Things rarely go as planned. When we decided to travel, our aim was to reach Mongolia via the silk road and the famous Pamir Highway. The Pamir Highway climbs to an altitude of 4600 metres, so there is a limited window of opportunity for crossing it, dependent on the season. Setting off from the UK in September 2018, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to cross the Pamirs before the summer of this year.
After spending the winter in Morocco, it was our intention to start travelling East in early spring. This would give us plenty of time to reach the Pamirs before the coming winter. However, we then decided to convert the inside of the Land Rover, taking three months out of our schedule.
We reached Turkey at the end of June, passing the easternmost point we had hitherto reached. On a campsite on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, we met some young Turks who approached us to look at the Land Rover, saying how much they liked it and asking questions about how we cooked, slept, washed, etc. They were visibly impressed with our set up and stayed with us for a pleasant half hour talking about Land Rovers and camping and showing us the best places to visit in Turkey. Later they brought us baclava; a small gesture of thanks for the time we’d spent with them.
Our original plan had been to hug the north coast of Turkey, following the Black Sea all the way to Georgia. However, our new Turkish friends suggested we travel south to see ancient Greek and Roman ruins and to visit the rock formations of Cappadocia and then travel eastward, staying inland. The coast road, they said, was just a busy dual carriageway with the sea on one side and mountains on the other. We heeded their advice and set off to explore this interesting and beautiful country – first visiting the Phrygian valleys where Midas was once king, then to Hierapolis with its Greek amphitheatre and travertine pools, and on to Cappadocia with spectacular rock formations, cave villages and hot air balloons.
We travellers don’t like to think of ourselves as tourists. This is pure snobbery of course, there being little to distinguish the tourist from the traveller, particularly from the point of view of locals. We visited the ancient town of Hierapolis with all the other tourists visiting that day and did what all the other tourists did – marvelling at the amphitheatre, paddling in the slippery travertine pools and taking photographs to put on Instagram in search of those approval-bestowing ‘likes’.
In Cappadocia, however, we strongly felt the separation between us as travellers and the tourists that flock to the region. We found a place to camp using an app – which was described as a great spot to see the hot air balloons at dawn. We arrived to find a flat parking area surrounded by sandy valleys with deeply fluted stacks of rock in shades of beige and pink. Looking down into these valleys, we saw animal tracks in the sandy valley floor and Steve spotted a family of jackals living in a rock crevice. The sun was just starting to set and we were sitting down to eat our dinner when half a dozen vehicles arrived, including two Defenders from which a number of Asian tourists emerged. They had been brought to this spot on a guided tour to watch the stunning palette of colours the setting brought out in the rock.
On seeing the Land Rover, the Asian visitors took no notice of the beauty around them but proceeded to take photographs of us eating our dinner by the car. One man gave his camera to his wife and came to stand behind us, asking if he could have a photograph with us. We sat eating our dinner while this random stranger stood behind us smiling at his wife taking several photographs. To these people we had become a tourist attraction as interesting as these majestic structures surrounding us! It amused us to imagine these people returning home and showing their friends and families photographs of a Defender and two English people eating their dinner – smiles fixed like exhibits in a waxwork museum.
Although these vehicles disappeared with the sun, it was not a peaceful camp. Two cars arrived late at night and noisily set up camp next to us and after a brief respite in the small hours, the activity recommenced before dawn. This time, however, it was worth being woken as we opened our door to a sky full of newly launched hot air balloons, with many more still on the ground around us. The balloons glowed like giant lightbulbs in the pre-dawn twilight, as their roaring burners heated the trapped air enough to lift the baskets full of eagerly awaiting tourists into the sky. We watched as balloon after balloon paraded past, so close they blocked out the sky, rising briefly before dipping down into the valleys in turn and then up high into the sky. As dawn broke in a clear sky, the sight and sound of over a hundred balloons climbing and descending over the dusky pink landscape around us was truly spectacular.
We find that in our determination not to be tourists, we tend to shun tourist places. In Turkey we did join the tourist trail, visiting the ruins at Hierapolis and the open-air cave museum at Goreme. We found these experiences expensive and disappointing and although interesting, our experience was marred by other people. In Goreme, it was hard to move in and out of the caves due to the number of people blocking staircases and doorways, and groups of friends stopping to take photographs of each other at every opportunity. In Hierapolis we paid twice the normal price for a simple bottle of water. In many cases, we refrained from taking a photograph of something beautiful because it was almost impossible to do so without other people in the frame. In Istanbul we decided against visiting the Aya Sophia and found the Basilica Cistern disappointing and crowded. We have found that we prefer to find our own places well away from tourists and in this way have stumbled across some achingly beautiful and peaceful places.
