to the sea. Its £10 each to get into so we spent all day there, we're not sure how the locals can afford it but there were plenty of westerners and locals around.

The beach is sandy, presumably imported, and you walk into the sea from sand onto solidified salt, keep walking and suddenly just float off. It's almost like becoming an Angel as you seem to take off from the sea bed. It really is great fun and according to he guide books and tourist information you can't get sun burn here. Our 3rd degree burns will testify to that being untrue! 3 months we've been away and not got burned once. Read the guide books and check into the nearest burns clinic!

The Amman beach is handy for a number of sites so we set off the next day to Bethany on the Jordan, where Jesus Christ was baptized by John the Baptist and also where Elijah was taken up to heaven in a flaming chariot! For such an important religious site it was deserted! We visited the spot where Jesus was baptized which is being renovated. The river Jordan, now more of a stream, no longer flows to the baptism spot but there is still water there. Steps lead down to the water from a ruined church, one of many dotting the entire site, and a small shelter next to the water is apparently where John the Baptist used to baptise people. We then visited the Jordan river and got to dunk our toes in it under the watchful gaze of Israeli soldiers on the other side of the stream, the mid point being the border with Palestine. One thing you notice about the site is the oppressive heat. It is at least 5C hotter than the Amman beach (presumably because of all the burning chariots) and it was with much relief that we headed to the hills to visit Mount Nebo, where Moses looked upon the promised land and died. The view from the top is fantastic and the grounds the memorial church is set in are pristine and full of butterflies!

From here we visited the church of SS Lot and Procopius en route having to drive half in the verge to avoid a hanging telephone cable that still happily bounced along the roof a little. The church was locked and Jon went off to find the custodian who was in the shower! When he was dressed he let us in to see a marvelous mosaic floor almost completely in tact with a large burn in the centre. The custodian explained that his family lived on this site as Bedhouin for many years and the tent was roughly where the church once stood. The mosaic was unknown to them and under about a foot of soil on which they had their fire. They accidentally came across the mosaic and were then made the custodians of it! A wonderful story.

Next stop was Madaba and the Mosaic map in the Church of st george one of the oldest maps of the Holy Land in existence. In the crypt we saw an icon who, according to the guide, had seen a miracle a few years ago. The crypt had filed with smoke and when it had cleared one of her hands had turned blue! The paint on the hand has been tested by laboratories and the substance cannot be found anywhere on earth! "You are in the land of miracles you know" he told us. 'And gullible people' we thought.

Our last stop on the days tour was at the Panoramic View point overlooking the Dead Sea and Palestine. We had a drink watching the sun set and then hurried down the pass before it got dark back to the Amman for the night.

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Wadi Rum and Petra

2009-06-04T06:17:00.000+01:00

The journey from Aqaba to Wadi Rum took us via Safeways to restock with fresh milk and cheddar - they even had salt & vinegar crisps!

Wadi Rum, famous for it association with Lawrence of Arabia, is breath takingly spectacular. The scenery is like something out of a cowboy film with long flat sandy valleys flanked by towering reddish mountains. The silence inside the park is wonderful and as we sat on a small rock outcrop watching the sun set we couldn't here anything apart from the wind. If you have a 4x4 then you can explore to your hearts content but after our previous efforts in the White Desert we took a sunset jeep tour that took us to Lawrence's springs, a wonderful canyon and then onto our rock perch to watch the sun set. We spent the night in the car park completely on our own and lay in bed watching the stars without any light pollution.

When we arrived at Petra we found Dave (Tripoli) was about to leave, so we delayed him enough to feed him have a great chat catching up with his news and half mend his Garmin GPS unit for him! Dave was having to head back to Aqaba as he had problems with a warning light on the dash and hoped to get it fixed there.

Petra was a great surprise for us. We like everyone else have seen the image of the Treasury as you approach it from the Siq, but we had no idea just how big the place is! To give you an idea we walked about 30kms over 2 days and barely scratched the surface and Dave drove to the next town for a walk and managed to get himself detained for not having a ticket for Petra! It is huge! A 2 day ticket is an absolute must but you could easily spend a week walking and exploring.

Apart from the Treasury, which we saw on a candle lit walk and then at 7:30am to beat the crowds, the Monastery, the numerous tombs, God blocks and the old city there are loads of picturesque walks through ancient tunnels, mutlicoloured canyons, gorges that narrow so much you can only just squeeze through and paths with sheer drops on one side and a cliff on the other. We loved it and found it amazing that despite it being the main tourist attraction in Jordan with literally thousands of people there at any one time you could easily find your self alone in a canyon or hike for 30 minutes or more without seeing anyone if you were away from the main attractions. We particually loved a walk we did through a deserted Wadi full of Oleanders in bloom through a gorge where the sides looked as though they had been painted and the rock looked like candlewax dripping down the sides of the gorge. It took us around 3 hours to complete the walk and at one stage we had to be man handled up the gorge sides by some Bedhouin as the gorge was flooded. We stopped for our packup lunch in a deserted tomb overlooking a valley littered with tombs and in silence part from he goat bells and occasional bleet. Apart from the Bedhouin we saw one other couple!

The Monastery is in some ways more spectacular than the Treasury as it is much bigger and at the end of an arduous walk up 800 steps. Some people do this on Donkeys but the path at times is very narrow and the donkeys merrily waltz along right next to the edge oblivious to the sheer drop next to them. We walked!

