The Final Tally

So, we're back! And, as promised, here are the long awaited and eagerly anticipated trip stats....

Miles: 10, 293
Miles in a car driven by someone else: 3,820
Miles in a car driven by me: 1,320
Miles in a big bus: 2,016
Miles in a minibus: 882
Miles on a train: 1,438
Miles on a boat: 877
Miles in an aeroplane: 140 *
Cheapest hotel: 500 Pakistani rupees in Passu (£3.80)
Most expensive hotel: €220 in Santorini
Countries: 24**
Border crossings: 29
Passport stamps: 49
Stressy moments when we realised they'd only stamped Trev's passport and not mine and we were now a day's journey from the border: 1
Best kebab: Ashgabat, Turkmenistan
Worst kebab: Goreme, Turkey
Trains missed: 1
Bouts of swine flu: 3 (at least)
Shaves: 2

*Important fact: this aeroplane trip didn't count as cheating for three reasons:
- it was too dangerous to go by bus; the Swat valley refugees were camped on the road
- it took us East, not West
- it was an internal flight, not a border crossing.
So there.

**Including made up ones

We're now back in the UK, staying at Trev's parents in Rochester. We've found a flat to rent and as long as credit checks and suchlike come back OK we'll hopefully be moving to Belsize Park on Wednesday. And it's been drizzling pretty much constantly since we got back. Nice.

As ever, photos to follow when Trev gets round to posting them. Don't hold your breath.

Gem.

There'll be bluebirds over....

Et alors... La France

The last week we've spent in France, driving from Nice to Avignon, then Biarritz, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and now Brittany, with a Michelin guide for company.  Avignon was pretty, but the highlight was a fish soup. Biarritz excelled itself with Bayonne ham. In La Rochelle and Brittany we gorged on assiettes de fruits de mer.

In Bordeaux the food played second fiddle to the wines, and we spent a lovely day driving around the small vineyards trying and buying. I was driving so had to spit, but Trev was blotto by lunchtime. We filled up the boot to see us though the first month back in London. Or the first week, depending on how grim it is.

Until yesterday it was warm enough to be on the beach, so we spent lazy days finishing off our stock of English paperbacks, topping up the tans and admiring all the French breasts on display.

Now we're in Brittany at Trev's Mum and Dad's house, getting excited over English TV (Strictly Come Dancing proving to be the highlight), getting all our washing done and continuing to eat and drink excessively.

The plan is to stop overnight in Honfleur tomorrow, then we'll be back in Blighty Monday afternoon. Et alors, on est pres de termine. Really pres now!

Gem.

A tribute to Lisa Cordwell

Dear Lisa, you wanted a mention,
We hope this will make you content
But don't think it will bring much attention,
Our readers don't like to comment.

Italia - part 2

From Venice we took the train to Rome, where we saw the Roman stuff and the Roman Catholic stuff, and Trev well and truly jumped on the Swine Flu Express. So he did a lot of laying in bed sweating and shivering and I did a lot of sitting in internet cafes trying to figure out if we went to a doctor they would just give him Tamiflu or decide to quarantine or deport. We also ate a lot of pizza with no cheese on, which may sound rubbish but is actually far superior to the cheesy variety.

Then it was on to Genoa, where it turned out that the largest aquarium in Europe had immense medicinal properties.

We also spent a day in the Cinque Terre national park; five beautiful villages linked by a hiking trail along the coast for the toughies and a train for those recovering from flu.

We said goodbye to Italy on the train through Monaco to Nice (does it count as a country visit even if we didn't get off?), where we wolfed down a quick Nicoise salad for lunch before setting off.

So now we have une voiture, une Guide Michelin, sept jours et un tres fort grasp of franglais. Vive la France!

Gem.

Italy - Part Uno

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Balkans and beyond

Gemma says that I have to write a blog post. I've explained that this may not the best way of encouraging creativity. My protestations, alas, have come to nought. Besides, we've started this thing and kept it up until now - so I guess our reader(s) deserve some sort of denouement. Gemma has been seen adding up the distances we've travelled by various means of transport - so it should be a thrilling climax.