Having been surrounded by people in Cappadocia, we craved solitude for our next camp and in search of that we drove up into the mountains to a place we found on our app next to a volcanic crater lake. The long, but easy off-road track took us up to 2300 metres, where it was blissfully cool and quiet. Despite numerous gambolling marmots, the lake itself didn’t appeal to us as a camp place, so we decided to continue along the track, which became much rougher as we climbed higher. We finally reached a place where we could pull off the track and make the car reasonably level. It was perfectly quiet with no-one in sight and a view over the distant plains to one side, and the peak of the volcano, still capped with snow, to the other.
We have learned that wherever we go we are never alone. Nowhere on this planet seems to be truly remote. Whether in Saharan sand dunes, arctic mountains or the Swedish wilderness, people are never far away. The silence of even this remote place was soon disturbed by the sound of sheep bleating and goat bells and within minutes we were surrounded by a huge flock, accompanied by a donkey, several Anatolian shepherd dogs and a solitary herder. He took no notice of us, however, and the flock inexorably moved away with only the dogs peacefully lingering to ensure we were no threat.
As the sun set and we prepared for bed, we noticed a fire on the side of one of the surrounding hills. At first we assumed this was the herder’s camp fire, but on looking through our binoculars, we saw that the fire was far too large to be a camp fire, and that there was no person in its vicinity. As we watched the fire burn and start to die, another fire sprang up some feet away from it, quickly followed by two more. The fires didn’t burn for long, each one flaring brightly for ten or fifteen minutes before beginning to die as another was born. Eventually there were ten fires in various stages of life, clearly visible in the darkening sky.
By morning the fires were all out and we could see the scorched grass showing where they had been. Another fire sprang up further away on another hill, but it quickly died and seemed to be isolated. We were puzzled about the cause of these fires and have, as yet, found no explanation for them. Google gave us nothing and the fires didn’t seem to fit the description of the ‘eternal’ fires sometimes associated with erupting volcanic gases. These were certainly not eternal.
The rest of our journey through Turkey took us across vast arid plains and up into the mountains of the north, where we were able to escape from the heat, if only briefly, before descending to join the coast road that would take us into Georgia.
Our first stop was Batumi, Georgia’s answer to Dubai. The city was a mix of old colonial style buildings and ultra-modern skyscrapers, with a beach front on the Black Sea and surrounded by cloud topped mountains. Our only task in the city was to buy a local SIM card, which we did quickly before heading for the mountains to escape the heat, something of a theme with us since arriving in the Balkans in early June.
Georgia quickly became one of our favourite countries and rivalled Norway for its spectacular beauty. We spent a few days in Tbilisi, which, although the capital, was compact enough to get around on foot and occasional taxis, which were cheap enough to be a good option. The crumbling old town of Tbilisi contrasted starkly with the modern shopping mall on Rustavelli Avenue, where we treated ourselves to a visit to the cinema. Accommodation was plentiful and inexpensive – and Georgian food was delicious.
After resting in Tbilisi we explored the Caucasus mountains in the north, driving along bumpy dirt tracks to over 2800 metres looking for places to camp, and finding them in stunning high valleys alongside clear mountain streams.
It had been our intention, while in Tbilisi, to apply to the Russian embassy for the visas we would need to continue our journey east through Russia to Kazakhstan. The alternative to travel through Russia was to cross the Caspian Sea from Baku in Azerbaijan to Aktau in Kazakhstan. We had read that the ferry from Baku was notoriously unreliable, with no timetable and the possibility of a quayside wait of as much as two weeks. The ferry was also expensive and uncomfortable offering meals of which the only meat-free option was the soup with the pieces of meat picked out and left on the side of the plate.
For entry to Mongolia, there was no other option for us than Russia. The only other border with Mongolia is Chinese and overlanding in China had never been an option, as the requirement to travel with a guide is prohibitively expensive.
We discovered that there is no Russian Embassy in Georgia, but they do have an office within the Swiss Embassy where visa applications are processed. There is also a recently opened Russian Visa Centre, and this is where we headed to apply for our visas. On arriving at the Visa Centre and explaining that we wanted to apply for tourist visas, we received a positive response. But when we explained that we were driving and would be taking a vehicle into Russia, we received an emphatic ‘no’. It was not possible to obtain a visa. No explanation was offered but the interview was clearly over. We think that the only way to obtain the necessary visas to drive in Russia are through the embassy in the UK, but even contacting them didn’t help us. The simply said that each country had its own rules regarding issuing visas and that we needed to contact the embassy in Georgia.