After completing the Monastery walk in the morning we headed for the Place of High Sacrifice in the heat of the afternoon. Mad dogs and Englishmen. The walk took us passed many tombs and up and down mountains like a roller coaster. We had opted for the pilgrimage route and you certainly felt you'd been on a mini pilgrimage when we arrived. In the three hours the walk took we saw 2 other people. It was hot to say the least and at times when we drank it appeared we were colanders! The view at the end was spectacular and we even got to glimpse Aarons tomb in the distance. And to round it all off we had Movenpick Ice Creams at the end of each day. Yum.

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Jordan

2009-05-28T09:34:00.000+01:00

We left Egypt on Saturday on the slow ferry at just after 15:30 slightly late mainly as it had to wait for us to complete the paperwork for departure. It is somewhat ironic on our last day in Egypt to see Egyptians actually rushing around exasperated, hurrying us up, but at least they now know how we've felt for the last 5 weeks. The ferry was great, an old one which we had to reverse onto, but well organized with plenty of places To sit and a cafe too. We'd read horror stories about this ferry but we've certainly been on much worse. Take some food, a drink a book and your camera and sit back and enjoy the mini cruise. Even getting our ticket was simple, turn up at around 10am hand oven your carnet and passports and 15 minutes later walk away with your tickets. Easy.

Arriving in Jordan was less complicated than most of our crossings so far. We didn't need a fixer and the authorities were helpful too though the insurance and taxes set us back another £150 for the month.

We found a campsite - the Bedouin Garden Village - a few kms north of Saudi. Rough Guide says its about as Bedouin as a bikini but it is very nice and overlooks the sea too. In fact we were spoiled for choice here as there are 3 campsites all next door to each other.

The next day we headed into Aqaba to get some Epoxy resin to hopefully finally fix the diesel leak, which has lessened greatly since Quintens fix in Luxor. In fact after cleaning it all up I found there was still a small hole at the edge of the plate we used to seal the hole and I'm very hopeful this is now fixed.

The journey to get the epoxy was by taxi and when we arrived at the industrial estate Jon hopped out and went into a shop to buy the bits. Linda was left in the taxi and the driver asked her if she was a good f@@k. This to add to being called a whore in Tunisia doesn't leave you with the best impression of Arab men. Never fear though it will take more than this to put us off coming back or enjoying ourselves!

The picture is of Aqaba and the largest free standing flag pole in the world - surprisingly not in the USA - and in the distance is Israel. To the right of the picture (out of view) is Egypt and if we look left we can see Saudi Arabia.
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Farewell to the Nile

2009-05-21T17:19:00.001+01:00

After leaving Luxor we stopped at Dendara - a temple in the midst of renovation. This temple is the only one in Egypt that you can get onto the roof and if you bacsheesh the police you can climb right onto the edge and peer out over the arid landscape in one direction and the Nile in the other. The restoration work allows you to compare the blackened reliefs on the ceiling with their bright and colorful restored twins and it is quite astounding.

From here we headed out to the coast and the Gulf of Suez staying at a camp / hotel where we had omelet and chips in the beach cafe with a glass of wine! Who says Jon doesn't know how to show a girl a good time?

We stopped at one of the numerous Police checkpoints and were told there was a problem. Jon had to go and see the 4 star police chief who promptly told him we were going at 100kph just before the checkpoint! Jon burst into laughter and said we weren't able to go that fast and had been told off by other police for going to slow. The 4 star chief then backed down sensing his bacsheesh fine was fast disappearing and sent us on our way. A couple of day later they tried to fine us again for linda not wearing a seat belt, which of course she was. Presumably they hadn't managed to take their eyes off her chest long enough to notice the belt, but after getting a good close up ogle were satisfied she was wearing a bra.

We had thought we had seen the last of the overlanders bound for Cape Town, but on arriving at Ras Mohamed national park were joined by 2 brit land rovers and 1 swiss van!

We spent a couple of lovely nights there parked right on the beach but had to move on to Nuweiba to check the ferry times etc and that is where we are now. We are in another beachside camp tied to a nice hotel with pool and loungers looking out to Saudi Arabia. We may now try to catch the Saturday ferry instead of tomorrow so we can have another lazy day.

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Luxor Again

2009-05-18T17:57:00.000+01:00

After saying our farewells to J&M we headed back into Aswan to visit the unfinished obelisk and Philea Temple. The Obelisk looks as though the workers have just popped out for lunch and will be back any minute to finish it. It was abandoned when a flaw was found in it.

Philea Temple is on an Island and the approach by the lake created by the British built Low Dam is cooling and very picturesque. The Temple itself is nice, but it is its setting that is the main attraction.

We set off for Luxor, passing Pumba outside McDonalds, and arrived at to find we were the only people on the campsite! So we went to bed to catch up on some sleep. Quinten and Julie arrived the next day and we spent the next few days having another bash at mending the fuel tanks, going on a becalmed Faluca (sailing boat) ride and visiting the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsuts Temple, the Ramesseum and the tombs of the workers. We cycled to the Valley and Temple and despite It reaching 46C found the 30km cycle very cooling, especially if it ends with a strawberry milkshake at McD's! The kings tombs are fascinating, but we really liked the workers tombs which were much smaller but lavishly decorated. The Ramesseum was devoid of tourists so was ideal to just sit in the shade letting yourself drift back to when the temple was full of life and Hatshepsuts temple we felt was impressive from a distance, but disappointing once you arrived.