We've started spending more time thinking about getting home and everything that goes with it. We've been worrying about starting back at work, fighting with the company that is/should be shipping our stuff, and making lists; of tasks that need to be done for the wedding, possible areas of London to settle in and of trilobite specimens to look at if there is any free time before Christmas. All quite dreary. Luckily I was only responsible for one of these. I am very lucky to have such an organised fiancee.

In a further intervention, I've been reliably informed that I should be writing about where we've been and should stop being 'horrible'.

Since we last wrote, we've almost completed the balkans leg of our journey and are now on the bus from Rijeka in northern Croatia to Trieste. We'll spend a couple of nights there, visiting Emma, Sandro and new-ish baby Arturo. Its amazing how many new babies of friends there will be to meet when we get home... at least 5, without being thorough.

Anyway, from where we last wrote in Kotor we headed further North in Montenegro to Herceg Novi, mainly to catch the direct bus from there to Bosnia. We also got an afternoon on the beach and some nice clams for dinner.

We then spent a couple of nights in Sarajevo and a night in Mostar. The weather finally turned on us in Bosnia. This was a disappointed for Gemma, but I feel that overcast skies, grey light and light rain lend a more authentic atmosphere to eastern european cities. Ideally  accompanied by pensioners selling unpaired shoes by the side of the road and musty cafes that only serve salted pork fat. I guess it reminds me of happy years living in east London... Other than the weather, Sarajevo was a big disappointment: the food was good, the city attractive and the people cheerful and friendly. There were at least a lot of bullet-holes.

Mostar was even prettier, and even more bullet-ridden. The town only has one real attraction, an old bridge. Our Europe Lonely Planet boldly translates the name of the bridge (Stari Most) as 'petrified moon', a reference to its 'slender and refined beauty'. I'm not sure where they find their writers from; everyone else translates it as 'old bridge'. I expected Mostar to be a bit of a disappointment, but it is a very good bridge.

The weather improved slightly when we got back to the coast at Dubrovnik. At least enough for a few hours of sunbathing each day. We splashed out a bit, rented an apartment overlooking the beautiful old city and ate oysters for the first time on the trip. We could have happily stayed for longer.

Finally, we travelled up the coast of Croatia by overnight ferry. It was much more comfortable than the 12+ hour bus would have been and no more expensive than bus tickets and a hotel room. We had a few hours on the beach in Rijeka when we got off the boat. It will probably be our last bit of sun for a while - the water was freezing and its now chucking it down as we cross the Slovenian border. Our plan after Trieste is to spend a couple of days in each of Venice (G's never been), Rome (I've never been) and Genoa (you should be able to guess why we're stopping there?), then head across France to rent a car and drive up the West coast (better than the East coast), to finish with a day or two at my parents' place in Brittany and a couple of days in Paris.

Pictures to follow...

T.

P.S. Neill - I don't have your new address, so Mum's got your postcard.

New pictures - Greece, Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro

Here we go with some recent piccies....

Hiking on the Pelion Peninsula (Dad took this one):

Monestries perched on the mountain tops in Meteora, northern Greece:

A nice little church in Orhid, Macedonia:

Spot the non-mainstream flag.... Vivcani, Macedonia:

Waiting for snails for lunch in Vivcani:

Crap site number one in Tirana (a bell made out of bullet shells):

Kotor Old Town in Montenegro (really lovely):

Not (H)Ohrid at all...

...in fact, our brief sojourn in Macedonia was pretty nice!

We caught a series of local buses and reached Ohrid at tea time. It was a pretty pleasant town, with pretty Balkan houses and churches on a hillside, but not a lot going on (except for an awful lot of pizza restaurants).

