It's on the Meter

Where is Hannah going now???

2012-01-26T17:27:00.001Z

Things are incredibly exciting with us, we fly to the USA on Monday to carry out the next leg of the journey. This has all be enabled by Get Taxi, the company who came on board to sponsor the expedition to go the whole way around the World. Check them out here, they basically run a service which allows people to hail a black cab from their smart phone or online. It's very smart, give them a try!

So, where now?

Hannah the taxi should be arriving in Oakland Port, San Francisco any day now. We’re going to collect it and then spend a week or so doing some major repairs (including fitting a new gearbox!). After that, this is a our rough route through States (obviously we will be following the roads and not going in straight lines…):

West Side

East Side

You can see the whole proposed route after the USA here. We will be flying to Israel and then, as per usual, taking the longest route home. Get Taxi will be fitting one of their driver GPS units so you can also track us in real time (link to come soon). If you live in America, know someone who does or have any recommendation about random things we should visit (that are kind on the route) then drop us a line at info@itsonthemeter.com or comment on our Facebook. We sometimes tailor our route if someone asks us to swing by for a cup of tea (or even a beer) in return for a ride in Hannah! We've had 90 people in her so far, but she's the kind of girl who can never give enough rides...

We will also be auctioning off rides in the Taxi to raise money for the Red Cross, but we’ll cover this in more detail soon.

Rough Timeline:

30/1/12 San Francisco

15/2/12 LA

18/2/12 Tijuana, Mexico!

19/2/12 Vegas, baby!

25/2/12 Albuquerque

28/2/12 Austin

29/2/12 Houston

2/3/12 New Orleans

4/3/12 Memphis

7/3/12 Daytona Beach

10/3/12 Richmond

13/3/12 New York

20/3/12 Israel

We cannot wait for this next leg. Spread the word!

Loads of love

Paul and the Get Taxi: It’s on the Meter boys

Arriving in Sydney

2012-01-22T20:37:00.003Z

London to London, via tip-ex

We were at the end of a 10 month odyssey, only a few days drive from the finish line and we had just discovered that we were off to the USA on route to circumnavigating the globe. Avid followers of this blog may have got the impression that our final few weeks in Australia were a haze of parties, beer, BBQs and beaches. And they would be right. There were beaches... and BBQs… and certainly beer, but they lacked that all-important ingredient that binds these wonderful things together. The sun. The coldest day everrecorded in Brisbane had just passed and it was grey, cloudy, and for the first time since we passed through the high plateaus of Tibet three months previously, I was cold.

Santa, baby!

On the way out of Brisbane, we stopped by Adam’s place, a Brit who has been following us on Facebook from the beginning and had always promised us a BBQ and beers ‘if’ we ever made it. But it was raining. Never fear though, Adam had built his BBQ under shelter, so we sat in hoodies, digging into mountains of meat and beer, chatting. Although we’re never ones to turn down an offer of a free dinner, Adam had something that set his invitation apart (other than the pool and huge house): his very own bar in his garden.

A bar, in your garden? We'll be right over!

Still suffering from carnivorous overload the next day, we loaded up the car with Leigh and Char’s 30 bags along with Johno’s friend Rob, and headed off in the pouring rain to the greatest testament to the Australian ‘call-it-as-it-is’ mentality to naming, Surfers Paradise. Six months previously, we had met a couple of Kiwis on their honeymoon in Cappadocia in Turkey. The new husband, Robbie, had promised that ‘if’ we ever made it to Oz (see the running theme), we would make us a ‘Hungy’.

We had all looked at him blankly,

Paradise?

“It’s a Maori BBQ, bru, you bury the food in the mud then build a fire… but we never bother with that, we just cut open a beer barrel and put a fire underneath it and cook it for the whole day whilst we get drunk. It’s gonna be sweet, ‘ehy.”

They also happened to be one of the most fun couples we ever met and we looked forward to catching up again in their home in Surfers’.

A gift sticker from the Kiwis

But it was raining. So we sat and played with their really big, ill tempered snake instead.

The most easterly point in Oz

On our whistle-stop, rain soaked tour of all the big names on the gold coast, we kept moving south, stopping by Byron bay then hot-footing it to Coff’s Harbour for the night.

A Giant Banana in Coffs'

We had pledged to arrive in Sydney on December 10^th, with the plan of getting some press attention and having a bit of a do. But as Sydney was no longer the finish point, we kept our ‘big’ arrival quite subdued. The taxi was not in a good way. Her gearbox had been through the wars over the passed few months. Obviously not helped by being taken up to 5200m, off-roaded for thousands of miles and pretty much abused in ways never conceived by its manufacturers, the main problem was actually a symptom of another problem. The brakes.

Byron

Our brakes were always a bit crap, and they got worse and worse as the trip went on, with little we could do (they are custom taxi parts, impossible to find abroad). This meant to save them we tended to use our engine breaking to meter our speed, leading to wearing the gearbox out from the wrong side…. meaning that we could only accelerate or coast in neutral, anything else resulted in a skin-crawling crunch of metal. Worried we would not make it the final few hundred miles into Sydney, we stopped in a town called ‘Newcastle the night before.

On the morning of the big day, we left early to give us enough time if we needed a tow! However, Hannah’s a tough ol’ bird and we limped into Sydney under our own steam at around 1pm, excited, and feeling slightly odd.

I had imagined this moment in my head numerous times. However, in that imagination, it was the finish line, we were triumphant, we had finished. But in real life it was just the end of a leg. It felt odd, but, all things considered, we had still achieved what we set out to do:

We had broken the World Record, or possibly two.

We had driven to Sydney in a taxi

We were all still alive, and further more, all still friends!

The huge mass of steal and concrete that was the Sydney harbor bridge rose up ahead of us.

“Shit, there it is. Get the camera out”

We were suddenly over it, passing into the thriving business district south of the bay and trying to find the point where we said we’d park up for some pictures.

We’d made it.

Who cares about how it feels, let’s party!

We’re in bloody Sydney and off to the USA!

Footnote:

Leigh and Char flew out of Sydney the next day, Crazy Craig (our longest and swearyest passenger) flew home from his travels the day we arrived in Sydney and met us in the pub that night. Johno, Craig and I gave Hannah to the shipping company and then got on the 28 hour flight home to the UK.

Hannah is taking five weeks to ship to San Francisco, so we went home for Christmas and to buy a new gearbox (and a mountain of other spares) as she sits in the Pacific. We go Stateside on Jan 30^th.

Next up: the new route!

Bird Murder in the Outback, the Great Barrier Reef and Women with Big Feathers

2012-01-13T17:45:00.001Z

Obama was in town, there were soldiers and police on every corner, our taxi was not technically road-legal and the windscreen was spider webbed with cracks. We tried desperately to look cool and not draw attention as the cab slowly pulled out of Darwin, catching the smallest glimpse of Air Force One in the tiny airport.

It was like a shopping centre just for us!

Hot, humid and with the definite air of a frontier town to it, Darwin was one of the most hospitable places we had the pleasure of visiting. However, ahead of us lay at least five days of solid driving through the famous Outback. Ridiculously hot and unrelentingly inhospitable, stories were always surfacing about tourists going missing out there.

The roads were good though; the scenery unexpectedly green and bushy and the engine was running well. Stocked up with three days worth of water and supplies, we camped in a national park with famous swimming holes. We rose at sunrise for a quick dip in the clear waters, nervously avoiding the deep black bits for fear of the Crocs. Although apparently there are none in the area, as soon as someone mentions it, you just get that little bit nervous and make up excuses as to why you’re sitting in the shallows…

WATCH OUT FOR CROCS!!!

Australian birds are stupid (I’m talking about the ones with wings… obviously. Shame on you for thinking otherwise!). I can now comment with a fair amount of authority of bird behaviour around the world as a 1992 Black cab drives toward them (although this is hardly the best specialty topic for Mastermind). Whereas most birds fly out of the way, Australian birds fly straight up and hover around Cab windscreen height, blindly waiting to be hit. We think Leigh hit a small one on the drive to the camp site, but without stopping to search for evidence it can’t be proven. As Johno was driving out from our camp spot, a much larger bird decided to play chicken (no pun intended) with the cab. There was a screech of brakes (or there would have been if they worked) and a momentous thud. Johno and I in the front seats rose from behind the dashboard, where we had instinctively ducked, to find our previously cracked windscreen was now well and truly smashed. The culprit, a ‘bush pheasant’ about the same size as an English pheasant lay, very dead, by the roadside.

Fortunately the driver’s side of the screen was clear, but with the nearest town about 100km away, and the chances of them having a spare London taxi windscreen slim, we were forced to push on to Cairns in an even worse state.

Night camping in the bush brings out all the ghosts

Until you have driven in the Outback, it is impossible to really get a grasp on true desolation. The sheer size of the country is palpable; the roads are straight and go on for as far as the eye can see, blending into a hazy mirage when they meet the sky. A dead wallaby or Kangeroo litter the roadside every few kilometres, mown down by the huge ‘roo-bars’ on buses and road trains. The heat pounded down as we drove for about 12 hours every day. Stopping, camping in a rest stop and repeating. The process was only interrupted by the odd ‘road train’ every few hours 50 meters long, four articulated trucks bolted together and thundering along at 70mph. These monsters are just downright intimidating, especially as they cruise faster than our top speed and overtake on roads only wide enough for them, shoving us into a nerve wracking battle to hold line with half the cab on the road and the other in the dust. Every day we drove through scorched desert scrub, every night a huge thunderstorm raged. This was typical luck for us. Rain in the desert; yet again we cursed our bloody single-skin pop-up tents.

Bushes in the Bush

It was Friday night in the middle of nowhere, but by picking up two hitchhikers (two girls, each carrying their body weight in beer, so the decision to stop was not a hard one) we accidentally stumbled on the biggest party for a thousand miles (around 30 people). The entire workforce from a mango picking farm had the day off and were taking full advantage of it! The workers were travellers from all over the world, letting their hair down from their job, menial as it was, it paid well and allowed them to extend their visa for another year because they had done the mandatory agricultural work.

Leigh 'n' Char

We arrived in Cairns having not had a shower for six days, exhausted and smelling so bad we feared people would start throwing change at us soon. All was good though. A few months previously we made a mad dash through Bangkok at dawn to find a TV station to do an interview with Australian morning TV. We had got horrendously lost, but the interview resulted in an email from a chain of hostels called Base. These guys assured us a place to stay in all the major towns. They also promised brilliant parties and mentioned that they were in need of wet T-shirt competition pourers… as three red blooded twenty-somethings, this offer was hard to decline.

Table = Dancing

We turned up to Gilligan’s, one of their sister hostels, got put up in a brilliant room and finally washed. Leigh’s girlfriend was flying in for the final few weeks, so he collected her from the airport, Hannah was deposited with Brando the Mechanic at Machete Motors, we met up with some friends from UK and we all went to the pub. The pub turned out to be a very energetic bar in the hostel, so when a particularly good song came on (the Mighty Mighty Bosstones), some of us (mainly me) got up on the table and danced like a tit. The bouncer was there within second and I clambered down looking sheepish:

“Where do you think you are, The Woolshed?”

“What’s that?”I replied. This was an odd bollocking from a bouncer.

“The pub where everyone dances on the tables.”

“WHERE’S THAT???” everyone replied in unison.

It was around the corner and bloody brilliant. They even had shelves for your beer at table dancing height.

Beer shelf

We had made it to Cairns, all the hard sections were finished, and all we had to do was drive to Sydney. We were on the home straight and in a jovial mood. This was allied with the near-confirmation of new sponsor getting onboard and the chance to extend the trip beyond Sydney…

Dawn Interview

Great Barrier Reef

We did some interviews (again involving a 4am start for breakfast TV), we fulfilled our dream of diving on the Great Barrier Reef and Brando called a few days later. He’d had a good go on the brakes and steering and his mate has replaced the windscreen. We swung by to borrow his welding gear and gave Hannah a make over. It was Saturday, so Brando finished work by midday and settled back with his mate, ‘Fat’ (or Stan to his mum), and two fridges full of beer. 100% Aussie. By evening all the work on the cab was done and we were all kicking back, listening to great stories about wrestling crocs, the fact that Fat’s heart is the same size a horse’s, tips on how to fly through a car windscreen and use your face as a brake and how not to get bitten by a shark whilst snorkelling. Fat had had enough after about eight beers, drove home and was soon replaced by Brando’s annoying Neighbour, an ageing woman with far too much willingness to share personal problems with people she had just met. I successfully avoided her by chatting with Brando about his daughter. He showed me a picture of her when she was a few hours old

“what’s she holding”

“that’s her fust twennytwo, mate”

“a gun?”

“yeh, but it’s owwnly a smaall one, she’s only liddle…” my face must have expressed what I was thinking

“It’s not loaded” he quickly reassured me.

I wasn’t reassured.

Meanwhile Annoying Neighbour cornered Johno and asked in the kind of way that indicates that you don’t have an option

“dya wanna see moiy cats?”

“umm…”

“Daaant worry, aam not gonna rape ya”

So with an invitation like that, he was over to hers, meeting her cats and being deafened by her sound system, on which she perpetually played Johnny Cash at full volume. The old couple next door, aged somewhere between 90 and 105, started shouting for it to be turned down. After shouting at each other for a bit, she turned it down a fraction and left it playing as they came back to Brando and I. The granny fixed Johno with a disapproving stare as he walked away with Annoying Neighbour.

“I know what you’ve been up to, don’t you try and deny it”

He returned to us, scared and blushing.

With toy boy accusations, Annoying Neighbour getting even more inappropriately with her sharing as she cracked another pre-mixed Jim Beam and coke, and with Brando falling asleep, it was time to leave.

This guy made even Johno look weedy

Dutch Alex and his Daughter

We collected the cab the next day and Brando wouldn’t take any payment, so we placed a few crates of beer in his fridge. He was a genuine Australian and a hero through and through. We headed South with two new passengers, Leigh’s girlfriend Char and Lila, an old friend from University who happened to be in the area. We had received an email from a Dutch family who saw our cab in Cairns. They lived at Flying Fish Point, an hour or so South and they were planning to drive back to Holland along a similar route to us and asked if we could come to dinner. They also mentioned that he was a chef and we were only too willing swing by. We rocked up, and had a delightful evening eating and talking about the real nitty-gritty aspects of overland travel. It felt good to recap the challenging parts of the expedition with people who had it all before them, especially so close to the end of our trip.