So after another 5 night spell at Luxor, a few McDonalds milkshakes and chillie cheese nuggets (yum), 2 pizza Huts and loads of temples we spend our last night on the campsite with Q&J over a Pizza Hut takeaway!
The next morning after restocking our wine rack (3 bottles) we set off northward.

It is getting hotter and hotter and we are relieved we are beginning our trek northwards to hopefully cooler weather. By 9am it is hot - mid to high 30's and after 2 you just want to sit in the pool in the shade. Heaven help those people heading off to Sudan!

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On our way home!

2009-05-12T07:39:00.000+01:00

After recovering from my tummy bug we cycled down to Luxor Temple and shame on us, McDonalds for a strawberry milkshake! Yum. On our return to the camp Katie and Alex rolled up from Cairo and Jon had to reload / mend 3 of the campers laptops! In the evening Jacques and Linda made us all a great Curry as another farewell meal before we headed off to Aswan with J&M. We stopped at the Temple of Horrus along the way which was remarkably in tact with the ceiling and walls highly decorated and some paint still clearly visible.

By the time we reached Aswan Linda was feeling poorly so we went to bed when we reached Adams Camp where Mandy and Linda provided a slap up feast for the mosies getting over 100 bites between them.

We arrived in good time for our convoy escort to Abu Simbel at 11am and were 2 of 5 vehicles. The convoy departure area was surrounded by armed guards who for the first time that we've seen in Egypt, actually looked like they were guarding us and watching out for threats. The convoy left on time (another Egyptian first) and we felt like royalty as we swept out of town passed police stopping traffic at the junctions.

The trip down was uneventful and slowish at 70-85kph until we passed the last check point about 50km before Abu when the tail end coach pulled alongside us flashing and getting very worked up that we should go faster. We ignored them and after a few minutes he zoomed passed and we and Pumbaa (J & M's Landcruiser) were on our own.

We arrived all of 2 minutes after the coach and parked up on the edge of Lake Nasser right next to the temple. The two convoys per day run at 4am and 11am and almost everyone takes the early one which is on its way home by 10am so we had the temples to ourselves. They are the highlight of the temples so far. They have not been vandalised or worn with weather and look as vibrant and beautiful today as they would have done thousands of years ago.

We awoke the next day as dozens of coaches started loading up to take people back to Aswan. We were still having breakfast when half the coaches left on the 9am convoy so we joined the 10am convoy as we turned for home. We were put at the front and within 5 kms had been overtaken by all the coaches bar one and were on our own.

We had a pleasant trip back and then visited Aswan High dam which you had to pay for to walk on but could drive over for nothing! You were only allowed to walk on a small section and we had soldiers yelling at us for walking on the wrong bit / the wrong way etc etc. The dam itself is very disappointing as it is so small, with a 500 km lake behind it you expected a really tall impressive dam.

Our last night with J&M was at the Mossie breeding ground Adams Home, but this time we were covered up and inside well before the hordes had woken for the night.

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Luxor

2009-05-09T18:11:00.000+01:00

We arrived at Luxor late at night and tired after the previous days blistering temperatures and a 600 km drive and asked a policeman where the camp site was. He consulted passers by but no one had any idea. Naturally enough this was because thet were standing in front of it!

Reitsky Camp is a godsend in the heat. It has a bar with beer and wine, shade, is central for the sites and has a swimming pool!

Our journey to Luxor had taken us through various oasis towns and at El Kharga we stopped to visit the Necropolis of El Bagawãt, a Coptic graveyard. At the Police Checkpoint at the edge of town the police asked where we were going and then proceeded to follow us. With no signposts to the ruins I decided to pull over and ask them to go first which they did. When we arrived at the ruins two soldiers got out and put flak jackets and helmets on an hen toof at each end of Taffy with there machine guns. We were discreetly escorted around the site had then escorted out of town!

On arriving at the campsite we were offerred a complimentary mint tea which was a nice touch and then spent the evening chatting to Stuart and Susan who were Brits in a landrover going to SA

We visited the Luxor museum which was excellent and spent an interesting hour chatting to a teenager on the banks of the Nile. His views were quite unusual in that he drank beer, smoked pot, didn't go to mosque but thought women should be in the home and not go out as they were simply inferior to men. He was quite astounded that I thought men and women were equal.

The thing that every traveller we have met hates about Egypt is the non stop hassle you get from people trying to sell you something from shirts to boat trips, coffee to taxis. "No thanks" in Arabic or English has little effect and it really puts you off the tourist areas, especially considering how helpful Egyptians have been elsewhere. Sadly many tourists won't have experienced the more remote areas and will go home thinking all Egyptians are like this.

Jacques and Mandy arrived and we spent a couple of great evenings chatting looking at the photos of there journey from Australia and went out for a curry too!

In between the socializing we've managed to Visit Karnak which was breathtaking and get some bits made to hopefully fix one leak in our tanks. When I came to fit them I found the fix done by the garage had broken completely and I could just lift the probe out of the tank! Hopefully my effort will last longer!

The 3 brits we saw at the border crossing into Egypt have just arrived and everyone is chatting happily about the trip except me as I'm confined to quarters with the runs but I'm watching the BBC text commentary on the first test so not all bad.

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Pit Stop!