The following day we were excited to visit the village of Vivcani (mainly to boost the country count), close to Ohrid.  Fed up with border battles in the 90s and cross about an attempt to divert their spring water to a nearby town, they declared themselves independent. The village shop now sells passports and local currency.  The government have studiously ignored them.  I'm not sure what we were expecting (barbed wire and stock plied weapons, maybe), but again, there was not much to see. We did have a very nice lunch, though, of homemade sausage and snails.

Yesterday we set off for Albania with a mental taxi driver, who kept us amused for the first hour, then just grated immensely. He had (apparently) driven both Liza Minelli and the Crown Princess of Japan, and we should have been very honoured to be in his car.  We tuned out of most of his incessant chatter, but I thought his solution to the Macedonia name problem was pretty good: if Greece want Macedonia for themselves, they should let Macedonia be called Greece... Make the Greeks pick one name, but they can't have both!

Arriving in Tirana we took ourselves out on a walking tour of the main sights... of which there are very few! I don't know if our tolerance for Soviet-style concrete blocks has diminished post-Greece, or if Tirana is especially nondescript, but we were done pretty quickly.  At least they have made an effort here, but painting the aforementioned blocks in a variety of bright coloured geometric patterns (think pink and purple concentric circles, yellow and blue stripes) isn't particularly effective at disguising them!

Dinner was in Blloku, the area surrounding Hoxha's old house, which used to be the homes of Communist Party officials, but is now streets full of boutiques, bars and trendy young things. Obviously, we fit right in.

This morning we decided to bail early on Tirana and head north to Montenegro. I think this is the right decision now we're getting close to the end of the trip and don't want to be wasting days, but it's made us think we haven't really given it a fair chance. Maybe we'll just have to come back.  Trevor thinks we may as well fly as go so quickly (but he's just being grumpy and I am ignoring him).

But anyway, we're on the bus heading North again, hoping to hit the MN coast by mid-afternoon.

Gems.

A proper post for a change

Oh dear, the blog seems to have degenerated completely over the last few weeks. Looking back, its been downhill since my 'curry' post.

There's a couple of reasons for this. We've been doing more drinking than actually travelling, and we've arrived in proper touristy places. It seems horribly self-indulgent to write about places that many of you will have visited and probably explored rather more thoroughly than we've found ourselves capable of. Besides, is anyone really interested in what we're eating for dinner (expensive seafood), how tanned we're getting (very), where the nicest beaches have been for sunbathing (Krios on Paros, although the water was a bit chilly) and snorkelling (south coast of the Pelion peninsula, I saw an octopus) or our deliberations on whether to hire a white convertible Smart car or a quad bike to get around Santorini (we got the bus)?

Thought not.

Rest assured, we've been having a really nice time.

We're now on our way out of Greece and away from the coast for at least a few days. More specifically, we're travelling from Meteora in the western half of central Greece to Ohrid in Macedonia. It should be a fun day - we need to take 5 separate bus journeys between small provincial Greek towns to avoid a huge diversion via Thessaloniki. There is always a chance that one of the buses we're hoping to take won't exist and we'll get stuck somewhere. I really like not knowing where we'll end up, but it stresses Gem a bit.

I'm not planning to use Macedonia's interim official name 'Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia'. Greece has blocked the use of the name 'Macedonia', as part of Greece is also called Macedonia and they view it as a slavic attempt to appropriate part of greek heritage (essentially Alexander the Great and his transcontinental rampage). On the other hand, I'm not sure why the Macedonians (i.e. FYROMers) really care what name they have to put on the letterhead when they write to the UN, when everyone will continue to call the place Macedoina regardless. Of all international disputes, this has to be one of the most petty.

Meteora is a group of monasteries built on once inaccessible rocky pinnacles. The monks once had to climb ladders, get winched up and down in nets, cross rope bridges, swing on a trapeze and use all manner of Indiana Jones-esque contrivances to get to the shops. The views are spectacular, but I can't help feeling that some of the magic has gone now that they are accessible by road and Italian tour bus.