Ten months on the road and still sane...

The man at the bar at Magnetic Island said it was free drinks for ladies...

Sad to say good bye, we headed off south to Magnetic Island for a couple of nights, and then spent a night with some good friends from home who had just relocated down under.. We stopped at 1770, where Captain Cook had first landed in… 1770, surprisingly enough!. My parents were staying there, so we met them, which was nice as I hadn’t seen them in ten months, but soon we were back on the road, headed to Brisbane.

QUT Press Day

One of our most invaluable sponsors was our old university, Aston, who had supplied us with a workshop, support and money. On the day we left the campus, the Dean from Queensland University of Technology, a partner institution in Oz, happened to be there and promised us a big welcome if we ever made it to Brisbane. Unlikely as this sounded nine and a half months earlier, we rolled into Brisbane and QUT had arranged a press event in the town centre and a celebration including all the tea and scones we could scoff.

Johno gets arty

"Don't look up my feathers"

This jovial mood was carried over when we received an email, finalising a new deal with a new sponsor. At the flat of Corrie, (one of my oldest school friends, who now lives in ‘Brissy’ and works down the mines) the lads and I finalised the contract with Get Taxi:

We were not finishing in Sydney. We are now circumnavigating the World!

Next up, the arrival in Sydney, the new Sponsor, the new plan and the new route

Posted via email from It's on the Meter

Australian Quarantine: See You Next Tuesday’s

2011-12-20T12:18:00.001Z

By Johno

The team met up back in Australia ready to be reunited with Hannah for the final leg...

“Criiiikey!” yelled the leathery old man.

I had been in Australia for less than fifteen minutes and `already ticked off half of my mental list of stereotypes. There were fully-grown men wearing baggy singlets and backwards baseball caps playing eighties arcade machines whilst sun-bleached mulleted kids tore around and an aborigine with a huge white beard wandered past in a daze.

Long distances!

All I needed now was a guy in a hat with corks hanging off it, a boxing kangaroo and a lovable rogue to tell me, “that’s not a knoyfe maate!”

The ship carrying our car had been delayed again and although Leigh and Paul had postponed their departures from the beach paradise of Bali I had decided to stick with my original flight and come over to check out Darwin, Australia’s most northerly city and home to about 130,000 people from sixty different nationalities.

Old Model T chassis - probably in better nick than Hannah

I was staying with a very nice Couchsurfer called Paula who cooked a delicious Kangaroo stew and told me about life in the far north as we walked her dog around streets which seemed unfeasibly clean and ordered after our months spent in India, China and Asia.

I borrowed a bike and a spent a pleasant few days exploring the little city on two wheels. I even stumbled across our shipping company and popped in to ask when we would be able to get the car.

Crocs about!

“The ship is in on Wednesday,” they told me, “just pop down then”

Coincidently this was also the day Paul and Leigh arrived and so, laden down with rucksacks we walked down to the docks, rather naively expecting to be driving away that afternoon.

We were soon hammered with a harsh punch of reality when we were told the container still needed to be unpacked and we might, possibly be able to get the car back “sometime next week”.

We could hardly believe it, especially after all the previous delays but had no choice but to go and check into a hostel and haemorrhage money whilst we discovered exactly how expensive having a minimum wage of £10 an hour makes everything in Australia.

Toilet Toad!

Thankfully after some gentle nagging we persuaded the shippers to get the car out and inspected on Friday. I had just read a news story about two Bangladeshi men who had sneaked into a container to smoke a crafty joint and accidently been shipped over to Singapore. One of them soon died of thirst and the other arrived barely alive. The story was really driven home as I found myself pushing Hannah out of the sweltering metal box under the beating sun after the battery had predictably gone flat on the sail over.

Reunited!

As it is essentially a huge island populated with a load of deadly creatures, the Australians are understandably very serious about maintaining their uniquely isolated ecosystem and quarantine is a very big deal. We had all heard the horror stories about tourists being fined hundreds of dollars for accidently bringing a banana into the country but our case was slightly different and we were rightly worried about Hannah’s filthy innards.

Flat battery... obviously!

We had spent days cleaning all of our stuff and washed the car at least four times over in Malaysia. We had even paid through the nose to get the whole container fumigated in Singapore in an attempt to finally wipe out the various nests of ants we had somehow acquired in India but in the end it was a little bit of mud that undid us.

The quarantine officer literally took less than a minute to tell us that we weren’t coming in anytime soon as he felt under the rear wheel arch and came back with fingertips covered in dirt.

Now the car would have to be cleaned ‘professionally’ for us at the extortionate cost of $75 an hour and to rub our noses in a little more we were told that they wouldn’t be able to get it done until at least Tuesday. It was going to be a very expensive wait.

We've been stuck in worse places!

Although the place we were staying did have a hot tub it also cost more for one night in a grotty dormitory bed than we were used to paying for a full week in a private room back in Asia, so we racked our brains for options. I had met a local woman on the plane over from Singapore and she had invited us over to her house for dinner so we thought we’d cheekily ask her if she minded us camping in her garden for few days. But this suggestion was immediately torpedoed when we realised that our tents were still stuck in the car, along with most of our other possessions, in fact we had been living out of hand luggage for almost three weeks.

Sounds familiar!

We got the bus to Bernadette’s anyway; the offer of a meal from her son, an award-winning chef, was too great for us to resist. Unfortunately he had not actually been informed of his dinner guests (and after working all day probably didn’t fancy cooking for three random English guys who crashed his house) but Bern cooked us up a delicious meal.

On hearing of our situation, within a second she invited us to stay at her place, use her car whenever we liked and go for dinner with her friends. She really was an absolute life-saver and we all thought of her as our adopted Aussie mum, especially after she cooked us an absolutely amazing roast, the first one in nine months.

Relaxing with a G&T at Bern's

We spent a few days watching TV, lazing around, seeing the sights, giving some talks to the kids at the school where Bern was the head teacher and even catching an AFL “Footy” game in the savage heat and humidity.

Footy game!

Next Tuesday came and we shuffled down to port for the second inspection and nervously followed the inspecting officer around as she directed a guy with a jet-wash to clean off some still stubbornly dirty nooks and crannies before finally passing us and freeing Hannah. This was not before we had parted with the better part of a thousand dollars in cleaning charges and fees and even more annoying for two reasons. Firstly, all the dirt, seeds and other crud they cleaned off the car just blew into the sea and portside anyway and secondly when we mentioned we needed to change our oil the officer, Holy Environmental Protector of Australia™, just suggested that we drive into the Outback and drain the old oil straight out into the dirt.

Amazing skies

Now all that stood between us and the open road was the small matter of getting the car registered and insured so we could legally drive on the Ozzy roads. After a bit of a wild goose chase around the various offices, not helped by half the city being on lockdown due to President Obama’s flying visit we found ourselves undergoing an unwelcome roadworthiness test. Anyone who has even skimmed any of the blogs will be aware that roadworthy is probably not the best way to describe Hannah and it was no surprise when we were presented with a comprehensive, two-sided list of what we needed to get fixed before we could be issued the necessary paperwork. This included front brakes, back brakes, flat battery, flat spare tyre, welding and of course, the windscreen that was in a bad way after an encounter with the over enthusiastic car washers in Malaysia. Apparently any cracks longer than ten millimetres needed to be repaired. As you can see from the picture ours were slightly outside this limit.

BBQ with Bern's freinds: great food and company

As it was now Thursday this meant another weekend of invading Bern’s house and another load of delays pushing us ever-closer to our 10th December Sydney finish date.

Alas the call of the open road proved far too strong and after studying our carnet documents and some forum posts we figured that posts on online message boards are always completely accurate. With this in mind we somehow convinced ourselves that we were legally covered and decided to start the drive over to Cairns and get all the work done there.

Back on the road!

So with our dodgy brakes and spiderwebbed windscreen we said our final goodbyes and thanks to Bern and drove off past the parked up Air Force One and into the vast Outback.

Next time: Thunderstorms in the desert: typical ITOM luck, Machete Motors, diving and the East Coast!

Posted via email from It's on the Meter

We made it to Sydney! (but this isn't the end...)

2011-12-11T03:41:00.001Z

We made it to Sydney!

But this isn’t it…

We did it! We have driven a black cab from London to Sydney and broken the World Record for the longest ever taxi journey in 296 days. It has been the adventure of a lifetime, bloody hard work, scorching hot, freezing cold, thrilling, dirty, smelly, scary, funny, boring, exhilarating, and most of all, fun.

But this isn’t it. We were contacted by a company called GetTaxi, a start up company who allow people to order taxis from their smart phones (check them out and get their app here), who said they would fund us to drive all the way back to London.

We said no.

Hannah would not survive the journey back through Asia (and we weren’t sure we would either!). However, we said we would drive around to London, through the USA, then Europe and back to the UK, they said ok, and we confirmed it only a few days ago. We asked the folks following us on Facebook if they thought this was a good idea, 98% of people agreed (2% were our mates being annoying). So this is it. We’re driving Hannah onto a ship to San Francisco next week…

And then we’re going to circumnavigate the World in a Black Cab

We'll add an updated map soon.

Massive Thank You

We could not have got this far by ourselves. There are too many people to thank, and I’m sure there will be many more to come

• Our 20+ sponsors who made this possible. Without your money, parts, gear and help we would be sat in my garage at home with a slowly rusting black cab. A special thanks has to go to Performance Direct and the Non Standard Awards

• Our friends and family who supported us the entire way (don’t worry, we weren’t sure we’d make it this far either!)

• The Couchsurfers, friends, and randoms who gave us a bed, a feed, a workshop or a patch of grass for our tents, without you, we’d be on park benches and would never have made it.

• Every person who smiled, waved, honked or taken a picture of us as we were driving along, it really keeps us going.

• GetTaxi for allowing us to go further

• Every person who has donated to the British Red Cross on our behalf. You’ve helped us raise £10,000 so far for their really rather awesome work.

Now, we made a pledge to drive to Sydney in a black cab. We have now done this (and it was not easy!), please, please, please donate a little something to the Red Cross on our behalf (£10, for example, is the same as a few drinks down the pub).

We would really appreciate it, but not as much as the thousands of people they help.

Click on this link to do so www.justgiving.com/itsonthemeter

We’ll see you on the way, or back in London at the finish line in Covent Garden, London mid April

Posted via email from It's on the Meter

When in Thailand... ping pong balls and full moon parties

2011-12-09T09:13:00.001Z

By Johno

After a sodden but stunning Ankor Wat the journey continued on to Thailand and her capital, Bangkok.

Bangkok is lodged firmly in traveller folklore. The name conjures up visions of bustling, steamy backstreets where wizened old women sell fried insects on wooden skewers whilst in the smoky rooms above people of questionable gender do even more questionable things with table-tennis balls and hordes of short fat men bet wads of money on bare-knuckle boxers, fighting to the death.

It was into these preconceptions that we drove, keen to separate the myths from the reality.

Unfortunate Ant!

We were staying Joost and Benz, a Dutch-Thai couple who lived on the outskirts of the city and who are planning on driving from Thailand to Netherlands (see here) and so were keen to pick our brains. Once we eventually found their place in the sprawl of South East Asia’s third largest city we got settled in and Joost offered to show us the ‘seedy underbelly of Bangkok’. It actually turned out to be more like the overpriced empty bar-belly of Bangkok but as always it was cool to experience the city from a resident’s perspective.

We had arranged to meet up with some friends we had met at tubing in Laos and so the next evening, after the usual day fixing up the car we found ourselves on Khaosan Road, the backpacker centre of South East Asia. Although Joost and Benz declined to join us as they found the mass of flashing lights, 7-11s and screaming hawkers too touristy we reasoned that we are tourists and so loved it.

The packed road seemed to suck in backpackers for miles around and within a few hours we had bumped into three other groups of travellers we had met over the last two weeks and decided to seek out the real sleazy underbelly of the city, packaged up with a free drink and transport offer for susceptible tourists . A less respectable blog would go into juicy details but needless to say what we found involved a dartgun, some balloons and some impressive no-hands target shooting.

Rave taxi with Holly and Kat!

The reason we bumped into so many recently-made friends may have been that the backpacker hordes were gathering in Bangkok before swarming en masse down to the island of Koh Phangan ready for the monthly Full Moon Party. This huge party is held on the beach of a beautiful tropical island and famed for attracting tens of thousands of revellers from all over Asia.

After Paul and I had picked up our hand-tailored suits, made to measure by Bangkok’s finest in anticipation for our eventual return to the ‘real world’ we picked up two new passengers, Holly and Kat whom we originally met at Tubing in Laos. The five of us sped south to catch the ferry over to the tiny islands and found ourselves a reasonable, if minuscule, room ready for the revelry. Although we were there during probably the quietest month of the year we still had an epic time partying until the sun came up over the beach and we bumped into a load of ‘old’ friends including Sarah (aka FTDJ) and Diana from Laos, the Scouse Boys from Vietnam, Frenchy from Cambodia (now attached with a girlfriend!) and Alexis from Thailand.

Ferry to the Koh Phangan

A big mention also has to go to Woody and the staff at the awesome Club Nine who kept us watered and indirectly provided brilliant entertainment through one of their drunken punters; a huge tattooed, Essex beefcake who liked Hannah so much he decided he would like to make love to her exhaust pipe. The sight of a bald bodybuilder with his shorts around his ankles, blubbering, “It’s not normally this small, I don’t know why I can’t get it up!” will not be easy to forgot, however hard I try.

The 'roider

A hearty congratulations also to Nimrod and Nivi, and a massive thanks for taking time out of their honeymoon to have lunch with us and thanks to Tony the Chef at the Rasananda for providing what was probably one of the best meals of the whole trip.

Full Moon Party

Our next country was Malaysia and as we crossed down onto the peninsula it dawned on me with the suddenness of a snapped shoelace how close we were to the end; less than a week’s driving lay between us and putting Hannah on a ship over to the fabled Australia.