2009-05-04T22:02:00.003+01:00

We arrived in Bawiti around 6pm on 1st May after spending a couple of days doing nothing at Salma camp Cairo. We spent one afternoon and evening catching up with Quentin and Julie who arrived from Siwa and drinking Egyptian wine. When we got to Bawiti we smelt diesel and looked under Taffy and we were leaking at a steady drip drip. The leak was coming from the heater pickup at the low end of one of the tanks. I managed to take the pickup to pieces with Shauns telephone help, and refitted it but not before we had lost 100 liters of fuel on the sand. It appears the tank has a split in it, so we will need to replace that when we get home.
Jacques and Mandy turned up that night and cheered us up a bit by showing us some of their pictures from their trip so far from Australia to here. Very tempting and very doable!
In the morning a garage mechanic made some repairs and made us fill up and the diesel poured out faster than before! With 280 liters of fuel in the tanks the garage cannot take the tanks off so have suggested that we just run on a few litres at a time. This reduces our range dramatically as it seems once we have around 60 liters or so we start to leak. We are going to run the fuel down to empty and drop the tanks off in Luxor and see what we can do.
The leak continues but I have decided that I will try to repair this myself when we get to Luxor with my swimming pool sealant that I brought with me!

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Black and White Desert

2009-05-04T22:02:00.001+01:00

We left the mechanic, a newly formed diesel oasis and a trail of diesel as we drove into the Black Desert. This is very similar to monument valley only black with golden sands drifting up the sides and into every nook and cranny of the mountains.

As we left the Black Desert we entered the White Desert and the change is dramatic. The land is littered with small rock formations from the size of a car to Taffy sized in a huge variety of shapes from mushrooms to tents domes to pillars and strangely often the shapes are localised presumably so the tents stay on the campsite! All of these rocks are a bright white, they almost look painted! It bears more than a passing resemblance to the icebergs in the glacial lakes in Iceland, except its 35C and bone dry.

The White Desert is a national park and has a trail you can drive around some of the clusters of rocks. The trail was rocky but looked OK so we took Taffy in! For the first couple of kilometers it was slow going but manageable but soon deteriorated and we eventually got stuck in drifting sand, twice. We dug Taffy out and made it back to the car park both looking like ghosts and drank liters of liquid. Quite how anyone does any work during the day here is beyond me - but the dilapidated buildings would suggest they don't.

We had a lovely night in the desert camped in Taffy with no lights and no sound around us. Unfortunately the night was overcast so we couldn't star watch at night from bed.

We left the White desert and entered a martian landscape of flat reddish sands dotted with hand sized rocks stretching as far as you could see. By now it was a soul destroying 48C outside. It felt like a sauna everytime you opened the door. We decided to find a camp with electricity so we could hide from the heat in Taffy but when we hooked up at Mut we found our electric cable kept overheating because the cable reel was touching the metal of the geny which was red hot even though we hadn't used it! We can run our main air con without a hookup for a few hours so turned it on only to find it not working presumably because of overheating. I assume this is because the fresh air intake is right above our water tank and our cold water is hot enough to shower in! So its now 49C outside and 40 inside and our electricity, generator and air con won't work. Fortunately the bedroom air con works fine so we have hidden in the "den" and are a lovely cool 28! We've also had a cooling dip in the brown smelly thermal spring which is 43C!

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The Pyramids

2009-04-28T17:38:00.000+01:00

Taking the desert road from Alex we arrived at Cairo to be greeted with the absolutely amazing sight of.... Carrefore - a French Tesco! I'm sure my brother would be horrified being an ardent fan of the corner shop and a Tesco hater, but roughing it like we are you sometimes need lifes little luxuries, or in our case dishwasher tablets... So a couple of hours later, stocked up on Pilgrims Choice Extra Mature, fresh milk, McVities and Cadburys chocolate we came over the brow of a hill to be confronted by the sprawling mass that is Cairo, complete with smoggy cloud and peaking through the haze the Pyramids.

Finding the campsite proved straightforward but Jon has now given up being the polite English " after you sir" driver and when a car stopped in our lane to use his phone got within an inch of his bumper and leant on the horn in true Egyptian style. Sure enough the driver moved on rapidly! The camp is near the pyramids and you can see their tops from our plot. Unsurprising the site had us and 2 cars on it both of whom were heading to South Africa, 2 Brits Katie and Alex (fourwheelsaround.blogspot.com) and 2 SA Jaques and Mandy who were en route to SA from Australia. (www.seeyouwhenwegetthere.com).

Cairo is home to 22,000,000 people about half of which are Policemen and the other half follow the tourists around pointing out the obvious and then ask for a tip for doing so. Unlike Libya it is simply impossible to enjoy a historic site without a constant stream of people selling things or trying any trick in the book to get you to part with a tip. They will pretend doors are locked and they have a key, often asking you for your ticket first to make them seem official. It took us a few days to figure out most if the scams and cons but it is almost safe to say anyone who approaches you and says more than Hello, Welcome is a con man or Bacsheesh merchant, this includes many of the Tourist Police. That aside we have enjoyed Cairo, the Egyptian Museum was stuffed full of treasures and the King Tut room was fabulous. The general exhibits though are often poorly lit and the labels appear to be the same ones my dad may have seen 40 years ago when he was in Cairo as they are on yellowing paper and typed on a typewriter. The number of coffins and statues is overwhelming.