We said goodbye to Gem's parents this morning. They'd been with us for a week since we got to Athens. David's kindly been paying for most of our dinners and wine, which hasn't really helped blog quality. We successfully converted them to the card game that has been keeping us occupied, and our usual lights out at 9.30 after a cheap dinner and a beer have been replaced by staggering back up the hill at 11 after a marathon game and a few kilograms of house white. That is except last night, as the 'home made' wine didn't taste like it had followed any recognizable oenological process.

Our plan for the next week is to spend a day in Ohrid, then travel from there to Tirana. From Tirana we'll visit the world's newest country, Montenegro, for a couple more days at the seaside, most likely in Kotor.

T.

Santorini, Paros and Athens

Here are some photos... (in reverse order)> Post to follow.

A quiz

At Jamie's request, here is a quiz for people called James Cotton. Anyone else is also welcome to enter, albeit at massively reduced probability of success:

1. At which textile company did Granddad Cotton work?

2. What is the name of the only object from Cameroon in the Cotton household?

3. What is the proper name of the red colour applied to London, Midland and Scottish railway passenger locomotives?

4. What was the name of the Cotton family house in Sri Lanka?

5. Are lungfish more closely related to salmon or cows?

6. Complete the sequence: Custard, Nugget, .......?

7. Name the wetland north of Heaton County Primary School.

8. What were the names of our two long-term drivers in Delhi?

9. Where was Neill found after his 'Big Night Out' in Cyprus? Where did Mum think he was?

10. Name 5 Cotton pet dogs.

11. How many houses in the East End has Trevor lived in?

12. What was the name of the shower company that Neill acted as a 'consultant' to aged 16?

13. What was the 3rd largest city in the Soviet Union?

14. Name 4 Atlas Brewery products.

15. Name 4 Atlas Brewery outlets.

16. Who has a 'slightly smaller sack'??

17. What is the full name of the hotel from the first visit to Tunisia?

18. Which is bigger: 'Red Devil' or 'Jack Dempsey'?

19, When Jamie kissed Natalie Baker behind the bikesheds was Trev betrayed by:
A) Natalie; or
B) Jamie

20. Ouzo or Raki?

We like ouzo...

...we like Greece.

Ancient Romans and modern Greece

From Istanbul we took the bus down the west coast of Turkey to the Roman city of Ephesus, which was stunning, but completely overrun by coach loads of cruise ship passengers. I quite like the idea of a cruise (getting to see lots of places without having to deal with buses, a backpack and packing up every couple of days) but you don't seem to be allowed on if you're under 70.

(All photos in Ephesus)

Then another bus took us to Marmaris. Described in the guidebook as a shrine to British package tours ("The only place in Turkey where standing in the middle of the main street in a bikini drinking a can of lager at midday won't raise eyebrows") we were obviously disappointed not to witness any such shenanigans.

After a very pleasant, if disappointingly sedate, lunch we took the high speed hydrofoil to Rhodes. Although this is our third entry into Europe in geographical terms, this time we won't be leaving again until the trip is done. Our arrival coincided with the departure of the easycruise boat from the harbour, so I guess there'll be limited Brits abroad antics here as well.

(Rhodes town)

After 24h in Greece, the most dramatic change is in our diet - whilst kebab is still most definitely on the menus, they have been usurped in our affections by grilled fish and calamaris. This is making me very happy.

Gems.


PS - we're not actually going to Ukraine. We were just wondering!

PPS - Trev says there aren't enough jokes in my blog posts. So here is one:

What do you call a man with no arms and no legs who swims across the English channel?

A clever dick!

Tonight's pondering

Why do we call it 'The Ukraine' and not 'Ukraine'?

We have an idea it might be related to either
A) what they call themselves (c.f. The Netherlands); or
B) relating to a geographical feature (c.f. The Congo)

but we don't know.

Anyone? (I think James, Trev thinks Jim)

Curry

Approaching the end of a twelve and a half hour bus trip down the coast of Turkey. We're averaging a book and a half on the long buses. They also provide some good thinking time.

The further on we get, the more I think about home. I'm looking forward to a good British curry. A proper spicy one. None of that Indian rubbish.