After a few days recuperating with Dan, a friend of Paul’s up in Pennang we tootled down to the capital, Kuala Lumpur, where we admired the huge twin towers and other skyscrapers tinged with Islamic influence then decided to continue down to our penultimate country, the city-state of Singapore.

Showing some schoolkids around the car

The reaction from Malaysian motorists was staggering. As in the Czech Republic their drivers just seemed to love the car so it seemed like the right thing to do when one of the cars urged us to pull over in the next service station. We had just suffered a major tyre blowout (although luckily the first of the trip) and lost a load of time replacing the wheel and rejigging the roofrack so we weren’t too concerned with our schedule when they kindly offered to buy us lunch.

The Floating Mosque - viewed from Dan's place in Pennang

Over the food they asked us all the usual questions: how did you come up with this idea, where has been your favourite country, before moving onto some deeper-than-usual ones; how do you feel you have spiritually fulfilled yourselves on this journey?

After some questions of our own we found that, far from being crazy missionaries, they were in fact motivational speakers on their way to a conference in Singapore and they wanted to use us as an example of achieving your life goals! A few photographs later we waved them off, happy to have inspired some other people.

Twin Towers in KL

One of the main things we had heard about Singapore was how horrendously expensive it was so we had decided to stay just over the border in the Malaysian city of Johor Bahru, known to everyone as JB whilst we got Hannah and all of her contents scrubbed up clean to pass the rigours of Australian quarantine. Here we could all bunk down in a welcoming homestay where the beds may have been hard as rocks but they cost a mere £3 a night. The owner was off on an extended holiday and had entrusted its running to a long-term-travelling American- Spanish couple called Tom and Emma. They made us right at home and didn’t mind when we spread all of our dirt-encrusted tools and spare parts over their yard for washing. They even helped us clean Goofy.

Emma, Tom and the team

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning

When I was a kid my dad accidently misspelled my name on a form as ‘Joho’ and ever since I pointed this out I have been called Joho by my family. So when a ‘youth collective’ blog based in JB and called Joho Lover got in touch and asked if they could come over for an interview and some photos I positively jumped at the chance.

When they arrived and gave us Joho branded shirts and stickers I could hardly believe the hilarity; I spent the whole chat giggling away to myself.

Leigh and Paul, and everyone else for that matter, didn’t find it so funny.

Emma and Leigh cleaning up Goofy

And then, quick as a flash, one of the major milestones of the trip was upon us; the car had been thoroughly cleaned inside and out (or so we thought) and was towed through the streets of Singapore to the port where it was loaded into a container and onto the ship for the eight day sailing (or so we thought) over to final leg of our journey. Or so we thought.

With the car safely packed on board we had over a week to kill until we all had to meet up again in Darwin, North Australia so I decided to take this rare break in our busy schedule to fly over to Hong Kong with my new suit for a job interview.

Leigh and Paul meanwhile were both also busy and had flown to the beaches of Bali, as apparently detouring to this island paradise is cheaper than flying direct to Darwin

Singapore

[Paul: When we get a few days off from the trip we always try and go our separate ways to get a break from each other (9 months living in the same car, sleeping in the same room and eating the same food can wear you down...). Bali was no different, so after spending a few days on Kuta beach (Bali’s answer to Magaluf), I decided it wasn’t really my kind of place so I headed to the much quieter islands off the coast of Lombok (where I was also guaranteed not to bump into Leigh). Two days later, chilling on the beach I hear the familiar voice behind me, “Alright dickhead”. We’d accidently gone to exactly the same place!]

Next up: The team reunites but are missing one crucial member... Plus: is the end as close as they thought...?

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Gin, Tonic and Snake Wine, Minor Foot Surgery and Angkor Wat

2011-12-05T05:58:00.001Z

By Paul Archer

Angkor Wat

Since we had left Europe five months previously, we hadn’t really drunk alcohol nor had much contact with Westerners. Eastern Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan were dry countries, and aside for a small handful of evenings in random places in Nepal and China we hadn’t partied much all that time. Now we were entering the Backpacking circuit of South East Asia and it looked like things were going to change. This circuit seems to be the process of flying out to a country where alcohol is dirt cheap, morals are loosened in the constant pursuit of hedonism as the sun shines all day, interjected with the odd temple visit and elephant ride to show one’s parents that they’re expanding their horizons and are experiencing culture.

We had just arrived in Vang Vien for the ‘Tubing’ experience; floating down a river on a rubber inner tube and stopping at countless bars on the way, it definitely fell into the hedonistic categories of backpacking activities. Feeling like we deserved the break, we immersed ourselves into tubing with gusto!

Tubing

My two sisters had flown in from England to meet us and all six of us made our way with our tubes to the top of the run. There were hundreds of westerners on a wooden jetty, all drunk, all in swim wear and all raving it up to British dance music; this was a world apart from central Asia and bloody brilliant!

Avoiding actually floating down (The river was in flood, flowing dangerously fast)[Johno: for Paul, Leigh and the girls, not for Matt and I]; the first three river side bars provided enough entertainment for us as we danced around, invented the gin-and-tonic-and-snake wine (complete with a real snake in it) cocktail, the beer bench and had too many laughs to count. Rising a bit dusty late the next day, we found Matt (who had no recollection of where he stayed) and went and did it again. Floating down this time as the river level had decreased, we played on the numerous swings, slides and river surfing devices that litter the side of the river. Tubing was one of the strangest, simplest yet brilliant tourist attractions ever invented and something which seems to be putting this lovely little country firmly on the tourism and backpacker radar.

Beer Bench!

It does, however, have its drawbacks and some of them pretty serious as we found out. Swimming around in a flooded, muddy river in the tropics can be harmful to your health (aside from infecting any mosquito bites or cuts you may have into a puss filled mess), deaths by drowning as drunken tourists try their luck at swimming with no tube are regular and we later met a girl who had to spend weeks in hospital as flesh eating bacteria was surgically scooped out of her leg.

We bounced along from Vang Vien, feeling a little worse for wear after our ‘Tubing’ experience, heading for the Laos capital, Vientien. The capital is a relatively unremarkable place, a few pretty French colonial buildings house various different business fronts and restaurants, all being run in the laidback manner that makes up life in Laos. Driving was becoming a challenge for me, I had managed to lodge a piece of glass deep in the heel of my foot and it was really starting to hurt. I had to get it removed before it got too infected (very easy in the climate), and after attempting an operation in the hotel room, it was too deep in so I limped to the city hospital. The air was heavy with bleach and rows of beds lined each wall; some with curtains pulled around and you could hear the sound of retching and the odd moan of pain and agony permeate through the thin fabric barrier. Most of the equipment seemed to hark back to Florence Nightingale’s era and paint flaked everywhere, showing the bare concrete or rusted metal beneath.

My bed was basically a green vinyl surface to lie on, obviously designed for the average Laos patient’s height as my few feet stuck out a few feet over the edge. A doctor smiled a big grin, nodding that he would be with me in a moment and he turned to the patient beside me. He was no more than a metre away from me, a middle aged, over weight patient with a boil of some variety blushing, bulbous and red on his lower back. The doctor injected some sort of anaesthetic into the lump before taking his scalpel and delving deep into the boil. The anaesthetic clearly had little effect as he moaned and the doctor cleared over teacup full of bloody puss from his back and threw the waste into a bin a few inches from where my head stuck out from the short bed.

Pigs

This, combined with the shit state of the hospital was too much for me, I tried to get up and leave, landing heavily on my bad foot and wedging the glass further in. Remembering that this was the best hospital in the country and refreshing my memory, painfully, why I was there, I reprimanded myself for being a pussy and settled back down. Once the doctor was finished, he washed up, bought over a fresh tray, put on fresh gloves and went about anaesthetising and cutting open my foot with brand new needles and scalpels (I checked each one myself, much to his puzzlement). Cutting down about 2cm into my heel, he rooted around and came up and showed me what he found.

“You want?” he asked me, holding it in front of my face. All I could see was a bloody pair of tongs.

“Want want?”

“Glass, see…” I could just make out the tiniest shard, 2mm squared.

“No thank you” not really sure how I would store it for safe keeping “I think there is more, that seems too small to cause that much pain”

He looked, there wasn’t. I was just a pussy.

I was given antibiotics, spare bandages and Paracetamol and sent on my way after parting with $7 for the lot!

We all went our separate ways for a few days, Johno, Matt and Leigh went to Vietnam stayed with my sisters, all meeting up with Hannah to head to Thailand.

As soon as we passed the Thai border, the roads improved dramatically. Smooth duel carriageways cut through the country allowing us to cross from North to South where beautiful beaches and islands lay. Things are never easy when you’re driving Hannah though, even with the smooth roads we had to repair a ball joint on the steering arm, fit a brand new shock absorber and replace a suspension plate before we got to the southern island of Ko Chang where we were going to chill for a few days. There I met a lovely English couple, Iain and Mish, who offered to show me a great place to stay. Wood huts lined the palm fringed beaches and we sat in a bar and drank beer with white sand beneath our feet. They turned out to be some of the most interesting people I’d met on the whole journey, they lived in Cambodia and volunteered for a charity out here called www.mloptapang.org. They are working to stop the child sex trade, rescuing children and teenagers and giving them an education. Iain’s job in particular shocked me. In his own words he’s a ‘dodgy looking bloke’, his greasy black hair is down to his chin and he has the red complexion of a man who drinks a vodka orange for breakfast. His job is to act as a ‘John’ in sting operations to catch madams peddling underage sex, and also to go with the police to arrest Western men in the act and to make sure they don’t get the chance to bribe their way out (apparently a mere $2000 is enough to ensure the police and the child’s family get paid and heads look the other way).

Oh, and apparently his other job before this was as somewhat of a rock star, he played session bass guitar in the bands Massive Attack and The Prodigy (and to my delight, four shows with one of my favourite bands, The Smashing Pumpkins!).

Floods

A few beers turned into a few more and we agreed that we would give them a lift back to their place in Cambodia.

A few days later, after Hannah had had enough of the sea air, we picked up Iain and Mish from their hotel and headed for the Cambodia border, it was 10am but Iain had stocked up for the ride with beer and cigarettes. We had easily enough time to make theirs by nightfall, which was a good thing as both headlights were broken from their dousing in Laos. However, as we rolled off the ferry, we carried on rolling! The brakes had sprung a leak so we had to keep refilling them with brake fluid every few hours. The border then turned out to be a nightmare, border guards inexperienced with foreign car paperwork incorrectly stamped everything and it was almost three hours before we were off again. Leaving Thailand’s smooth road behind, we bounced along the potholed strewn, but empty, coastal road to Sihanoukville. Darkness fell, we were still 100km away from our destination and we were stuck in the middle of nowhere with no lights. We only had our two spot lights in the middle of the bumper so we looked like a motorbike to the trucks that veered onto our side of the road not expecting a full sized car to be coming. I used every torch I could find in the car and lashed them onto the car along with high visibility vests and our warning triangle to give the impression of our real size.

Angkor Wat

Three nerve wrecking hours later, having succeeded in not hitting any wayward pedestrians, wild dogs or articulated Lorries, we arrived in the town and was introduced to the folks who lived in Iain’s hostel. It was a random mix of the loveliest people, united by the fact that they were all complete wreck heads who had come to the town for a few days and ended up staying months. There were students, rock stars, lighting rig fitters, bums, drug addicts and even a contestant of ‘Britain’s Next Top Model’. The town had a great ‘Wild West feeling’, where hedonism met the numbing poverty and unbridled corruption of Cambodia. As part of a grand scheme for supplementing the local law enforcement’s wages, it was illegal to drive during the day with your headlights on (although, ironically, not illegal to drive at night with them off…), which was not so good for tourists on scooters which had the headlight permanently switched on. A fine of $150 was slapped on the unsuspecting rider, which often got paid (although $5 would usually do it, or less if your skirt was short enough and you smiled sweetly, I’ve been told). All of this and $0.50 a beer meant that Sihanoukville was a big, wild party town.

Cambodia was ravaged by one of the most brutal regimes on the 20^th century until 1979. Pol pot and his Khmer Rouge cronies killed and starved 21% of the country’s population, often for no real apparent reason, picking out anybody who posed a possible threat; famously killing everyone who wore glasses, a sign of intelligence and therefore a threat. Driving north from Sihanoukville, we visited the S-21 museum. An old school which was used to interrogate and detain 17,000 prisoners. There were only seven known survivors. This was a grim and sobering experience, but well worth a visit, especially when you realise it really wasn’t that long ago.

Our destination was Ankor Wat, one of the seven wonders of the world. However, we had no map of Cambodia (in fact, we have no maps of anywhere, we left them back in England and after a few weeks without any we decided we’ll see how long we can go without using a paper map. We’re in Australia as I write this). We knew there were two routes from Phnom Pen to Siem Reap, the town by Ankor Wat. We took what looked like the fastest route, but it soon turned into a very wet, tiny causeway across a lake. The whole country seemed to be in flood.

Buddah Face, Angkor Wat

We turned around and went the other way and proceeded to get truly lost for the first time on the expedition. It took us two days. On the way we met a French man and gave him a lift. Kevin (imaginatively nicknamed ‘Frenchy’ by us) had a deep tan, long curly hair, an acoustic guitar and was so laid back he was virtually horizontal; he worked for months in Oz and was making the most of the strong currency to travel around Asia and using his French charm to sleep with as many impressionable young backpackers on the way. Eventually arriving in Siam Reap, we were dining on a Cambodian frog speciality (very tasty indeed!) as Leigh bet me $10 I wouldn’t put my face into the fish tank used for ‘fish foot messages’. I acquired my $10 with gusto, (although I also acquired a slight fishy odour too) and it clearly looked like fun as Leigh asked another fish message place advertising ‘no Smile, no pay’ if he could dunk his face too. The man just smiled and Leigh submerged his face into the water filled with little fish and bits of foot skin. To all our entertainment, the fish swam the other way, clearly hungry enough to eat people feat, but not for his face! The owner asked for the full message payment, Leigh laughed, and he replied with ‘see, you smiling, you pay’.