So we had to make a decision: continue across the Caspian Sea and along the silk road as far as Bishkek in Kirghizstan, then turn around without reaching Mongolia, or turn around now and return to the UK to prepare for another trip in the spring.
We decided on the latter.
Our vie on road, therefore, will shortly end when we spend the winter in the UK arranging the next part of our travels. Whether we will apply for Russian visas in London and try for Mongolia again, or head west, shipping the car to Canada to explore the Americas – we don’t yet know.
Things rarely go according to plan but we always knew that our life on the road was about just that – the journey – and not the destination. So while we are sad that we are already facing west again, we are excited about time at home with friends and family and looking forward to the next part of our adventure.
Gergeti Trinity Church, Georgia 
Davit Gareja monastery, south east Georgia
sing winches and wooden logs but these were soon to be replaced by electronic hoists. Like everything, the old would disappear to make way for the new. It was a fascinating and unexpected interaction, and also provided us with a place to camp for the night, as the engineer recommended a beach 20 kilometres away where he said we would be able to stay. We found the beach, with a military post directly on it, and asked for permission to stay there overnight. This was readily given and we set up camp alongside several other assorted overland vehicles. It was a beautiful beach, with an extraordinary rock shelf at the high tide line. The rocks were being steadily dissolved and eroded by the sea so that the shelf was riddled with tunnels, caves and blow holes. Below the tide was a sea of bright green seaweed, interspersed with clear rock pools. Local women were harvesting and drying the seaweed, which was then sold to the cosmetics industry to be used in the manufacture of sun creams and cosmetics.
Our relentless flight from bad weather kept us moving south, as the rain and cold caught up with us in Chefchaouen. We followed the roads southward, enjoying the dramatic changes in landscape as we left the Riff mountains and crossed the vast plain between mountain ranges and desert. The roads were lined with people selling tagines and fruit, and people invariably waved as we passed, or beckoned towards us wanting a lift, or for us to stop and buy their produce. As we approached the desert, we encountered the first of many fossil-sellers; from those with hundreds of rocks spread on blankets by the roadside, to boys on bikes or on foot who pulled a handful of rocks from their pockets or knapsacks, carefully wrapped in newspaper.
own of Merzouga, we stayed on a campsite adjoining a lovely auberge, called ‘La Gazelle Bleu’. We received the customary welcome of a tray with sweet mint tea and a bowl of nuts, but with the addition of a small bowl of Moroccan pastries, made with honey and sesame, which were delicious. The auberge stood between the village and the sand dunes of Erg Chebbi and with the doors on both sides open, you had a view through the cool interior to the hot orange sand beyond. We went for a walk on the sand in the late afternoon and no sooner did we reach the dunes, than a 4×4 vehicle drew up alongside us and a man asked if we wanted a tour of the desert. We said no, that we preferred to walk, whereupon he offered a camel ride. We declined this offer as well, saying we needed the exercise so he offered us fossils. When we told him we already had fossils he finally left us to our walk undisturbed.
As it was such a nice place we decided to stay for two days. On the second day a man appeared on top of the dune; he wore a long tunic, was barefoot and carried nothing with him. He walked towards us and greeted us but his language was incomprehensible to us, and ours to him. He told us he was a nomad – we had this word at least in common. We didn’t know what he wanted, so offered him bread and water, which he took. He pointed to his back, indicating pain, so we invited him to sit and rest and we offered him two paracetamols.
We arrived in Morocco two weeks ago, having just managed to stay ahead of the bad weather as we travelled south through Spain. Our idea was to spend a month or so in Morocco and be back in Europe before Christmas. However, we have fallen in love with Morocco. Since arriving here, we have settled into an unhurried life where we decide each morning whether we will move somewhere or stay where we are. Before arriving in Southern Morocco our decisions were mostly based on the weather. Here in the desert, the weather is the same every day and so we base our decisions entirely on how we feel that day. We have felt less motivated to move. When we stay in one place we rest, save money, have time to catch up on chores, contact family and friends, write new blog posts and bring our daily journal up to date.