To the left, to the left...

(The alternative title to this blog post was 'Left, left, gulp', but we weren't sure if the language of Going Live is still an accepted means of communication.)

Anyway... Since leaving Georgia, we've done A LOT of westbound travel. First to Cappadoccia by overnight train (highly recommended - a compartment with just 2 beds and a minibar (!) and a lovely restaurant car). There, we stayed in the fairy chimneys (www.kelebekhotel.com - very cool rooms), hired bikes, visited an underground city (less cool than Terry Pratchett would have you believe) and lay by the pool.

(Goreme village)

(Inside a fairy chimney church)

(Cappadoccia)

(Our cool hotel room)

Randomly running into Chris Byrnes (of Delhi whisky fame) and his lovely lady friend resulted in an evening of rather over enthusiastically sampling the local raki.

Then on to Istanbul by bus and ferry, which was a huge shock to the system in terms of number of tourists (is there anyone left in Italy?) and the existence of a real backbackers' ghetto. Nevertheless, the city was great. The highlights were a trip up the Bosphorus to a fishing village for lunch (thanks, Jim, for the recommendation) and dinner on a terrace overlooking a strip of tavernas in the centre of town. Both excellent meals. The Blue Mosque, Aya Sofia and Topkapi Palace were pretty good too, but they'd have to go some to beat those grilled mussels!

(Blue Mosque, Istanbul)

(Trev in the Harem at the Topkapi Palace)
(Inside the Aya Sofia)

It certainly feels like we're back in Europe: buses have timetables (which they stick to) and tickets (of which they only sell one per seat), restaurants have menus (even in English), ATMs are everywhere and we have a choice of English language paperbacks... All good things! On the flip-side, prices have skyrocketed, some of the sights have resembled a tourist circus and we had a couple of pretty inedible meals in Backpacker Central.

As ever, photos to follow when we're off the bus and somewhere with a decent connection.

Gem.

PS. Jamie - you can consider all offers of babysitting WITHDRAWN.

New pictures...

We're now in Cappadocia, central Turkey. Famous for its unique wind and water eroded landscape and for cave churches, underground cities, and more or less anything else you can do with a chisel and a bit of patience. It's really touristy, which was a bit of a shock at first, but has become quite welcome - no more struggling with menus, no more cramped minibuses and no more playing hunt the ATM.


We've now uploaded some pictures from Georgia and here is a picture of a Turkish train, specially for Dad, who likes such things.

T.

Arrived in Turkey!

(... that's the oblong shaped one connecting the bottom of Europe with Asia, T.J.)

More to follow when we've seen more than just the inside of a bus!

Arriving in Europe..

We've now made it to Europe! Although only for 48 hours...

After a great birthday trip to northern Armenia we travelled back to Tblisi and then, after changing buses, up to the mountains in northern Georgia. The town of Kazbegi is only about 10 km from the Russia border (with North Ossetia) in dramatic rocky mountain scenery. It's a great place to see the number 1 Georgian scenic speciality - churches on top of big hills. It is also just on the northern side of the watershed of the Caucus mountains and so, technically, in Europe by most definitions. We had a great time walking and picnic-ing, although we got a bit bored of the only cafe in town and its two menu options!

[Gemma, church and mountain]

[Big fierce bird]

[View towards Russia: North Ossetia starts just at the bottom of the ridge on the back right]

Today we headed back to Asia for a while - at least until we repeat the 2 days in Europe trick in Istanbul.

We're now in Batumi on the Black Sea coast after a painful 9 hour minibus journey across Georgia. It's swarming with tourists, and seems like a nice town. However, we're only here overnight before crossing into Turkey tomorrow. The plan is to briefly head East to Erzurum to catch an overnight train across most of Turkey to Cappadocia. It's a bit of a shame to miss so much of Turkey, but we'll only pass the half-way point in terms of distance on the train tomorrow night and we're already 2 weeks past half-way time-wise. This is a bit worrying given that we have 8 countries left in our current plan (excluding the vatican..), so we're also spending a lot of time inconclusively debating whether we should change our route a bit.