Ankor Wat was one of the most impressive places I’ve seen on the trip. Sticking out fo the jungle, we spent the day driving to various different temples within the huge complex. A picture paints a thousand words, and I’ve already been blabbing on for too long, so here are some of Johno’s shots…

Going Tomb Raider

Next up, the rest of South East Asia

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Battling Bribery: Playing Volleyball to Enter Laos

2011-11-23T11:27:00.001Z

By Paul Archer

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It’s sods law. If you fill all the fuel tanks in one country, the fuel will be cheaper in the next one. That’s the way it always works, and succumbing to the strange superstitions that develop over long months on the road, we rolled over the border filled to the brim.

Entering Laos, we were in a jubilant mood; the sun was shining and the atmosphere had changed immediately. China had been… an experience, a country without parallels. But, Tibet aside (which had been the most mind blowing, beautiful county), China was restricted by constant rain, six, twelve hour days, a week spent driving and our inability to really communicate with people other than through our somewhat challenging guide (not to mention the communal toilet habits!). The food was brilliant, always something new and interesting (although not necessarily tasty…) sated our appetites most nights (to this day I dream about waking up to a good bowl of dumplings and a tray of chilli vinegar!) but by the time we reached the border, we were up for a change.

As good a deterrence as you're likely to get

The road turned rough as we passed through the over engineered, three story, majestic Chinese border gates complete with gold font bidding farewell from the ‘People’s Republic of China’. It was a crass display of wealth next to the dilapidated bungalow that housed the Laos border. Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world, ravaged by the Vietnam War, it’s barely recovered 30 years later. It is the ‘most bombed country on earth’; mines and unexploded ordinance scatter the dense forests going some way to prevent serious agricultural and economic growth.

Bushes and long grass had grown high around the border bungalow, only being cleared for a full sized volleyball court positioned behind the hut. The visa guy provided us with a visa and immigration stamped us through. By the time we had finished, the whole building had come out and started to play volleyball.

Temple

Immigration told us we needed to pay him for ‘overtime’ for doing our passports (all of $7). We work on a no bribery policy, generally being in no particular hurry, we can normally wait out difficult police and border stops (although we have had to bribe occasionally when there is no other option). Although it is an insignificant a mount of money, I don’t want to set or reinforce a precedent for future travellers. We refused to pay and a padlocked barrier was put down in front of the car. Apparently it couldn’t be opened until the next morning. Although not averse to camping on the border, we had no food or water. The volleyball players said border was now shut and we needed to pay ‘overtime’ for the man to open it and carried on with their volleyball.

The answer to this problem was abundantly clear; we would have to play them at volleyball to get through. Maybe if we irritated them enough, they would let us through? Grabbing the ball I announced with a big smile that I was playing; all of them versus me, if I win they open the gate. They seemed up for it (but they didn’t have much of a choice; I had the ball), so I gave it a smack and it went right into the net. My plan was flawed from the beginning; I don’t possess the slightest iota of volleyball playing skill.

If I win, we go through...

They won hands down and the gate remained firmly shut. Smiles and jokes carried on, but I upped the irritation. Every time I got the ball it ended up in the long grass (due to skill or lack of… you decide) and they eventually broke (i.e. got bored) and one of the guys opened the gate, and we entered Laos.

It was dusk so we drove to the first village and found a homestay. We grabbed a bite and checked out what is classed as nightlife in a village of a few hundred in the middle of the Northern Laos’ Jungle; a building on bamboo struts serving beer to ten local lads and playing very loud Laos karaoke and videos by a Japanese hair metal band called X Japani … (I ask you to finish reading the blog before clicking this as you may find you'll spend the rest of the day watching these guys on youtube, revelling in their awesomeness and trying to decide the singer's gender... I know I did: )

Our destination was Vang Vien, home to a weird activity called, simply ‘Tubing’. Rapidly becoming a staple on the South East Asian backpacker’s circuit, the model is simple; you take a tuk tuk to the top of a river with a car tyre tube and float five miles into the town, stopping at as many of the riverside bars on the ways as possible. My two sisters were flying out from home to get a ride in the cab and we arranged meet them there.

I woke the next morning and something wasn’t right. Numerous battalions of some bed bug type animal had fed viciously on my torso, turning it into a scattered landscape of small red and incredibly itchy bites. To make matters worse, we had used all our anti histamine tablets in the dust mite infested hovels where we had stayed in Tibet to stop us sneezing all night long. Covering myself in ineffective aftersun cooling cream, we headed south and I itched.

Before long I stopped and had a wee; it wasn’t just my torso they had bitten.

Minging!

The landscape in northern Laos is excellent, rising small hills; you can see thick green forest meeting the horizon. Hills get higher as you head south and volcanic outcrops stick vertically up from the forest with trees hanging on unfeasibly steep slopes. It doesn’t seem possible for anything to grow on anything that steep, and you’d be partly right. Although the road from the border is initially very good (the bit built by the Chinese) it soon descends into a game of sporadically paved, pot hole filled, hairpin lined truck chicken. Landslides block the road every few miles as the unfeasibly attached trees discover that as soon as it rains, their base on a near vertical slope is untenable and they all fall down along with a lot of mud onto the road below. Land movers work tirelessly during the wet season to clear these, often just leaving deep mud tracks for you to simply drive over the land slide.

Off-Road Heroes!

The Winch

Arriving at one particularly substantial one, we found a small truck had slid out, blocking the road for all. This was it, the moment we had all been waiting for. A legitimate reason to use our winch!!! It had taken over two weeks to attach and cost £500 and had never been used (apart from one half hearted time in Turkey when it seemed more fun to winch then to push). Leigh and I jumped out and immediately Leigh fell flat on his ass in the knee deep mud. Momentarily stopping being off-road heroes to take be piss out of our mud-caked team mate, we then looped a tow rope around its axels, winched it back onto the road, dug away the remaining mud and guided him out. Cheers rung out from the three or four observers and the winch had proved its worth.

Our muddy feet (note Johno's pristene clean ones, apparently the photography has to stand on the car and not help the Off-Road Heroes)

The Cars, The Family and the Team

A bit further along, a car drove right at us, it looked like some sort of vintage car and all we could hear was the sound of an old ‘honk’ horn (of the variety naughty comedians used for sound effects when they squeeze ample women’s breasts in the ‘60s). It veered over, and there sat a beautiful Argentinean car from the 1920s. It belonged to a barking mad family, who had spent the past eleven years driving around the world in this awesome car. Such a long time, in fact that they managed to have four kids on the road. Unfortunately we couldn’t hang around and have a chat, they had to be in China the next day and after our reports about the road ahead, they knew they had to get going. We knew that no matter now hard our break downs are, and how long we’ve been on the road, there’s always someone out there who is doing something harder. Check them out http://www.argentinaalaska.com/eng/

Hannah looked positively chav-ish next to this majestic beauty

We stopped at the pretty market town of Luang Probang for the night then set off on our way with loads of time to make it to Vang Vien before nightfall. Soon there was a clunk, a grind and the familiar sound of metal on metal, out set all our teeth on edge and Leigh exclaiming in polite, four letter words his disappointment at yet another thing on the car breaking. The brakes went spongy and we stopped on the side of the road. The brake calliper had fallen apart. Chief mechanic Leigh announced that the pin holding it together had gone and now nothing was holding the brakes pads in. Chief blaggers, Johno and I, traipsed along the road in search of something pin like. Our fluency in sign language (or possibly that we were holding a brake calliper in our hands) allowed us to get directions to a village mechanic. A pillar drill and an angle grind on a piece of metal lying on the floor of his workshop later and we had a new pin. Back we traipsed to find that Leigh had found that we were also missing a plate of some sort. No problem for the It’s on the Meter crew, an iced coffee can, some pliers and a hammer were brought into the mix and we were off.

The caliper plate from the working brake

Arm Chair Mechanics

Winding along the lanes, straw huts on stilts lined the road, children played and chickens tried their best to get squashed under the wheels of black cabs. Each village had a tap on the main road, and as the day drew on, we would get a glimpse of everybody’s evening washing rituals as they hung around the only running water available.

Fixed

Our setback meant that darkness fell, and with it half the sky. Water fell as one big torrent onto us, forming sudden deep rivers in the road as our twenty year old rust bucket sprung a few leaks, our two motorbike lights we had bolted onto the cab as headlights had failed and the only lights we had were spot lights as the road turned into a pot holed, water filled mess. With nowhere to stay we had to push onto Vang Vien at a crawl, driving over small bumps, only to discover two foot deep holes behind them with clank as our decrepit suspension maxed out for the sixth time that day.

We eventually got to the village by 10pm to find it was not the small village we imaged, but a full blown tourist hot spot, heaving with drunken backpackers.

It was time to put our party boots on.

Next up fun with ropes and beer, gin-and-tonic-and-snakewine (complete with real snake), minor surgery in the worlds worst hospital and road side rock stars…

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Terracotta warriors, giant pandas and girls with big eyes, like whales

2011-11-18T06:58:00.001Z

By Johno

It was raining as we approached the ancient and historic city of Xi’an after two hundred days on the road.

It had been raining heavily for most of the day and the factors of good roads, bad drivers and water had combined with deadly consequences meaning we had seen more car accidents in this single day than in the rest of the trip combined.

Sign at a urinal

This didn’t seem to dampen Leigh’s determination to get to the city, home of the famous Terracotta Army, as quickly as possible and for the second time of the day we asked him to reduce his speed a little. His nonchalant reply wasn’t the most comforting, “If we hit something today we’re dead anyway, the speed doesn’t matter”.

[Paul: Sod Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, this was the most scared I’d been the whole trip!]

Despite the odds against us we made it safely into the city and found ourselves a nice youth hostel. It was still raining.

Roadside sculpture

The main draw of Xi’an is the Terracotta Army but on the way to the city one of our front suspension-spring brackets had snapped off so our highest priority was getting the car back up to scratch. So before we set out to find the rows and rows of pottery soldiers, archers and horsemen, Leigh and I set out to find some flesh-and-blood mechanics.

After some driving around with Frank we saw a place that looked promising, parked the car outside and took in the shattered plate and bent shock absorber. Frank spoke to the teenage mechanics at length explaining our problem whilst occasionally referring back to the broken parts Leigh and I stood holding.

Swarm of bees!

After talking for fifteen minutes Frank turned to us, “They say it is not possible to fix this”

Leigh and I were pretty stunned. “What do you mean? Of course it is, the shock absorber just needs hammering straight”

“No, this is not possible”

“Yes it is, we just need a big hammer,” we said, looking around until we saw a hammer, “look can we just use this? Do you have a vice?”

Frank spoke to them for another few minutes, “No. There are no vices here. This whole street is tyre change only”

“But... this is a mechanics, there must be a vice!”

“No, they do not have such a thing”

Terracotta warriors!

Leigh and I told them we would be back shortly and walked out onto the street, into the rain, and along the line of mechanic’s workshops. After about five metres we saw a huge vice on the threshold of workshop and asked the mechanics if we could use it briefly. Five minutes of hammering later we had straightened the unfixable shock absorber and returned to the original workshop resisting the urge to ask Frank to translate, “There! See: don’t be so defeatist, you can fix anything with the right tools and materials!”

"They took my frickin' kidney!"

Now we just needed to get the bracket which held the shock absorber in place made up. To cut a long story all that was required was to cut a triangular plate of metal, bend it in two places and then drill four holes in it. But to even explain this took literally hours, to actually make it happen took many more. To make things worse Leigh repeatedly tried to explain that they should drill the holes last as their position would change when the metal was bent. Frank eventually told Leigh to leave them to it as they were professionals. Needless to say, the pros drilled the holes before bending the plate and to their surprise the holes didn’t line up when they were finished.

Pandas!

The rain was still falling when the new part was finally finished and the mechanics tried to charge us over fifty pounds for a shoddily cut, bent and drilled piece of metal that either of us could have made in less than an hour. Much to Frank’s annoyance we ended up paying about half the asking price and returning to our hostel.

He was similarly sulky the next day when we managed to get our tickets for the Terracotta Army for 70 Yuan, much reduced from the 190 they were asking in the hostel. According to him getting a good deal by negotiating on things was somehow related to the ‘losing face’ concept we were struggling to fully understand.

Panda Porn

The army itself was interesting to see but ruined by the extreme commercialisation of what was deemed to be one of China’s most important archaeological finds: The rainy walk from the car park to the entrance gates was a fifteen minute gauntlet of cat-calling shop owners and restaurateurs and by far the most exploited tourist attraction I’ve ever visited (and that includes the Taj Mahall and Santa Claus Village in Finland).

Baby pandas!

More hotly anticipated than Xi’an was the next city on the route, Chengdu. Frank the Guide had been telling us of the legendary beauty of the girls of Chengdu and explaining that they have, “big eyes, like whales, filled with water”. We were positively moist with anticipation.

Frank turned out to be completely right and after meeting up with a friend of Matt’s we explored the local nightlife and once again enjoyed near-celebrity status in some of the city’s most exclusive nightclubs.

TV interview

[Paul: Matt and I did the classic backpackers trick of buying beers from the shop next door for 30p instead of the £6 asking price in the club. Matt got caught smuggling his into the club and when he pleaded poverty the head of security winked and spoke into his radio. He sat us at one of the best tables in the club and very soon two almost full £200 bottles of spirit arrive with a courteous nod from the waiter and no charge! We could get used to this.]

At one point Matt and I stepped out of the club to grab a snack and walked past a supercar that had just pulled up. Two near-supermodels stepped out, smiled at us and coyly purred hello. Things like this didn’t happen in real life! Not to me at least.

Biggest Buddha in theWorld (in China)

After a quick TV interview the next day we visited the famous Panda Reserves and spent the morning gawping at the crazy things. They almost didn’t quite look real and wobbled around like drunken stuntmen in bear suits just chewing on the nutritionally bland bamboo, too lazy to even try it on with their partners.

In the afternoon we visited a huge outdoor Buddha that we were reliably told was the, ‘largest Buddha in the world, in China” before continuing southwards towards to the border with Laos.

Sky-ways

China has an outstanding road-building programme and with the exception of road up to Everest and a few minor roads we had spent the last three weeks racing along on smooth asphalt. The most impressive feats of engineering were the huge elevated skyways that sliced through steep winding valleys and cut our journey times dramatically. Unfortunately in southern Yunan it seemed we had arrived six months too early and so the whole next day was spent crawling up and down mountainous B-roads whilst staring longingly at the unfinished six-lane monsters towering above us.

