The most amazing thing

It was an American fish hatcher who first made me reevaluate everything. I'd pulled into his Oregon forest hatchery in a rainstorm, in search of a rumoured creek campground, and amidst the questions I was used to answering - why are you cycling around the world? did you know there's an aeroplane? - was the …

Of spooks and spokes

On the night of the super blue blood moon eclipse I walked onto the balcony of my haunted hotel, and watched clouds scuttle across its surface until I couldn't tell what was eclipse and what was shadow. I’d stopped at the Champasak Palace Hotel in Pakse, south Laos, because it was supposed to be haunted, …

On the road again

Between the typhoons, the tarantulas, the Dengue scares and the rough rides on propeller planes low over the South China sea, it was, for me, an average Christmas break. But it was a break of a week that stretched into two, then three, and maybe because they had arrived exactly halfway through my trip around …

The monsters of my own imagination

In most great adventures there comes a point when the characters split up for a time. So like the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings and Luke, Leia and Han in Star Wars, Miranda and I went our separate ways after the Pamir Highway. Still recuperating, Miranda decided to fly to Thailand early in …

The downward spiral

As Miranda closed her laptop with a flourish, the last blogpost complete, the walls of the Pamir Lodge in Khorog started to vibrate as an earthquake rocked the mountainside town and the power cut out. “At least I’ve got a topline for the next blog post,” I joked. “Although I hope that wasn’t an omen.” We …

Ascent into madness

“Tell them we aren’t moving unless they bring us a truck” Liz said in a hushed tone. We had been warned that the Tajik military like to pounce on tourists camping along the border with Afghanistan, but we had thus far avoided them. This was our final night on the Panj River and they had …

By any means

“We’re sitting on a box full of money, on the train conductor’s bed, drinking a teacup of vodka, and minding bags of other peoples’ contraband,” Miranda observed as we sped across the Uzbekistan desert on the slow train to Samarkand. When we had realised, in Georgia, that we would have to throw our bikes on …

Georgia on my mind

Our experience on the ferry from Istanbul to Odessa had left us feeling like wizened old seadogs. Sailing to Georgia, we rocked up to the port two hours before our scheduled departure and headed straight for the bar. Eventually setting sail at 3am, we had already polished off the entire supply of champagne. By the …

All at sea

"We're about to get on a boat to Ukraine," I said to Miranda, head in hands as I tried to squash my hangover back into my skull and the sun rose over Istanbul, "but we don't actually have any way out of Ukraine." Since being reunited in early August Miranda and I had done Istanbul …

There’s only one way to find out

There is a computer game called The Evil Within, a notoriously difficult horror game. It took me 31 hours to complete it, and over the course of the game I died 442 times, or once every four minutes. Once every four minutes I failed, waited for the game to reload while regretting my life decisions, …