T.

Birthday boy trip to Armenia

Happy birthday, Trev!

We've popped over to Armenia for a couple of days and are staying in a fancy pants hotel in the Debed Canyon as a special treat. Lots of ruined monasteries on mountain tops to explore and a lovely room, pool and sauna to enjoy.

Back to Georgia tomorrow to finish exploring there...

T'bilisi

Highly recommended, T'bilisi has been one of our favourite cities so far: excellent local wine at 2 quid a bottle, new and interesting food, attractive buildings and streets, beautiful frescos in churches, hip bars and restaurants, and cheap local tavernas... Wonderful! (Although, to be honest, a city that has both ATMs and Diet Coke readily available gets top ratings regardless.)

It's great to try some new food. We do still love kebabs, but we were starting to risk turning into one. Our favourites amongst Georgian dishes are the cheese pies with an egg on top (T) and the mushroom dumplings (G). Our favourites amongst Georgian wines are the reds and the whites.

Wayne Rooney is the footballer of choice amongst Georgian men. As it was explained to me yesterday, "David Beckham looks like a girl, this is very bad. Rooney looks like a bull, this is very good."

We have really enjoyed it, except for the fact that Trevor has been suffering from an ear infection and I have a rotten cold (pretty much Swine flu, I reckon), which Trev now seems to have caught too.

[Happy, smiling, paranoid nutjob; Stalin Museum, Gori]

[Trev in Stalin's armchair, Stalin Museum, Gori]
Yesterday we took the bus to Gori (where Stalin was born and where today there is a pretty good, if somewhat one-sided, museum about him) and then on to Mtskheta, where Christianity was established in Georgia, which features a huge cathedral and a couple of pretty older churches, all being enthusiastically prayed in by Georgians in their Sunday best.

One the way back to T'bilisi we were amused by a road sign on the highway: a very modern LED type sign, about 5m high, featuring an illuminated picture of a Russian tank (easily identified by the flag on the gun barrel) with a No Entry symbol over it. Just in case they were thinking of trying!

Gems

In defence of Azerbaijan...

...they have really good caviar.

Gemma.

Azerbaijan

Lttle visited and not particularly interesting, Azerbaijan is a byword for international obscurity. We didn't feel the need to stay long - a couple of days in Baku to recover from the ferry, and then a couple of days in Seki in the foothills of the Caucasus on the way over the border into Georgia. Both were pleasant enough. Azerbaijan is rapidly getting richer, due to oil and gas under the Caspian and as a result Baku is a bit of a boom town - lots of new cars on the roads, more luxury-brand shops than Mumbai and Delhi put together and building sites engulfing much of the sea front promenade. In 1910 Baku sopplied half the world's oil, and there are some nice buildings in the 'old town' from this earlier oil boom and a very few that are older, but most of the modern stuff is fairly ugly. Its hard to see how any amount of beautification is going to disguise the sprawling oil terminals that form the backdrop to any view of Baku.

Oil money also means that the country is not very good value. This is severely exacerbated by the size of the kebabs, which have shrunk from a decent meal in Central Asia to four withered dry chunks of meat. Prawn kebabs, in particular, are not recommended.

Seki is reputed to be one of the most attractive towns in the country and was passably pretty, but nothing really exciting. We spent the day walking up the valley to a village with an old church and then had a picnic dinner in our guesthouse overlooking the town. The landscape and architecture has definitely got more of a European feel now, and we had our first rain for a long long time.

Fun facts about Azerbaijan:

1. It pretends to have a distinct alphabet, but it differs from the roman alphabet only in having a back-to-front and upside-down 'e'.

2. There are no famous Azeri people.

I think Azerbaijan suffered a bit from being the second country in a row that we were only in because they are in the way between countries we actually wanted to visit and from my nasty ear infection, that finally seems to be clearing up after a week. We're now in Tbilisi, which has a lot more going for it, trying to decide whether to head up to the mountains or down to Armenia for my birthday on Thursday. I have decided to shave for the first time since we left Delhi to mark the occassion.