Lunch with Beckham

But these slow routes allowed us more chance to meet local people and we spent an enjoyable few hours being treated to lunch by a car full of young Chinese who kept repeatedly calling Matt, “Big Ham”.

“Do you think they’re calling me Big Ham because I’m sat at the head of the table?” he asked.

“Dude,” we said, chuckling, “they’re calling you Beckham!”

He wasn’t too impressed.

Insect Market

Our final large city before leaving China was Kunming, home of an amazing market that sold everything, ranging from live bugs, birds and animals to hand-made stone stamps to an entire shop stocking police gear including radios, weapons and even fully kitted-out police scooters.

Then we found ourselves on our last few days in China, having encountered surprisingly few problems on our extremely tight schedule despite my earlier worries. However, we still had 48 hours for things to go wrong and this they did.

Cages full of Mogwai and Police Shop

Firstly Frank finally reached the end of his tether with us after 23 days. Maybe he was used to overland expeditions with rich, middle-aged Westerners in roomy air-conditioned 4x4s and luxury hotels or maybe he just didn’t like the fact that we were all young enough to be his children but he had had enough.

We had repeatedly explained to Frank the purpose of our trip and that we were trying to break the World Record but most of it had gone in one ear and out of the other. We had a telephone interview at 3pm and so had decided to stop for lunch at 2pm so we could combine the two, but Frank seemed to think that the sole reason for the late lunch was to deny him food for a few hours more than normal.

Taxi stamp being made

So when Leigh drove past a service station at 1.30pm Frank was pushed over the edge, “You must take me to hospital now!” he suddenly demanded.

“Hospital?” we asked, shocked, “Why, what’s wrong, are you okay?”

“No, I am malnourish!”

We laughed in disbelief, “Frank, we just told you: we are stopping at two because of the interview!”

“No” he shouted, “stop now!”

“I can’t stop now,” said Leigh, “we’re on the motorway”

“Stop or I will tell police you kidnap me!”

“He can’t stop here Frank, there’s nowhere to stop”

“It’s always Leigh, he always do this, it’s all Leigh’s fault!” huffed Frank.

After some food Frank miraculously felt better and we settled down for the evening a mere few hours from the border and our freedom!

The next morning didn’t start well when a few minutes from the border we heard a familiar unwanted grated sound. On closer inspection a bolt on the aging suspension had snapped off leaving half of it stuck in the hole and our front left wheel hanging on by a single nineteen-year-old piece of steel. Unsurprisingly the only garage in the town told us that it was not possible to fix this but after persuading them to let us use their drill, finding some new drill bits and tracking down some new nuts and bolts we had Hannah patched up again and were ready to finally cross the border.

Mechanical problems again, just before we leave...

After some arguments over our missing Chinese visa stamps [Paul: and our Chinese driving licenses, which we all ‘accidentally’ misplaced when they needed to be returned (if you had a Chinese driving license, you would keep it too!)], we managed to exit China and enter the PDR (Pretty Damn Relaxed) Laos.

Exit border!

In true Chinese style it was still raining.

Next time: Out of China and into Laos where the team brave a flooded tropical river full of flesh-eating bacteria with a belly full of snake wine!

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Breaking World Records, Chinese lock-ins and Missile Testing Zones.

2011-11-15T11:32:00.001Z

By Leigh.

When people ask how we felt when we broke the world record, we give the usual ‘it was amazing’, ‘brilliant’ and ‘a great personal achievement’ but when we crossed the line in Qinghai province I felt a sense of anticlimax. We had been working to this moment for three years but when we reached this magic mileage there was nothing , no fireworks, no big brass band to accompany us. I honestly don’t know what my mind was conjuring up in the lead up to the record, maybe it was the high altitude ruining my sleeping pattern or the long days driving from morning to dusk with an annoying Chinaman perching on your shoulder.

We pulled up on the side of the road, reversed back slightly so that we were on the right place for the GPS mileage and got Frank the guide to take our picture. We had been looking for a bottle of champagne to go with the record since Nepal, but to no avail adding to the feeling of anticlimax. but suddenly things started to change, Matt pulled out a hidden bottle of the finest, cheapest Nepali champers and popped the cork and it started to click; we were elated. WE HAD BROKEN THE WORLD RECORD! We were being sprayed and covered in the stuff, standing on the top of the roof of Hannah in a very barren section of Tibetan plateau. Spending the next thirty minutes taking pictures and relaxing, the achievement spread throughout the group with each one of us taking in the news at different times. We had done it!

Breaking the world record!

[Paul: I felt… on top of the World (ahem)]

On the days approaching to the world record we may have unexpectedly set a new world record, the highest ever taxi journey. We had not gone under 3,300 meters altitude since arriving in China and this had some adverse effects on us and on Hannah, she did not have much power to begin with but at this height the horsepower of the engine was effectively halved. Black smoke was billowing out of the exhaust adding to our environmental credentials, some sections we accomplished in first gear going less than 20km/hr infuriating our Chinese guide, Frank. He expected that our car would be a top quality four wheel drive vehicle, instead, when he was crammed in the back with two other tall men, it slowly sunk in that our car was not going to do well on these roads and he didn’t like that. “You should have got one of those cars” and “we should take 4x4 as your car is not good” were some of the comments expressed within a very short time frame. We knew this would be a long 25 days.

Highest ever taxi Journey?

The highest plateau we reached was on the border with Tibet and the rest of China, at 5,218 meters we realized this was pretty damn high, discovering that we may have broken the World Record for the longest ever taxi journey! The effects at this height were apparent, breaking all of the rules of acclimatization for altitude, becoming out of breath by just getting out of the car and becoming light headed as if you stood up too quickly. Luckily for us as we headed north through China the altitude reduced as we left the plateau relieving both ours and the taxis symptoms; the team aimed to get to the city of Dunghuang in just a couple of days.

Dust Devil.

One of the sections that we needed to traverse included a restricted missile testing zone where we needed special permits; we did not organize these ourselves because our tour agency (a compulsory requirement for driving a vehicle through China) was supposed to do them. Our permits through Tibet seemed to work fine but as we arrived on the outskirts of the restricted zone, we soon found out that our tour guide did not have the right permits, and, to our surprise we also found out that no one has brought foreigners through this region within the past five years. Great service by the ‘self drive China experts’ we were forced to pay a small fortune to arrange this leg, we figured(!).

Amazing Roads.

Frank, the guide, decided that we should drive a whole day back to the nearest major town to use a fax machine (A BLOODY FAX MACHINE?!) we could not believe our ears. Frank was throwing his toys out of his pram a few days ago when we were struggling on the track to Mount Everest base camp, that we were ‘going to be behind a whole day and that we should have had a 4x4!We refused and convinced Frank to phone up his office to get the matter sorted out. Frank was telling us we must go back, but we were determined to stay-as it would cost two tanks of fuel and a whole day- the thought of going over our own tracks for so many kilometers depressed the crap out of us and we had started to learn that Chinese can be very defeatist as soon as the smallest problem occurs. We refused to move, but it worked, eventually a phone call came through from the police chief allowing us entry.

The restricted area was desolate for a large portion u apart from an off road section we had to endure parallel to a beautiful new tarmac highway which was not currently open reducing us to a 20km/hr crawl. We then came across one of the most amazing roads, newly built and similar to a race track.

Brilliant Chinese roads.

[Paul: A brand new road had been opened, wide carving bends and hairpins wound their way through the rolling hills down from the Tibetan plateau. It was one of the most incredible driving roads… if you were in a sports car and not a two ton black cab with a tendency to lean disturbingly!]

[The road was lined with small concrete cubes alternately painted red and white making me feel like I was on a Super Mario track. After a while the cubes were unpainted, then unfinished, then not present at all… and then we were back on standard roads again.]

Arriving at Dunhuang we finally had a day off, the first break in the past two weeks. Frank was enthusiastic about seeing the largest indoor Buddah in the world (in China ) and also the night markets there. Determined to sample the cultural delicacies of this region the team unanimously decided to go out for our first night since Lahsa, We hit the markets, ate some chicken’s feet and drank a few beers. The next thing we know we are in a small Chinese bar teaching them the concept of a ‘Lock in’, consuming more (and more) beer and learning phrases in Mandarin.

Waking up the next morning we were informed that a Chinese man had entered our dorm room in the early hours of the morning and took some keys; panic set in, thinking that we had our car keys stolen. In fact, the Chinese man was the owner of the bar and Paul had taken the keys for locking up the bar to promote the concept of ‘lock in’ literally.

Alcoholic.

Hung over, the four of us went to see the giant Buddha leaving Paul behind to recover [Paul: I didn’t fancy paying the entrance fee, nothing to do with the hangover…]. We found out that Chinese tourist attractions are relatively more expensive than their neighboring countries (£18!). The sight was impressive but we soon learned that China likes to promote itself by having the ‘best/biggest/highest things in the world’ (even when are not). We will soon witness the largest Buddha in the world (in China), the highest bridge in the world (in China) and many more.

Hidden Buddha.

Leaving Dunhuang, Paul managed to back into the only lamppost in the carpark and we witnesses Frank misbehave for the first time (“quick, drive, before anyone sees” he said, as we left the pole leaning at an angle)[Johno: See attached picture]

Idiot.

We were only 100km south of the border with Mongolia, so we had to head South East to make it to Xian, the ancient capital city. Along the way the Great Wall of China was beckoning, we were told by our guide that this was the section that had been made from mud and you could definitely tell. From the satellite images and picture we’ve seen, the brick section of the Great Wall of China looks like an engineering marvel but the bit we saw is just a mud wall that didn’t look like it would hold the smallest Mongol horde out. It was a big, long wall, but just a wall all the same.

We had 25 days in China and we were already half way. The weather darkened and the heavens opened when we were 200km from Xian, we pressed on but the combination of bad Chinese driving (mixing good roads, high speed and no driving sense),with the introduction of contra flows and the darkness culminated in one nervous driving experience.

Chinese designed toll booths .

We pulled up and ignored our guide’s useless advice for a hotel and directions, going by theLonely Planet’s advice; finding a reasonable priced hostel to prepare us for our adventure in Xian and the second half of our China adventure…

Next up we see Pandas and girls with whale eyes filled with water.

Trip Stats:

Days on the road: 199
Miles covered: 24,646.
Tanks of fuel used: 113
Meter reading: About £44,642
World Records Completed: 2 Hopefully!

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中國駕駛考試！or the Chinese Driving Test!

2011-11-10T08:46:00.001Z

By Johno

Following a bone-shaking all-dayer to Mount Everest Base Camp the team pushed further into Tibet to face the horror of the Chinese driving test.
~

Capitalist Communism

We had heard mixed things about the Chinese driving test, ranging from, “Don’t bother with it, just bribe your way out of any document checks” to “It’s a two-hour written test with a hundred questions and a 90% pass mark. And it’s in Chinese and you’re not allowed a translator”.

Cleaning the car ready for the police

Based on previous experience in Russia our car is quite a large target for police checks and seeing as we had over 7000km to cover in China and that none of us had a fond desire to complete a term of hard labour in Inner Mongolia we decided that it would be best to at least attempt the test and try to get the correct licences.

Paul, before the test

We turned up at the police station in the late afternoon on the day before a large local festival was about to take place but Frank did an excellent job of arranging the bureaucracy and Paul was quickly scooted off for an inspection of the car whilst Leigh and I nervously awaited the dreaded test.
It was twenty minutes before they decided to put us out of our misery and sent a short bespectacled officer, wearing trousers that were much too short for him, to begin the test.

Chinese rules

He fixed us with a steely glare and started to fire off machinegun-Mandarin, never once taking his eyes off us.
Frank helpfully gave us a translation.
“Number one,” he started, holding up a finger, “always drive on the right”
We nodded and he continued.
“Number two: The speed limit forty in town, thirty near schools”
Everything seemed straightforward enough so far, less of a test and more of a lecture.

Yaks crossing

He carried on, “Three: Tibet very big place and there are not many police officers so you must use your conscience to obey rules”
I resisted cracking a smile and almost gave Leigh a sideways glance but the bureaucrat’s gaze was too powerful and he moved on to the final rule, “Four: If you get caught you will be punished!”

We promised to obey these rules and five minutes later were presented with our newly laminated Chinese driving licences, just as Paul returned and reported that Hannah had somehow passed the lighting and brakes tests.

The next Couchsurfer... or the old peasants quarters

And so we drove onwards towards Lhasa, one of the highest cities in the world, through stunning wide pastures and meadows that didn’t quite look real. The surreally well-ordered fields with their regular sheafs of wheat and almost crazy-paving-like footpaths gave the whole place the atmosphere of a giant, eerie outdoor folk museum and I couldn’t help but get the impression that the corridor along the tourist-trodden Friendship Highway might be slightly different to the rest of Tibet.

Folk museum

This feeling was backed up when we stopped at a small museum based in an old Tibetan feudal manor. When we reached the servant’s old quarters there were signs everywhere proclaiming how much the lives of the peasants had improved since China liberated Tibet in the fifties: “Pintsochuochun used to receive only 16kg grain a year. Since she stood up for liberation her family now have 7 cows, 1 horse, 1 cart, 1 TV set and 1 plough! She need not worry for eat, live and use!”

Propaganda

Frank saw us studying the boards and mused, “Ah, Chinese Propaganda!”
I was surprised at how forthcoming he was, especially after his previous obvious support for his government, until I discovered much later that Frank’s literal translation of ‘propaganda’ was just something along the lines of ‘government-provided information’, without the negative connotations usually implied by the word in the West.

It looks very terrible

We were used to the car attracting a bit of attention wherever we went but Lhasa was something else. As soon as we stepped out at the youth hostel we were mobbed by Chinese backpackers who were sitting around the courtyard avoiding the fierce high-altitude sunshine. Many photographs and swapped email addresses later we had moved into the huge dormitory room and decided that we needed to relax after the last few days of heavy driving. We put on our cleanest clothes and headed out into the night.

New fans!