The citadel set on the hill overlooking the city gives a fantastic feeling for how enormous Cairo is. Buildings stretch in every direction as far as you can see and at the Call To Prayer the noise is deafening. We visited various mosques and the Coptic quarter too, even going into the Church where Jesus, Mary and Joseph lived whilst hiding from Herod. We strolled along the corniche and went up the Cairo Tower for another great aerial view. We've lived on felafel and home made crisps which have been excellent and last but not least, Visited the Pyramids, complete with camel ride, Sakkara, more temple and step pyramids and Dashur, a bent pyramid with the facing material still largely in tact and a red Pyramid. Too much walking, especially for Jons foot and some nights it has swollen up like an elephants, but it no longer hurts much and now we are heading off to the desert he will have a chance to rest it.

Lastly our social life is pretty hectic here! We managed to get some wine - a very nice Egyptian Rose - and shared some with Katie Alex Jacques and Mandy and heard all about their fantastic trips, we've been trying to meet up with Quentin and Julie again and David, the unimog Brit en route to Afghanistan has emailed us to try to arrange a meet as he is now heading up the Nile and we are heading down. As normal, we just meet such interesting and really nice people on our trips and in many ways it is one of the highlights and main reason for traveling like this. It is fantastic when you pull up somewhere and there are other travelers there too. Their nationality is irrelevant, we are all travelers and love to exchange stories and tips, where to avoid, road reports, great spots etc.
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El Alamein and the coast

2009-04-25T17:11:00.000+01:00

We had a very peaceful night at Siwa and looked around the old town, had a drink in a cafe and visited the Hill of the Dead seeing our first Egyptian tombs and paintings before heading back to Marsa. No sooner had we arrived than we got a text from Quentin and Julie saying they had just arrived in Siwa!

Next morning we moved on to El Alamein passing mile after mile of Hotel Resorts. By the time we reached Alexandria we had passed in excess of 80kms of non stop resorts around half of which were under construction. Alamein itself is just a small town tagged beside the non stop resorts. The hills are rapidly vanishing as the diggers use them as quarries but fortunately the war cemeteries are still havens of tranquility. Both the Italian and German ones are overlooking the only piece of undeveloped beach this side of Alex. The Italians have build a chapel with marble plaques lining the walls with names on and the Germans have gone for the fort style they used at Tobruk. We stayed the night here and spent an interesting evening chatting to the caretaker family who have lived on the site since before the war.

The Commonwealth cemetery is a traditional design and huge. The greeks is a small site not as well tended as the others but still peaceful and fronted by a pair of Greek columns and temple style roof. In the grounds of the commonwealth cemetery is a monument to the Australians and another to the South Africans.

The museum is not too big and has certainly benefited from the Imperial War Museum assisting in the translations in the British wing. Some of the plaques in the other wings are almost completely indecipherable! Overall though it is a very good museum with the most fascinating part being about a truck found in the desert in 1999. The truck was almost fully in tact with ammo and condensed milk tins etc. The engine even started!

We left Alamein and tracked down the tiny station (the soldiers called it "Heaven") which is now crumbling but still recognisable. A new station sits next to it but the original - complete with a tree to give some shade was in fact very moving to be in. Sitting under the tree with the railway lines in front of you you could almost picture the soldiers getting on and off the trains.

Alexandria! It sounds such a grand place, filled with history and Linda had got it in her head that this was going to be European Mediterranean like city. The roads in were manic. It made Tripoli look like a drive In the country on a Sunday afternoon. The roads split, joined, merged and ended with no warnings, there were potholes that Minis could go in and never come out, ruts That if it rained you'd need a ferry to cross and speed bumps the size of the Cotswolds. Add to that you usual mix of microbuses and cars racing and hooting, then get us lost so we end up driving down a tram line and find ourselves in the middle of the souk and you could safely say it was not pleasant.

We did eventually find a parking place next to the fort and taxied off to see the Library - a wonderful futuristic new building that is worthy of the history associated with its name. A wander round the heaving streets and a stroll down the promenade and a nice meal and cake in the poshest patisserie in town and we thought Alex was quite nice, at least on the shoreside. In land it is a sprawling mass of multi story apartments and ports. It looks extremely poor and run down.

We get back to Taffy and found the juice bar that was about 30cm from our van was open to 3am and had the loudest most distorted radio in the world playing. If it had been selling booze we could understand it but OJ? Midnight and the place is heaving and people knock on the sides try the doors shake the van and bang their heads on the mirrors - that OJ must be strong stuff. We can actually see the point of not selling alcohol here, if they get this crazy on OJ and Candy Floss I'd hate to see them on shandy let alone anything stronger! So we up sticks and set off for Cairo. Fortunately Jon spotted a truck stop near the port and asked if we could use it. We were ushered into a warehouse to wake up the next morning and find our selves locked in and at the front of the warehouse seats set up tarpaulins draped on the walls and orange spook suits laid out. All it would need was a video camera and a couple of hooded men with Kalashnikovs and you'd have recognized it from the news. Needless to say we hadn't noticed any of this when we drove in and slept like babies!
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Siwa Oasis

2009-04-21T17:08:00.000+01:00

We left Marsa at the same time as our French friends in different directions. They headed to Alexandria and we headed into the desert for Siwa oasis. Leaving Marsa you almost immediately lose the greenery and houses the land changing to desert, not the Hollywood rolling sand dunes but flat barren coarse sand hardpacked and a light rust in colour. You also immediately get faded, easily missable signs at the side of the road -"Minefield".