T.

Uzbekistan and Turmenistan posts now updated with photos...

...but if you're not a fan of blue tiles, I probably wouldn't bother looking!

Turkmen(tal)istan

40 points to Gemma for another witty blog title!

Although, it was actually much less mental than we expected. Almost disappointingly so...

We got through the border no problem due to our guide and after looking round Konye-Urgench (disappointing after Bukhara and Khiva, but interesting as it was full of Turkmen pilgrims, rather than Japanese tourists with cameras outweighing body mass), we drove into the Karakum desert. There was some serious offroad dune driving, which was a bit scary, but we finally made it to Darvaza around 8pm, where we opened the beers, pitched camp and barbecued. Great fun!

The Darvaza gas craters are one of the strangest things we've seen. The result of Soviet gas exploration in the middle of the desert gone wrong, there are now three big explosion holes in the desert floor (around 30m diameter), which were leaking gas. The shepherds thought the best way to get rid of the smell was to light one, so now it burns constantly, and the other two contain bubbling water and mud. The flames are especially impressive at night, when it was hard not to imagine a gateway to hell...

We left early in the morning before the tents got too hot and set off for Ashgabat, the capital. Anyone on a tourist visa in Turkmenistan has to be accompanied at all times by an official guide, except in Ashgabat, so we had a couple of days un-guided time and dutifully spent most of it lying by the pool! We did explore the city, which was full of gold statues of the President Niyazov (the first president of Turkmenistan, who died 2 years ago) including one that comically rotates so that he is always facing the sun.

(The Presidential palace and parade ground, Ashgabat)

(Kebabs for lunch, again...)

We also visited the Sunday market, where we learned that hoisting camels around by crane does not a happy camel make!

Monday morning we were picked up by the guide and drove to Turkmenbashi, the port on the Caspian sea. We had planned to stay overnight, then catch a boat in the morning. However, there were two boats sitting in the dock being loaded up with cargo train carriages as we arrived and after hearing stories about people waiting for days for another boat to arrive, we had a quick panic, a quick supermarket sweep to buy supplies and hot-footed it to the port. Once there, we boarded the boat, purchased a super-deluxe cabin for $20 extra (got to be worth it for an en suite... And although grubby and mozzy-infested, it is so far mercifully cockroach free.) Then we waited, and waited, ate our picnic dinner (a big pot of caviar and a loaf of Turkmen flat bread... Yum!) and waited some more.

When we woke up this morning, we were still in the dock. Not ideal. But we have since made good progress across what has so far been a remarkably flat sea, and are hoping to land in Azerbaijan at around 8pm. The sailors get paid by "hour on the sea with a loaded ship", so if the queue of trucks on the Azeri side doesn't look like a full load when they get within sight of the port, they are likely to drop anchor and wait for the queue to build up. We are obviously hoping for a very large queue so that we can get off and say goodbye Central Asia, hello Caucuses!

(sitting in Turkmenbashi port)

(I see land! Approaching Baku.)

To finish up today's post, some Turkmen fun for the fact-lovers out there:
- Natural gas is free but matches are not, so many Turkmens leave their stoves burning 24 hours a day
- Internal flights cost $10 to anywhere
- Turkmens deal in 3 currencies, which are all interchangeable: old manat (14000 to the dollar), new manat (2.8 to the dollar) and USD and often give payments in a combination of the three. Never has the calculator function on our mobiles been so useful
- petrol costs 5p per litre at the pumps
- in 2003 the government confused everyone in Ashgabat by replacing all street names with a 4-digit code
- the Turkmen language has its own copywrighted alphabet, called Elipbi
..... so still just about enough mental-ness going on to keep us amused!

Gemma


(BTW - we know our map has stopped working in IE, but still seems to work in Firefox. Can anyone (Jamie) help?)