We were highly disappointed. Every bar we hit was overpriced and underoccupied and it looked like a boring and short night lay ahead. So naturally we started asking the bar staff where was best to go and after a short while we found ourselves bundled into a taxi, destination unknown.
Ten minutes later we pulled up at what was possibly the most exclusive club I have ever seen. The queue that snaked away from the door was populated by hip Young Things clad in expensive looking designer clothes and high-end 4x4s and sports cars were parked all around. Even the bouncers looked like fashionistas and the doorway into the club was made up of a row of green lasers. I immediately felt out of place in my shorts, sandals and t-shirt.

We paid for the taxi, tried to project an air of confidence and strolled up through the lasers, all expecting a hand on the chest and a, “Sorry lads, not tonight”.
But inside the theme continued and banging house music mixed with clouds of smoke and flashing lights. Every table had stacks and stacks of unopened beer bottles on it and people in various stages of drunkenness waltzed around.

Masks in Lhasa

In true backpacker style all I could think about was money. Even the backstreet bars we had started the night in were expensive, this place was going to be cripplingly so. However, I had a plan...

I walked up to a table near the bar that was covered in full bottles of Budweiser and put on my best Stupid Foreigner routine, “Excuse me, do you know if we just, er, order beers from the bar?”
A guy at the table smiled and without a word opened a bottle and passed it to me.
“Thanks! Uh... my friends are also...”
He opened three more and passed them around.

The whole night continued like this with us flitting around groups of locals being treated like mini-celebrities to calls of, “Me you love you!” and free drinks.
We later learnt that if someone offers you a drink and you accept you somehow “lose face” but this didn’t concern us too much as we discovered that the next floor up housed a suite of ‘KTV’ karaoke rooms and that the occupants were more than happy to have us lose face in exchange for our performances of Robbie Williams and Bloodhound Gang.

We stumbled in about 5am, trying to keep quiet in the dark room and slowly remembering that we were due to visit the famous Potola Palace, the huge former residence of the Dalai Lama now turned into a museum, in a few short hours.

Potola Palace

It turned out that Frank had decided to have a sleep in and as the tickets for the Palace were only available first thing in the morning it was removed from our itinerary. Instead we spent a very pleasant day wandering around Lhasa in the blazing sunshine and admiring the spotless streets festooned with prayer flags. Once we learned to ignore the squads of police in riot gear posted on every corner the place was actually very nice and I wished we could have spent more time there.

After a well-deserved Yak steak we made our way back to the hostel and took our computers into the friendly cafe in the courtyard so we could us their free Internet. We had only been ogling Facebook through numerous illegal ‘proxy’ websites for a few minutes when we were interrupted by a pretty Chinese girl who ran up to our table from a rowdy group in the corner.
She looked embarrassed shouted loudly, “I love you!” at none of us in particular. Her group roared with laughter and she slinked off.

It took us a while to figure out that the crowd were playing a local version of Truth or Dare and we had just added a whole new league of awkwardness for them.

Taking the high road!

After another hour or so of strange interruptions later we decided to hit the sack and get some rest for the big day ahead. Tomorrow, all being well, we would pass the point 21,691 miles away from London and finally hit the target we had been aiming at for almost two hundred days of driving and three years of planning.

Tomorrow we would break the World Record for the Longest Ever Taxi Journey!

Next time: Will we make it? Only the highest pass on the route stands between the team and certain honour, fame and recognition!

Trip Stats:
Days on the road: 193
Miles covered: 21,430
Tanks of fuel used: 107
Meter reading: About £40,000
Face lost: Lots

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"How much to Mount Everest mate?" - Driving up the world's highest mountain

2011-11-08T05:27:00.001Z

By Johno

After a short break in Pokhara to recharge our batteries and fuses the team regrouped in Kathmandu ready to brave the Tibetan Plateau

I’ve always been skinny.

Even six months of intense military training when I was eighteen left me with the arms of a stick insect and the legs of a chicken. Now, after two months of vegetable Dal and an intense sweat-diet I could have given Kate Moss a run for her money.

The crew!

However, compared to some of the cycle rickshaw drivers peddling around Kathmandu I was positively muscle-bound so I felt a pang of guilt as one of the emaciated but ever-cheerful guys puffed and huffed his way up the hills from the city centre to the airport with me lounging in the back seat.

The point where the slope got so steep that the driver couldn’t even pedal any more was too much for me so I jumped out and helped him push it to the top, inspiring beaming smiles from every other rickshaw driver nearby.

I was due to meet a friend from home who was to be our next passenger throughout China and after paying the rickshaw guy an extra fifty percent to try to assuage my guilt I sat down at the arrivals gate and waited. And waited. And waited.

Teenage Club with shower

I was just about to give up and when Matt strolled out, loaded down by bags and almost walked right past me. With a sudden look of surprise he caught my eye and walked up.
“Bloody hell Johno, you look like a white Somalian!”

The first landslides

We had a few days to kill in Kathmandu whilst we waited for our Chinese visas to be processed so we spent them, as always, trying to patch up the car as well as catching up with Matt who I hadn’t seen since Christmas.

India had taken a heavy toll and Hannah’s current ailments included a broken front suspension bracket, a dying clutch that never wanted the driver to use first or third gear, no headlights after they bounced out on the horrific National Highway Seven, no fog lights, three out of the four door mechanisms rusty almost to the point of not being able to open them, two large holes in the boot, one flat tyre, the front wing falling off, no indicators, an ants nest in subwoofer and, worst of all, the chrome trim around the bottom of the car had lost its shine!

Momo on the road

We enlisted the help of Matt, Ozzy Craig( who had caught up with us again) and one of Paul’s girlfriend’s friends called Binay (who is possibly the best tour guide in the entire country, if you’re going to Nepal check out Sacred Himalaya, you’ll end up helping Binay’s charity and it’s very cheap. http://www.sacredhimalaya.com/) to right all these wrongs during the day and the evenings were spent exploring the backpacker haven of Kathmandu.

Nepal border

One place that had repeatedly caught our eye was the strangely named, “Teenage Club – with Shower!” We had seen the outside of many of these sleezy places in other parts of the world but here in backpacker-friendly Kathmandu it couldn't be that sort of joint. could it?
After a few beers we decided to check it out, just for the purposes of satisfying curiosity of course.

The place was pretty much said what it did on the tin: We walked in to find a seedy bar with a sparkly stage, the focal point of which was a standard electric power-shower. We were immediately mobbed by uncomfortably young girls who conveniently just so happened to be hanging out there and asked us to buy them drinks from the hugely overpriced menu.

The friendship bridge!

We quickly decided that this really wasn’t our type of place and with our curiosity sated we were just debating how to get out of this particular situation when our prayers were answered and a powercut struck.

We jumped up to leave, blaring our excuses and secretly praising Nepal’s ageing power system. “How can we stay for dance party with no lights and most importantly… no shower?!”

Despite the barman’s cries that he would get a generator up and running we managed to escape and find some normal bars without showers or indentured teens.

The long road up to the plateau

By Sunday we were all ready to get back on the road again and drive the fifty mile hop to the Tibetan border ready to meet our compulsory government guide the next day. Over the last few weeks we had learned that straight line distances in Nepal don’t really mean much as the roads twist from valley to valley along steep mountainsides meaning that two towns a measly twenty miles distant on the GPS might actually be hours apart in real life.

Thankfully this road seemed quite direct and it looked like we would actually make it in good time, that was until the inevitable landslides reared their heads and destroyed our well-laid plans. By the time we found a hotel within eyeshot of the border we had managed to keep our target of never driving at night outside of Europe at an impressive zero percent.

Leigh gets confused by the altitude...

We were all quite nervous about meeting the compulsory guide we had paid through the nose for and who would be spending the next twenty-five days and covering thousands of miles with. My biggest worry was that with four strapping lads (or three strapping lads and one white Somalian) already in the car we would now have to potentially squeeze a Shuai jiao wrestler in there too. I sincerely hoped he would be a little fellow.

We passed out of Nepal, crossed the third Friendship Bridge (the first two having been washed away in previous floods) and stood around watching the female porters ferry huge sacks of flour through the border as we tried to spy our guide through the automatic gates and rows of guards.

...and the rest of the team

After a while we saw a tiny Chinese woman with a backpack and folder waving frantically at us with a grin. She looked like a lot of fun and would definitely be able to fit in the space in the backseat; could it be that she was our guide, “Frank”?

No, no it couldn’t.

Brilliant roads

After a quick chat we found that she was waiting for another tour group but she did agree to go back through the border and find our guy. Before long we had met Frank Jin and crossed the border into Tibet, or as Frank corrected us, The People’s Republic of China.

Frank seemed like a nice guy and after some introductions we shoe-horned ourselves into Hannah and drove up over twenty hairpins into the foggy mountainside above.

Hotel at 14,000ft

We were pleased to discover to that China has lots of good quality Youth Hostel Association hostels spread throughout its ten million square kilometres and that one of them was located in the first town we came to.

I was less pleased to discover that the Chinese have a strange habit of making toilets with no door. I discovered this when I knocked on Frank’s room door and he yelled for me to come in then looked almost as surprised as I was when I marched in and came face to face with him, pants around ankles. I felt like knowing each other for five hours wasn’t long enough to find ourselves in these circumstances.

The drive to Everest

The next day we climbed from our hostel at 5,500 feet up the seemingly never-ending mountain hairpins and onto the Tibetan plateau. The road was truly amazing and a magnificent feat of engineering far from the landslide-strewn track we had been told to expect.

As we chugged higher and higher we appreciated the views snatched through the gaps in the clouds but Hannah didn’t feel quite the same way.

The turn-off...

Passing 12,000 feet the car started to feel more sluggish than usual and to belch out a thick black smoke. I had read that the highest point on the epic Friendship Highway between Kathmandu and the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was about 16,000 feet and was really starting to worry: if we were struggling with 4,000 feet of oxygen starved air still to go how would we ever make it over highest road in the world and into the rest of China?

Somehow Hannah crawled up the slopes and we tried to ignore the clouds of thick, black unburnt diesel being spewed out into one of the world’s most pristine landscapes. Eventually we crested the pass at 16,800 feet, all feeling a little weird from the altitude but not wanting to admit it, and stepped out to breathe in the crisp mountain air amid the prayer flags and Yak skulls.

Finding some fuel

The descent down the other side was an absolute pleasure and the road was unbelievable, probably the best of the trip. As the night fell we found ourselves settling into a walled compound at a mere 14,000ft and cleared all the excess weight off the car: tomorrow we would attempt to drive up the highest mountain on Earth: Mount Everest.

[Paul: every person in the hotel was giving us strange looks when we told them we would be climbing to base camp in our taxi. “You do realise it’s a 4x4 only track, right?”]

Local kids

Although the far west of China is over two thousand miles away from Beijing the entire country runs on the capital’s time, meaning that when we left Nepal we had to put our watches forward two hours and fifteen minutes. This meant that our early morning sunrise was actually about 8am although most of the others had experienced a fitful night’s sleep due to the effects of the extreme altitude so I volunteered to drive first.

The first 60km continued on the stunning Friendship Highway and the low sun reflecting off the pools of standing water amidst the high meadows looked incredible and kept me wide awake until we hit the Everest turnoff.

"It's one of those ones..."

We were a little surprised to find such a well established exit but perhaps should have expected (or been told by our ‘experts in self drive’ tour company) that Tibet isn’t exactly swimming in Welcome Break service stations and so should have stocked up on fuel in Nepal.

The sign indicated that Everest was 103km away and we had just over half a tank of diesel left. Under normal circumstances, on a flat road and at normal altitude, we might have just made this but on these extreme slopes where half of the fuel was ejected out of Hannah’s exhaust pipe in a cloud of acrid smoke it was just too risky so we decided to head to the next town and stock up.

Terrible roads

It was only now that Frank the guide spoke up. Firstly he said we shouldn’t go to the town as there was a police checkpoint between us and there and secondly he thought the town had no fuel anyway. Probably.
Maybe.

Eventually we ended up flagging down a lucky truck driver who sucked some diesel out of his tank and generously only charged us three times the going rate.

Brilliant roads

The tour agency had planned for us to drive to Everest and back in one day then continue on to the next town and when we saw that Base Camp was only about 100km away and it was about 10am this seemed like a reasonable plan.

Two incredibly bumpy hours later we had been forced to reconsider after only covering about twenty kilometres. We figured if this kept up it would take us all day just to get there, not to mention returning. Disheartened, we cursed every Landcruiser that sped past us at twice our speed and with half our shakiness.

80km to go!

Our spirits were buoyed as we crested the first hill, up at an impressive 17,030 feet, and looked at the epic mountain range spread out before us. With 80km to go we were certain Everest must be one of the big ones directly ahead of us.
“Is that it?”
“Erm... I’m not sure”
“What does it look like?”
“Ummm, like a big triangle I guess...”

Our speed picked up a little as we careered down the other side of the ridge taking the narrow line of least potholes that veered from side to side as the track wound down the hill and much, much later we finally rattled into Mount Everest Base Camp, the first London Black Cab ever to make it to the first camp of the world’s highest mountain!

Made it to basecamp!

It was crap.

The motley collection of tent ‘hotels’ set amongst the piles of scree, litter and prayer flags smelt worse than a Hyde Park toilet and to top things off the peak itself was completely covered by cloud. We trudged up to a small plaque, took the obligatory photos with all the other tourists and tried not to think of the seven-hour bone-shaking journey down that lay ahead of us.In the dark (100% darkness driving rate maintained).

The top! (sort of)

Judging by the amount of photographs he made us take of him, Frank enjoyed the camp a lot more than we did but as soon as we got back in the car his mood changed. Perhaps unsurprisingly there are no Little Chefs to be found at 5000 metres so we had gone since our early breakfast with nothing at all to eat.

The long journey home

“You need to look after you nootrition when you on long journey,” Frank said, casting an accusatory gaze at my skeleton like arms, “if you my children I no allow you to do such thing ”.

This provoked a less than diplomatic response.

We were all in the same boat and in fact we were annoyed that our itinerary had seemed to suggest that this section would take a few hours, not a full thirteen (and counting)!

The next day was much clearer...

Just then another Landcrusier steamed past and off in a cloud of dust.

“You should have got four-wheel drive!” Frank huffed, shifting sulkily in his seat.

We all groaned.

It was going to be a long journey down.

Next time we tackle the Chinese driving test and paint the Tibetan capital Lhasa red.