The drive is straight, 300kms of desert interspersed with phone masts every 25km and rather strangely Ambulance stations every 50km or so. There are no towns, no houses, almost no vegetation and once you pass the last oil rig, very little traffic. Suddenly, just as you are thinking how attractive the scenery is around Sutton Bridge the road drops off the plateau and you are confronted with multi colour gorges, lakes and palm trees. Siwa is a sleepy town, 40c when we arrived at 3pm and most people are hiding from the heat. We stop at the Police and ask where to camp and get directed to a hotel car park. Fine as a reserve but we came here to see the lakes. We head off in Taffy using the 3g phone network to get google maps working and promptly end up at a dead end. Surprising how those irrigation canals look like roads on google! 2 boys in a Donkey and cart signal us to follow them through some tiny streets past half fallen down homes. We go as slowly as we can but they are so excited by us that they start overtaking other carts and the our donkey Is going at a fair old rate. Eventually after ensuring we will never find our way home we arrive at the enormous lake and the view is fabulous though the mozzies look ravenous. We've now walked to the end of the road through the palms and along a sandy track to end up at the sunset cafe! We are almost completely surrounded by lake and the sun is slowly getting ready to set while we drink a coffee that will keep us awake for a month. There are all kinds of birds in the lake and mountains on the far shore a few miles away. Time to enjoy the sunset....
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Libya to Egypt

2009-04-18T17:57:00.000+01:00

We left Leptis and began the long trip towards Egypt. Ali our escort told us we could get to Aydabiya in a day easily, we disagreed but it seemed we had no option but try. We arrived in the dark around 9pm and the last couple of hours of driving was a mixture of good road and horrendous road works. To add to this we had seen about 10 dead camels by the road and at night they are very hard to see. Here we met up with the French family we had met earlier as our escort wanted us to all travel together as he was unfamiliar with Eastern Libya. Again this appeared not to be optional. Robert Natalie Lisa and Anouk are lovely so we didn't really mind at all. It gave us a chance to talk to other people and feel closer to home.

Over the next few days we visited Benghazi (not worth it), Tukrah - an old Greek Necropolis and church and Italian fort right on the beach, Cyrene - the greek Roman city set on the edge of a Cliff overlooking the plains and sea below and Apollonia another Greek / Roman city actually half underwater now and largely falling into the sea but in the most picturesque setting possible. It was here that our patience with Ali began to run out. Everyone you meet travelling in Libya say the same things about their escorts. They try to control you all the time, they don't want you talking to locals and they want you to do exactly what they say at all times. This includes what time you get up, how long you spend at a site, where you camp and they even try to tell you what to take photos of. They also appear frightened of stepping out of line with the Police (possibly understandably in Libya) so they will try to stop you doing anything not on your program. The way to deal with this we found was to simply accept somethings that we could not change then ignore the escort when he talked about time related issues. Getting Jon up early is difficult enough for Linda so poor Ali had no chance and as for spending only 45 minutes at a site - we hadn't driven 7000 kms for that!

Just after visiting the Knightsbridge Commonwealth war cemetery which is on the site of much of the fighting during the seige of Tobruk we were overtaken by a lorry going at what must have been in excess of 80mph. He misjudged his line and smashed into our mirror making a noise like a shell going off. He stopped and the Police arrived and after examining the damage - he lost all of his mirrors, we have just had the main mirror glass cracked and a bit of the plastic surround broken - decided to not take the Police up on their offer to charge him. So we shook hands and continued on our way.

Our last stop in Libya was Tobruk where we had a nice farewell meal with our French friends and visited the war cemeteries (which must be the best kept things in Libya).

We arrived at the border with Egypt around 4pm thinking it may take between 5 and 12 hours to cross. 2.5 hours later we were through what appeared to be organised chaos. At the border we had met 3 other British motorhomes doing a similar trip to ourselves. These 3 turned out to be part of The Silk Route Club, a small group of highly adventurous motorhomers who have toured virtually all over the world. In fact their web site has been part of the inspiration for us actually coming here! We ended up spending the night with them and Jon fell out of the van (sadly not due to us getting a drink) and badly sprained his foot. Fortunately it was his left and Taffy being automatic he does not need it to drive. He is unable to walk at the moment but we have again bumped into our French friends who are doctors and have very kindly made him a strap for it.

We are now plotted up for the next two nights next to the sea at Cleopatras beach and hope to visit Rommels beach and museum when Jon can hop in the nearby town of Marsa Matruh.
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2009-04-13T22:45:00.001+01:00

After a lovely day in Tripoli spent exploring the medina and souks we headed south towards Algeria ignoring both the FCO and parents advice in the process. We stopped en route to visit 2 kasrs at Nalut and overnighted in a small town near Ghadmes where a child kindly lobbed a stone onto our roof breaking one of the solar panels. A roll of selloptape later and it was working fine! Ghadames has to be the highlight of our trip so far, we explored the underground town sunk beneath the Oasis and went dune riding in a 4x4 which would have failed an MOT years ago. We had sand bread and tea with the Toureg and sat on the dines and watched the sun set over Algeria. We had been invited to round the evening off with traditional music and dancing laid on for a French minister and US diplomat but when we turned up we found it had been cancelled because they were too tired!