The hotel, called Hostal Bofill, was serving lunch to town locals but were happy for us to come in for coffee and to use their Wi-Fi. As we sat in the comfortable and nostalgic bar the sky outside turned crepuscular and the rain became heavier. We decided to enquire about staying in the hotel for the night, and discovered that they had a room available for a reasonable price, by European standards. The room was simple but beautiful, with a high ceiling, tall shuttered windows and a small balcony overlooking the street. It contained two narrow single beds, a 1950s wardrobe, a sink and a television that we were warned didn’t work. We loved it. We ate in the hotel restaurant that evening, as it filled with visitors and locals expecting to see a show in the town square to celebrate the Dia de las Brujas (Day of the Witches), it being 31 October. The rain won in the end, cancelling the show, drowning everyone’s expectations and keeping the hotel busy.
Reaching the South coast, dominated by Almeria, Malaga and Marbella we regretted leaving the North so quickly and looked forward to reaching Morocco! We had an enforced stay of a week on a campsite outside Marbella (waiting for a parcel to arrive from the UK), by the end of which we were desperate to get moving again. The area was dominated by holiday villas, bars, spas and golf clubs. The presence of expatriates was demonstrated by the proliferation of English advertisements and signs, estate and insurance agents and restaurants providing fish and chips. Thirty years ago, we imagine, this would have been a very different place.
Now we started to get excited. We were near North Cape at the time so decided to take the Hurtigruten ferry from Honningsvåg to Harstad, from where we could explore the Lofoten Islands. 
Harstad had been very cold and wet over the past couple of days, but this morning the sky was clear and last night’s rain had fallen as snow on the mountains. The view leaving harbour was stunning. We had the deck to ourselves; most passengers having been on board for some time apparently more interested in the breakfast buffet than the departing shore.
Our day on board MS Finnmarken was spent between excursions on deck when the weather would allow, and stalking the public areas inside looking for free chairs to occupy while we warmed up with the free tea and coffee on board. Making our way southward, we approached the Lofoten Islands, where the ship entered Raftsund, the 20 km narrow stretch of water separating the Lofoten from Vesterålen islands. 
waited to hear whether the weather was favourable, while our crew companion told us that this was one of the best places to find sea eagles. As if on cue, a sea eagle flew past the ship low to the water. Others flew high overhead allowing Steve the chance to photograph them, while I randomly waved the GoPro in what I thought was the general direction of an eagle. The nauseating video I produced from this activity confirmed that it wasn’t.
well ordered farms and good campsites and because it gave us the opportunity to meet up with our Dutch friends. We met Mickey and Ed on a campsite in Northern Portugal last summer and bonded when Steve went over to help tie down their tent awning during a nigh-time storm. We think it was the action-man-esque cut Steve sustained on his cheek from a flying guy rope that elicited their sympathy – the bond later cemented over a meal at a local village eatery.
piece of equipment, as we piped warm air into the roof tent, maintaining a cosy environment to sleep in.
By 3pm, the Visitor Centre had closed (no more warm free wifi) – the entrance barrier left open and the toll hut deserted. Anyone could now enter the car park and walk to the North Cape monument for free. A few breaks in the cloud meant that we did glimpse the Barents Sea but for the rest of the time we huddled in the car, heater on, looking out into nothing but cloud. The wind persisted in coming from the West but our faith in weather forecasting kept us committed to our choice of location, convinced that when the wind swung to the north, we would enjoy a calm, sheltered night. It didn’t and neither did we. The wind did not change in any measure other than its strength. We were relentlessly buffeted all night, making sleep impossible and tempers short. 
We have loved Scandinavia, and especially the arctic. Something about the harshness of that environment draws us both and we were genuinely sad to leave. But there is only so much cold, wind and rain that you can stand living outdoors so if we are to visit this beautiful place again, it will have to involve a more permanent dwelling, hopefully allowing us to experience the different seasons, midnight sun and midday darkness, and the Northern Lights, which no doubt put on a spectacular show invisible to us above the unremitting cloud.
It is now three weeks since we packed up, transferred occupancy of our home to the new tenants and set out to start our very own ‘big adventure’. If we just unwind those three weeks, plus a few more going back, we arrive at a point in time when we still had every intention of being super-organised. All necessary items would have been sourced and purchased. All packing would be neatly arranged according to meticulously prepared lists ensuring nothing could be forgotten. Our home would be thoroughly cleaned, renovated and prepared for its new occupants. All goodbyes would be properly made, ‘good wishes’ messages replied to and social media updates posted. And most importantly, La Vie on Road, the blog that would record our adventure would be up and running – beautifully designed and laid out – just waiting for the first post to be uploaded. 
La Vie on Road 