Trip Stats:

Days on the road: 187
Miles covered: 20,498
Tanks of fuel used: 105
Records broken: Highest taxi ride ever?

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Craig’s List

2011-11-06T03:09:00.001Z

Nepal really is rather lovely.

Once we reached Pokara, and after gorging ourselves on Buffalo Steaks to celebrate leaving India, we went our separate ways for a week. We had been stuck in that cab together for 5 months and this break was well over due!

Johno climbed a hill

Leigh rode a motorbike around for a bit and got a flight tyre, Katie and I moseyed around between meals and Johno climbed a hill.

Does this look loose to you?

We all met back up, the wheel fell off as we were driving along (not good on Nepal’s mountain passes…), I waved goodbye to Katie and we killed time in Kathmandu. One evening we came back and there was a note on our door.

“I’m in room 201

Love,

Craig”

This must be Aussie Craig, keen readers of this blog may remember him featuring heavily in previous blogs. He was the mad, potty mouthed Australian we met in a hotel in Iran, who crossed the Baluchistan desert with Johno whilst fighting every person he met (if you haven’t watched it yet, this is Craig trying to fight a man with an AK 47). We had waved goodbye to him in India but he had caught up with us. It was great to see him again, exchanging stories and remembering that he really is a nice bloke (unless you are Iranian/Pakistani/Indian or in any way brown in colour, in which case he tends not to be very nice. Or patient. Oh, and he swears... a lot!). We were glad to note he had purchased a new T shirt soon after he left us, but it didn’t look like he had changed it since…

...and then the wheel just fell off

After so much time together, Craig had formulated a list of the most memorable moments he had spent with us. We decided to pop them on the blog, some of them won’t make too much sense but we’ve left it unedited. We decided to call this list… well, err…

Craig’s List

“My list of highlights from my Odyssey with the guys in London Taxi on the way to Sydney.

· Crazy old guy with IV marks in his arms and heart monitors still attached to his chest climbing into the Taxi, singing and smoking on the way to Chak Chak. Yazd, IRAN

· Camping in the road to avoid land mines.

· Local couple cancelling their plans on the wife's birthday to show us where the Towers of Silence were and then inviting us out for cake. Yazd, IRAN

· Running from the police twice and being involved in 2 police chases, just to get some diesel. Zahedan, IRAN.

· Johno finding all the crazy people, including the nutter taxi driver discussing the meaning of life, prison, good and bad through the window of the Taxi as we tried to drive off. Kerman, IRAN

· The nightmare that was Zahedan and Meriveh. Three days with no food, no money, little water and sleeping in the parking lot of a hotel whilst dealing with lazy, incompetent, smart arse and irritating Iranian Police as we tried to exit the Country. Zahedan and Meriveh, IRAN.

· Me losing my cool with lazy, incompetent, smart arse and irritating Iranian Police and almost belting one armed with an Ak47. Meriveh, IRAN

· Two Ak47 wielding Police taking me to the market to change money on the illegal black market. My first bodyguards and don't you love when the police help you break the law. Dalbandin, PAKISTAN.

· Armed escorts across Pakistan progressively getting more heavily armed.

· Motorcycle motorcade as we left Quetta. Sirens wailing, I felt like a true Foreign Dignitary. Quetta, PAKISTAN

· Paul's directions taking us through a market and Leigh hitting a Tuk Tuk. Multan, PAKISTAN

· ‘No Tension’ kid (or At-tension), whilst trying not to attract too much attention in a London Taxi in a not so safe neighbourhood with a friendly local yelling out the window for everyone to look at his new friends in the strange foreign car.

· The ladies of Lahore… what ladies? Lahore, PAKISTAN.

· Guests of Honour at a Sufi concert. Everyone around us got progressively more stoned as the night unfolded. Lahore, PAKISTAN

· Crossing into India and that first beer in months. Followed by a night of drinking games and late night cycle rickshaw races. Amaritsar, INDIA.

· Waving goodbye in Kathmandu, NEPAL.

Well, I think that’s it. I hope everything is going well. See you in Sydney”

Next up, we hit the mountain passes up to Tibet, the most beautiful country in the World.

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Drowning in Bombay, Starring in Bollywood and the Worst Road in the World

2011-11-01T13:07:00.001Z

By Paul Archer

Bombay Mix

I outlined in my last blog (in rather embarrassing and graphic detail) the events of one of the worst days of my life, but the next morning, as it always is with the expedition, we had to move on. So I curled up in a ball in the back of the cab underneath my ‘hajji’ scarf blanket and slept the entire way to Mumbai.

The sprawling metropolis’s quirks and irks, beauty and dirt have been described in far better ways in many different places than I could ever give justice to here. Put simply though, it’s bloody huge, filled to bursting with people (60% of whom live in slums) and then filled some more. Making for the tourist centre of Colaba District where we knew we could grab a cheap bed in this surprisingly expensive city, we had ideas of working with the Indian media, getting the taxi in a Bollywood film and sampling all the delights the city has to offer.

Mumbai Slums

However, India can wear you down, and wear us down it had. The cab was on its last legs, as were her drivers. I was still suffering from my delightful bout of dysentery, Leigh had run out of money, he and Johno had stopped talking to each other and we were staying in what could only be politely described as a dive. Stocking up on toilet roll (I had learned the hard way…) and sleeping pills, I settled down to a night of to-ing and fro-ing between our 2x3metre room and the toilet we shared with 30 Nigerians, two families and a crusty hippy.

The next day, I carried on with the previous night’s activities, Johno went and saw the sites of the town and Leigh sat and watched action films on his laptop. It was the first time in four days that I had started to feel mildly human and it was perfect timing. My girlfriend was flying in late that night and we had been invited to go out for dinner with some friends who had just moved to the city and were staying ten minutes from the airport, so we combined the two trips. Twenty minutes into the drive it started to rain. Not just normal rain, but thick, hard, relentless, soak everything in a second rain, and spirits were back to their standard Indian level. Our windscreen wipers, crap at the best of times, were now having the same effect as a wet-wipe stemming the flow of the Amazon. Mumbai is a hard place to drive around, but when most of the roads became underwater and it turned dark, it became really challenging. We eventually found the general area we were meeting them but not the hotel. Following the usual Indian directions (smile, head wobble, arm gesture indicating at least three different directions, generally all incorrect) we got progressively more lost.

Fording sudden rivers, dodging spray from trucks and trying not to kill any rickshaw drivers, we eventually arrived at their hotel almost four, hellish, stressful, hot and decidedly moist hours later. But there, waiting for us, was the most beautiful thing in the world; a huge burger made using proper beef (unheard of in this country of cow enthusiasts), fresh crispy chips and the piece de resistance, two strips of real, straight from the swine’s hide, bacon. After three months in the Arab world bereft of the streaky stuff, it was a perfect first meal-in-almost-a-week.

We collected Katie from the airport, she met me with the ever loving comments of ‘you’re so skinny… and look so ill!’ and headed back, since we had a big day of being movie stars ahead of us.

Bollywood!

Although we had big plans of getting Hannah the taxi into a Bollywood film, it turns out they don’t shoot outdoor scenes during the monsoon, and as Vishnu, Allah, Jesus and Buddah (India is, after all, a very diverse place) were still working on transferring the contents of the Indian ocean onto Mumbai, this certainly seemed to be out of the question. We settled for signing on with the standard ‘Western extra in a Bollywood film’ tourist trap, and boarded the bus with 30 other tourists. We were also being joined by one of our friends from the night before, Harry.

Looking damn fine (Harry, not in costume, second from left)

Filming a nightclub scene for the upcoming blockbuster ‘Agent Vinod’, less an all singing and all dancing Bollywood love story, more ‘Bond, Hindi Bond’; we were sent to wardrobe for our attire, emerging one by one to hysterical laughter. Leigh in “Versace”, and a nob-end hat, Johno looking smart and me in skinny jeans, a Samuel L Jackson cap and the most god awful fake Ed Hardy T shirt with diamonte diamonds depicting a Tiger. We looked like an all male dance troop, less podium dancers, more the teenage kind who watch far too much MTV and spend all year rehearsing and selecting their costumes for their big gig at the local village fete, featuring on the bill somewhere between the raffle and the ‘dog most like its owner’ competition. Katie emerged in a delightfully short skirt and Harry, being a dapper young gentleman anyway, emerged wearing exactly the same as he went in with, apparently not needing a costume change.

We filmed the same generic club dancing scene eighty times, stopped for chai, then filmed another generic club scene eighty times before dinner. Next up was the big fight scene, the protagonist was getting into trouble with a Russian ‘giant’ and we were dancing in the background. All of us, except Katie, whose short skirted behind was to be framing the shot. This meant that every time they did the shot (around 150 times as the ‘giant’ kept messing it up), the camera would pan out from a close up of her wriggling her bum to one of the fight, much to our amusement. Finishing up at 2am, exhausted and 500 rupees richer, we were bussed home.

This view gets boring...

Leigh manfully volunteered to fit all the spare parts brought out by Katie to the cab in the standard Mumbai downpour and we prepared to leave. We had some brilliant tin boxes made for the roof when we first got into India to replace the broken Ikea ones we had since London. Opening them for the first time since reaching Mumbai, it turned out that they are fantastic at retaining water, but not at stopping it flowing in and all our gear was floating around in a pool. We attempted to dry the soaked shoes and books, chucked out the ruined electronics and tools and prepared ourselves for the next leg of driving, wet to the skin.

If the road turns flat for a few minutes, you sleep

We probably could have got there just as fast in one of these...

Mumbai to Varanasi turned out to be one of the most challenging drives of the trip, the monsoon had hit, destroying already destroyed roads, making driving uncomfortable, slow and dangerous when combined with the local’s lack of any driving ability. Huge trucks veered onto your side of the road as this was the only spot without a two foot pot hole in a game of chicken where the winner was decided by a complex combination of guts, size and whether you’re an Englishman in a black cab (meaning you generally lose). We drove for over twelve hours a day, dawn until dusk and stayed in whatever dilapidated hotel would have us. Road signs were sporadic, as were roads. Occasionally you would discover 20km of brand new smooth road, where the terrain was flat and easy to build on, as soon as there was the slightest incline or need for bends, the road would give way to unpaved gaps between the jungle resembling the no-mans land at the Somme, only not quite as smooth.

This was India’s ‘National Highway 7’, apparently.

Drive, sweat, refuel, repeat

It took us five days to drive the 1600km to Varanasi, we had an average speed of 20-25kph (about 15 miles per hour). We arrived at sundown, getting lost in the tight streets and crashing out, happy to have got there and for a day off from driving.

Offerings at the river

Everyone bathes...

Katie and I wandered the streets discovering the holiest of Hindu cities. Varanasi is a city on the might holy Gang-ga (Ganges), and it’s the place where the Hindu dead are burned, and their ashes spread into the river. It is also the perfect microcosm of India’s ability to warm your heart and turn your stomach at the same time. Nestled among smouldering pyres with charred limbs protruding at grotesque angles, the oldest son dresses his father in bright, expensive cloth and carefully builds a fire around him, liberally spreading it with spices and flowers in a sombre ceremonial manner. Amazing temples line the banks, their bright gold and orange contrasting the dull brown of the river and as children run and bathe and swim right next to the sewage outlet, the corpse of a sheep is caught on a boats anchor a few metres away and a ‘baba’ holy man watches over in a meditative state from the bank.

A view from the dawn

We hopped on a boat at dawn and watched the sun rise over the city as hordes of devoted came to bathe themselves in the holy waters. But again we had to move; the Indian visas we had been granted back in the UK before the expedition (and all the delays) only had three days remaining on them and we had to make the 150km to Nepal before they expired. We drove all day along the same kind of roads and got to within a few hours of the border, holing up in a mosquito and bed bug filled ‘hotel’ when it got too dark to drive (driving at night in India is like playing ‘British Bulldog’ with the All Blacks, except they’re drunk, blind and driving big trucks with no head lights). Leaving as the sun rose, we were treated to a rare insight into the rural Indian’s morning routine as we counted 35 people squatting with a small pot of water on the road within three miles (we got bored of counting after that).

Bulldog

Passing the border without too much trouble, the road suddenly changed: it was paved and went up. Winding through the Himalayan foothills, we were stuck by a sight we had not seen since Europe. As we came up behind a slow moving truck, he pulled into the side, stopped, let us over take and then carried on. He actually let us pass!

I thought, “I’m going to like Nepal”

… but nothing confirmed this more until I passed a sign that confirmed the end of India and its running theme:

“Welcome to Pokara Region, Nepal. A Defecation Free Zone since 2008”

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Drowning in Bombay, Starring in Bollywood and the Worst Road in the World

2011-11-01T12:48:00.001Z

By Paul Archer

Bombay Mix

We collected Katie from the airport, she met me with the ever loving comments of ‘you’re so skinny… and look so ill!’ and headed back, since we had a big day of being movie stars ahead of us.

Bollywood!

Looking damn fine (Harry, not in costume, second from left)

This view gets boring...

If the road turns flat for a few minutes, you sleep

We probably could have got there just as fast in one of these...

This was India’s ‘National Highway 7’, apparently.

Drive, sweat, refuel, repeat

Offerings at the river

Everyone bathes...

A view from the dawn

Bulldog

I thought, “I’m going to like Nepal”

… but nothing confirmed this more until I passed a sign that confirmed the end of India and its running theme:

“Welcome to Pokara Region, Nepal. A Defecation Free Zone since 2008”

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...covered in poo!

2011-10-27T14:08:00.001+01:00

By Paul Archer

Kids in Jaipur

I’m sitting in Singapore airport as a I write this, and the city’s clinical atmosphere bears stark contrast to the contents of this blog. Although muggy outside, my feet are cold thanks to the over zealous air-conditioning; next to me, a ‘Harrods’ mini-store sells over priced cookies and handbags and an attractive and well dressed Chinese couple are drinking cocktails at the bar in front of me (it’s 10am). This blog is about India, a place where the price of one of those cocktails is the equivalent of a month’s wages. Singapore is the cleanest city in the world, everything works and I know there will be no ill effects from scoffing down a tempting smelling Subway from next door to the Harrods. However, Singapore, again with glaring disparity to India, is as bland and soulless as one of those people you meet who class their interests as ‘going shopping on a Saturday and then snuggling up with a take away to the X-factor’. So bland, in fact, (save for a delightful Singapore Sling in Raffles hotel with some friends), after asking a taxi driver what’s fun to do here he sat for a full minute in quiet contemplation before throwing the Universal Studios’ theme park out as an option, laced with a questioning upward inflection, indicating that he knew full well that he was scraping the barrel. He followed this by saying it’s not worth the small fortune it costs to get in anyway.