A 780 km drive back in a day to Tripoli and 2 stops to see a stunning abandoned hill top village at Termeisa and an underground berber house at Gharyan is too much and arriving in the dark on party night was a bit stressful to say the least and yet another occasion we really regretted not smuggling a bottle or two through customs! We were rewarded with another day in Tripoli to wander around which was lovely. Our next stop was the quite astonishing Leptis Magna. This fabulous Roman city is breathtaking with literally 100's of columns still standing, some of the best preserved baths we've ever seen and a port, theatre market place and much more. The guides say if you only see one thing in Libya it must be this and 5 hours of walking later and 3rd degree sun burn on a cloudy day says they're right. Taffy: our grey water tanks are now stinking again and it looks like Jon will have to do some repairs again.

2009-04-06T20:49:00.001+01:00

We crossed the border in 2 hours largely because we managed to talk our way through the diplomatic plates only channel and met our escort Ali who took care of our paperwork. We then headed onto Sabratha a magnificent Roman city right on the shore of the med. The theatre - largely rebuilt by the Italians is stunning set against the blue sea and sky. Next we drove into Tripoli at rush hour, which was the single most scary driving experience we have ever had. The drivers here are fast and reckless, they almost seem keen to die. Road markings are ignored, traffic lights are merely guides and pavements are designed for skipping to the front of a queue. When we had parked we met another Brit motor home - David - driving to India via Pakistan and Afghanistan (now there's an idea) who told us to always arrive and depart late at night.

Next day we walked around Tripoli to find the souks such a pleasure to be in. Shop keepers chat but never hard sell, people cone to talk to you out of the blue and you can pick an item up in a shop and put it down again without anyone giving you a special nice price, instead giving you free samples of cakes and free gifts when you did buy something. We bumped into a shop keeper we had met earlier in a Restaurant who then acted as our translator to help order a salad. Libyans have to be the nicest people we have ever met. We even had a man climb in our van today when we were having a cup of tea and invite us 1000kms south to stay at his home! While he was with us a 8 year old girl came in and joined us, sat with us shook our hands told us her name Saya -apparently it means beautiful day - and then left. Oh and did I mention 157 litres of diesel cost £12.50

2009-04-04T19:39:00.001+01:00

We left northern Tunisia and immediately lost our Blackberry service and found that WAP was not set up on the phone despite O2 promising it was so we can no longer be tracked on Google Latitude or easily send our blog entries in. We're likely to not get our service at all in Libya either so it may be quiet for a while.

We've zig zagged down towards the Libyan border seeing some fantastic Roman ruins along the way. We've met literally hundreds of French motorhomes all going or leaving a rally in Tozeur as well as a lovely South African / New Zealand couple driving home to SA! We've tried some local foods even Jon and also the Black coffee, fought our way through souks and markets, cycled 2 km into the Sahara, spent 3 hours lying on the dunes in the sun in perfect tranquillity then headed to the nearest hotel to make use of the hot spring pool!

We've even had to stop to let a herd of camels cross the road. Tunisia has been a great experience and the people outside the tourist centres helpful and very friendly. In the tourist zones the people are quite different, if they say a word to you it is because they want you to come into their shop, buy something or just want money. It gets a bit annoying and counter productive in the end as we tend to avoid the zones as we're fed up saying no thanks. Libya next...

Dougga and Bulla Regia

2009-03-25T17:13:00.000Z

We have spent the day doing Roman ruins. We spent the morning at Dougga which is simply stunning. There is an almost completely in tact Roman temple dominating the town and walking up the steps to its main entrance you really felt you had gone back 2000 years. The view from the temple over the surrounding countryside was breathtaking. The theater is also one of the best we've seen again cut into the hillside south facing and a stunning view of the valley. The town is isolated away from any modern development so you can reaLly imagine the streets bustling with people and noise. We loved it!

We then went to Bulla Regia which is much less well preserved. The things we had come to see were the mosaics, still in situ in the Baths and the underground houses the rich people built to escape the heat. You could have simply moved a some furniture back in and lived in them they are so well preserved. The floors are covered in mosaics and the central courtyard columns still have their fluting and at the top have ornately carved stone.
So, another day, another Roman ruin...
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Carthage and Beyond

2009-03-24T18:59:00.000Z

We ended up spending 3 nights by the sea in Carthage. We even took the tandem out for a day cycling round the various punic and Roman ruins. These sites are not the best we will see on this tour, but the fact that they played such an important role history makes then somehow come alive. The old Punic ports, now just glorified ponds, once saw the worlds most powerful fleet berthed here and the models and excavations really help you visualise it. The Antonine baths cover an enormous area - even for a modern pool complex and much of the lower ground floor remains in tact directly adjacent both the sea and the new Presidential palace. Allegedly you must not point your camera at the Palace even by accident, but we weren't immediately shouted at or shot when we did. We were however moved on by the guards on our cycle home when, exhausted and half way up another big hill, we stopped next to the Palace. After recovering we cycled into Sidi Bou Said, a picturesque almost European Mediterranean town sat on top of a cliff overlooking the sea. The town is completely white with blue doors and windows and is a huge tourist attraction for Tunisians and foreigners alike. The doors are all decorated and really beautiful and naturally enough the souvenirs sellers have many mini door for sale. We really loved these doors so thought we'd buy one and asked how much? 150 dinar we were told. After haggling we got it for 15 (and the seller seemed happy with this price).
After collecting our carnet yesterday and having lunch at a posh cafe du thé in the centre of Tunis we have now moved on to Douga. We could have changed planets the difference is so great. Douga has some of the most fabulous Roman ruins and the Roman town is situated on a hillside overlooking the new. We are unfortunately not allowed to camp next to the ruins and has been sent to camp outside the Police station where we have been joined by 4 French motorhomes. The town is ramshackle and not pleasant, unlike Tunis you rarely see a woman, and many of the ones you do see are wearing traditional clothes. The cafes have virtually no women in them and walking through the town you certainly feel people watching you. Some people say bonjour and others ignore you, but on the whole people are generally nice to us.

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Welcome to Africa

2009-03-21T18:41:00.001Z

We're sitting in a car park plotted up for the night with the sun setting behind us and the waves crashing on the shore In front at Carthage. Couples are strolling along the promenade in front of us wrapped up in winter coats and we've just put the heating on! We arrived off the ferry in the dark 2 days ago after filling in numerous forms and getting them stamped by various officials in what was a fairly well organized port. We had managed to get off the ship last - so busy chatting to a German that in the end they had to make an aNnouncement asking us to move our van off the car deck. When we got to Taffy it was sitting alone in the middle of the deck and the Italian crew were getting a touch animated. This proved fortuitous as we just followed the 20 motor homes on an organised tour out of the port to their overnight pitch and joined them for our first night.
The next day we drove into Tunis and parked up for our second night. We walked into the city and managed to get accosted by the captain of the ferry who had dropped an envelope on the ground. We made the mistake of calling him and giving him his envelope which resulted in a long chat lots of hand shaking then an appeal for cash. We even saw the guys ID card so think he was actually the Captain! 10 minutes later and we'd been collared by a 'friendly' local who turned out to want to sell us carpets and then the family scented oil for £18 for 10 ml - he was down to £5 before he figured out Linda was related to Scrooge And we left. Another 10 minutes and Jon had to extract someone's hand from his inside jacket pocket and another 10 and we were thinking what the hell have we done.

24 hours later and we've visited the fabulous Bardot museum and seen (and walked all over) some outstanding mosaics and found our little plot up and are beginning to settle in. We always find the first 48 hours anywhere the most difficult and certainly Tunisia has taken this to a new level, but we are sitting in Taffy, in the ancient city of Carthage, looking out at the med, with a bottle of wine, surrounded by cactus, palm trees and bright rust colored cliffs and we consider ourselves incredibly lucky to be here - what a difference a day makes.
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Remember the carnet....

2009-03-18T18:48:00.001Z

We rounded last night off with a glass of wine and a pizza delivered to our door. It was ordered in a mixture of German French and Italian and was fantastic. We woke up refreshed and decided to double check our papers to find the carnet had the wrong chassis number on it! Paul at the RAC, unphased as usual simply sent a new one out to Tunis for us to collect on arrival. We set off from our Sosta for the port much relieved and promptly ended up missing our turning and heading back to Switzerland! Quite why the co pilot thought that our Sat Nav was wrong along with all the road signs remains unclear but ho hum, a 25 km detour later and we arrive at Hell on earth - Genoa port. Few signs, plenty of trucks, lots of irate Italians hooting their horns and a bemused Englishman doing a 3 point turn in the middle of it all! The check in was chaotic, it was like Primark in the sales! There was room for 200 cars but the ferry takes 1100! People and bags lay everywhere and the cars were so loaded down the tyres were almost invisible. We got our papers sorted and eventually boarded as almost the last vehicle. Our luxury suite turned out to be a double bedded cabin and hardly what you'd call luxury or suite, but never mind, back in Taffy tomorrow and that is luxury.
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Tempting fate

2009-03-17T20:41:00.001Z

"This will be our last easy border crossing" Linda said 5 miles from the Swiss border. 10 minutes later we had found ourselves in a huge queue of lorries that had been stationary for 3 hours. "It could take another 4 hours" one of the drivers informed us - and we thought Ukraine was hard to get into. Plan B, go via France. We set up the navigator and 5 minutes later we ae out of Germany and in France! Another 5 minutes and we've taken a wrong turning and ended back in Switzerlands Customs lorry park! So we head off on foot smile sweetly and laugh with the French and Swiss Douane and have got all our papers stamped, the road toll paid and are on our way again somehow missing out hours of queues. We then somehow manage to leave Switzerland go back into Germany then get back into Switzerland again. God knows how we are going to find Egypt let alone Cairo if we can't manage to get out of the EU!
3 hours later and we have arrived on the Med, and got ourselves stuck half way up a mountain pass and lost in an industrial estate before finding our overnight Sosta. So far all the road signs have been in the Latin alphabet, we've had good English maps and the aid of Sat Nav. From tommorow its all going to be in Arabic, our maps are 1 inch to 100 miles and no Sat Nav. Sounds a doddle!
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Extra time winner!

2009-03-06T19:01:00.000Z

Well with less than 90 minutes to go before the banks closed on our last day at home HSBC managed to get the guarantee sorted and the papers over to the RAC by fax. The carnet will now be next day delivered to Stowmarket for us to pick up on route during our farewell tour! Talk about cutting it fine!
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Nearly Time to Set Off....

2009-03-03T16:46:00.001Z

With only 5 days to go before we depart we are still waiting on HSBC to
get the Bank Guarantee in place so the RAC can issue a carnet. HSBC
having lost our file have a lot to do to get the documents faxed over to
the RAC so we can take the Carnet with us when we depart. Other wise it
will have to be couriered out to Tunis for collection at the embassy.
Still, this is only one in a long series of minor problems that we've
had to overcome to get the trip on track and I'm sure it won't be the
last...