Back to the point though, this blog is about India, a country of great contrast and limitless fascination. This wonderful country’s virtues could fill pages. However, so too could its most interesting quirks, and this blog is about one of those. It permeates every aspect of Indian life (often literally), it’s unavoidable and always there, it’s a topic that often rears its ugly head during any conversation about travelling around the country and if you’re not a fan of it, you should probably stop reading now:

It’s poo.

The Taj

Following on from where Johno left off in the last blog, as we left Jaipur, the weather was typical; overcast, muggy and hot. The kind of weather which meant your brow would instantly bead with sweat as soon as the car stopped, giving you the air of an overweight gentleman who has just ascended an average length flight of stairs. We headed due south on the road to Mumbai, sometimes bouncing on unpaved roads, dodging Rickshaws, cows and atrocious driving, sometimes on new dual carriageways, dodging rickshaws, cows and atrocious drivers and sometimes through towns, dodging motor rickshaws, cycle rickshaws, cows, bicycles, cows, people, fruit stalls, bicycles, kids, beggars, cows, dogs, rubbish heaps - all of the aforementioned relieving themselves in said rubbish heaps - huge trucks, cows and, of course, atrocious driving.

Lush green fruit fields lined the side of the road and old women sat under umbrellas holding up identical bowls of fruit, hoping to lure drivers to make a purchase with them instead of their friend selling exactly the same bowl five metres down, or her friend another five metres further. We selected one for no particular reason and purchased a guava each, still covered in mud from the fields. I tried to eat it whilst driving, covering myself in juice but succeeding in getting the odd lump into my mouth. I commented about how hard it is to eat when you can’t look at what you’re doing, and Leigh responded by saying he had thrown his out ages ago after he found it was full wasps eggs. I thanked him for informing me of this after watching me blindly dig in.

We made good time heading south on the road to Mumbai, actually finding a road that resembled a motorway which meant we could get some speed up. Indians are tremendously quick to capitalise on any situation. When a western farmer has a motorway built through their land they see the business equivalent of a hooded character approaching clutching a scythe, clearly with no designs on using it to help with the harvest. When an Indian farmer sees a motorway built, he notices newly laid, lush green grass in the central reservation to graze his cows on, regardless of the cars speeding by at 120kph.

Speeding along faster than we had been for months, it suddenly hit me.

Broken down… again!

That grinding feeling of my stomach telling me ‘Paul, prepare yourself, not all is well in the world of your insides’. India’s fledgling motorway system (which consists of this 100km stretch of road), smooth as it is and reservation cows not withstanding, massively lacks service stations, or off ramps of any kind for that matter. Unable to stop, I held on for a bit longer, eventually finding an off ramp and stopping at a farmer’s shop in the middle of no where. He had no toilet. In India, it appears only the rich have toilets, for everyone else there’s you, a little bucket of water and the side of the road. Not being a fan of the verge loo, behind a cow shed was the next best thing.

We’d been on the road for 5 months at this point, and these rumblings become part of life in these parts of the world. It could have come from the guava, the Bombay mix I had earlier or simply by touching something dirty; in India its almost impossible to differentiate. However, after we found the only service station on the road and I had been three more times and used up every napkin on each table in the restaurant (or more accurately the waiter had tactically removed all the spare napkins on the tables when he got my game), I started to worry that this wasn’t just the normal case of the trots. However, I self-medicated myself with my usual bottle of coke, banking on its bacteria killing abilities. Back on the road, my stomach started to feel as though somebody had tied it in a knot and was slowly wringing it out, pushing everything up or down. Nausea overcame me and I informed the lads that we needed to stop. I then informed them with my more urgency, a few choice words and a very loud NOW!

The side of the road was standard for India, years worth of un-cleared rubbish piled up around small bushes and everything was covered in an oily slime that smelt like it was 80% sewage. A small shop was open, I asked them if they had a toilet, they looked at me blankly, wobbled their head and started to call for other family members. I’d been through this process numerous times here, it’s part of the Indian desire to be helpful, something that seems almost innate to all citizens. Three or four family members, old and young would be called out from the house to communicate with you, coming to the eventual conclusion that none of them can speak my language, I can’t speak theirs and they don’t understand what I want. Generally a highly endearing feature of Indian life, a game involving apologetic smiles and often a generous offer of some sort of hospitality follows.

However, in the literal sense, I did not have the time.

Mooo-ve along…

I ran around the corner to some bush and threw up. Flat coke and stomach acids burnt the inside of my nose as I dry wretched the last of my failed ‘coke cure’. Out of the corner of my eye I could see four rickshaw drivers, nonchalantly sitting on their machines and observing this man from this strange vehicle empty his stomach on a bush. This sight was short lived, because as soon as I had finished, the wringing sensation was pressing downward, so down too came my shorts and I turned the oily verge slime something more like 85% sewage. The audience just sat and stared and I noted this down in my head as one of my life’s low points. But it got lower; I saw that what was being rung out of me was not normal poo, or even normal liquid poo for that matter. It was green slime, marbled with a considerable amount of blood. This I knew to be a bad sign and hopped into the cab and told the lads in detail.

We needed a hotel, or at least I did, and quickly. We quickly found one, but as part of some local rule, they didn’t accept foreigners. Puzzled, I used their facilities and we found another. The same thing happened and we moved on. This started to get irritating after the 6^th hotel, and it dawned on me that I had run out of toilet paper at what can only decently be explained as ‘completely the wrong moment’. I shouted for Johno and Leigh, but what came out sounded more like a pathetic squeak. Apparently this was all I could muster and in my head it was all their fault that I had no paper. I use some initiative, leaving my favourite boxers (now ruined) and made my way back to the cab. It was dark by now and the smooth road had turned very Indian again, each pot hole and bump became agony, I had developed a fever and was shivering and thoroughly miserable. We found one more hotel but it was hugely expensive. They agreed to accept us, but it was way out of our budget. We moved on (after I took a trip to the men’s, realised too late that the paper problem had yet to be resolved and not in a state to care much, my day turned a lot worse) but I soon cracked. Things were bad, I lay up in the back of the cab, shivering, cramping and covered in my own shit, wishing I had a bed, my Mum, a shower, toilet paper, a hug; I realised I would pay any amount of money right now to get out of this bloody car and we headed to the hotel. Leaving the boys to sort out registering I had to run to the room again. I had nothing left in me so I had a shower and curled up in the foetal position on the bed, forgetting that normal people should clothe themselves after a shower. Leigh and Johno must have come in and covered me up, and I recall snippets of their conversation as they discussed what to do. They called my friend, Ellie, who was working as a doctor in the north of the country to get her advice. She said it sounded like I had dysentery, I needed re-hydrating quickly, prescribed some antibiotics and the wonder-drug paracetamol, but said I should be alright.

Hotel “Paradise”

That day and evening I must have gone to the toilet over 25 times, but within a few hours my fever had gone down and I started to actually sleep and the antibiotics had some sort of effect. I woke up, naked, wrapped in a towel with a large patch of green on the white bed sheet. I felt like utter crap, I was sweating, I hurt all over and I had shit the bed; not one of my best mornings admittedly, but I figured it was worse for Leigh, who had lost the rock-paper-scissors game with Johno the night before:

He had to share the bed with me.

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The Ministry of Bad Stomachs

2011-10-22T02:44:00.002+01:00

By Johno

Following the trials of Southern Iran and Pakistan the team were looking forward to entering India and relaxing a bit…

In the car we tend to read trashy Andy McNabb novels found at hostel book exchanges or old copies of The Economist brought out by visiting friends. They sound pretty dull but they actually provide a really good overview of all that’s going on around the world and allow us to regurgitate the opinion of someone clever than us when in current-affairs conversations thus making ourselves seem brighter than we really are.

“India-Pakistan: The World’s Most Dangerous Border?

The cover of one of these back-issues proclaimed, “India-Pakistan: The World’s Most Dangerous Border?”, and that was all I really knew about it as we passed through the relatively ordered Pakistan customs and into the chaos of the Indian side.

Indian border chaos

Once we had cleared the road of the piles of baggage to allow us to drive through the ornate iron gates we found ourselves racing to make it through before they finished for the day and the famous border ceremony started. By the time we had officially entered India in the early afternoon the surrounding roads were thronging with people making their way to the huge stands overlooking the border gates. Apparently, every day around 20,000 people from each side attend the elaborate ceremony to cheer loudly for their respective soldiers as they proudly march up to each other with all the sincerity of John Cleese in the Ministry of Silly Walks.

As we were ushered to prime position along with hundreds of other Westerners I felt a little uneasy. This was the first time in months I had been near so many other ‘travellers’ and quite frankly it felt a little weird not to be only one being stared at by all the locals.

“I don’t like being the only Whitey!” I said as Paul and Leigh rolled their eyes. Craig would have probably rolled his too but he had rushed down to the front and was running along trailing a large flag in a group of Indian schoolgirls, he looked completely in his element.

The spectators of both sides poured their hearts into the cheering and chanting and the atmosphere was incredible as the immaculate soldiers with bristling moustaches kicked up above each other’s heads and symbolically slammed the gates shut and lowered their flags. I couldn’t deny the electric mood created by the thousands vehement patriots even if the symbolism of the whole affair did seem a little bizarre.

Dehli Belly was the last thing on our mind as Paul and I hit the streets of the first city, Amritsar, to find some food. It wasn’t until we had drunk half of our glasses of pressed sugarcane that we noticed the guy we bought them off was mixing them with ice, no doubt not made with clean water, and washing the glasses in a large bucket thick with floating scum.

We shrugged, downed the sweet drinks and went off to find some street curry. “In for a penny, in a for pound” we told each other as we knocked back some glasses of Lassi – a type of yoghurt drink, from another guy who we were pretty sure didn’t have his GNVQ Level One in Food Hygiene.

As the minutes passed we started to regret the decision as we became hypersensitive to the rumblings of our stomachs and developed an unspoken code mainly consisting of, “Uh-oh!” followed by a serious look.

Golden Temple

“We are going to be staying in Shittsville, USA tonight!”we repeatedly joked.

Luckily we were wrong and the evening looking around famous Golden Temple and associated Sikh Museum went without any problems other than the shock we encountered at the brutal paintings of Sikhs refusing to deny their religion and their having their families and children slaughtered in front of them as punishment!

We left the sweltering heat of the plains and headed north into the mountains. Paul had previously visited an old hill station called Manali where British Raj had waited out the sweaty summers a hundred years before and now it seemed like a good idea to follow in their footsteps.

As soon as we started to climb into the lush jungle hillsides we could almost feel the mercury dropping and we were confident we had made the right decision... until the reoccurring specter of the cooling fan once more reared its ugly head and we were forced to stop for emergency repairs.

Once the radiator had cooled enough to touch we patched up the broken fan-bearing with some liquid metal and sat around waiting for it to set as we sweated, much to the suspicion and amazement of the hundreds of passing trucks. It seemed like this road was the only major route into the huge mountain area of Himachal Pradesh and once we did get going again we were instantly stuck behind the slow-moving juggernauts. We very quickly realised that the crazy blind-hill-and-corner overtaking moves were borne more of intense frustration than impatience.

Despite being on the road from 6am until 8pm we had covered a mere three hundred miles by the time it started to get dark and so once again we broke our vow, “Never to drive after dark once outside of Western Europe”: keeping up our record of breaking it in every single country so far. But after ten minutes of negotiating the pitch black roads littered with people, cows and other debris and punctuated with speeding drivers with dazzling full-beams on our side of the road we all agreed to stop at the first hotel we saw. We prised our fingers from the edges of the seats and rested our weary heads, ready to catch up the distance the following morning.

We actually ended up staying in a little village called Vashisht, next to Manali that proved very very chilled out and was mainly populated with aging hippies and frazzled out babas wandering round in flowing clothes and enjoying the natural hot springs.

The beautiful setting was augmented by the soothing chanting from the nearby temple that seemed to wake me up every morning although it was also slightly ruined by the hippy equivalent of chavs playing Scooter out loud on their mobile phones on the bus: a group of hippies that would gather on a nearby balcony and “jam” whilst singing deep and insightful lyrics mainly consisting of the phrase, “We feel… so good!” over and over again.

(Paul: my favorite was the crusty who sang an improvised song to a child about her mother and their love, only for the child to yawn theatrically, tell her ‘beloved’ mother that she was bored and proceed to cover her ears with her hands.)

Travelling tends to soften social rules regarding what it’s okay to talk about in public and since we had left England I had learned that the list of things that make Leigh have a, “bad stomach” is longer than the Daily Mail’s list of things that give you cancer and included amongst other things, cucumber, onion, beer, vodka, cha-cha, malaria medication, lassi, curry and kebabs.

Leigh's spider was much bigger than this and positioned itself between him and the door leaving him stuck on the toilet... in a powercut.

Now something else has added itself to the list and poor Leigh spent what was supposed to be a week of chilling out and recharging our batteries after the stressful Southern Iran and Pakistan legs getting better acquainted with his bathroom and the huge spider that terrorized him in there. Meanwhile Paul and I fixed the fan up,explored the local area and met up with his old school friend, Ellie who was working as a Doctor in Manali town.

This is why the locals are so chill

One day I went for a long walk through the beautiful pine forest next to the raging river that stemmed from the Himalayas and after eventually walking to an area that wasn’t strewn with rubbish sat down and started to read my book. However, you’re never alone in India and I was quickly joined by a charming young man who earnestly questions me about my past and seemed to actually want a real conversation. That was until the usual question I was asked by Manali locals; either I have one of those faces or they just ask every single tourist, “So you want to buy some Manali cream?”

Luckily even the drug dealers in Manali are chill and we actually did have a decent chat before he wandered off without making a sale.

But they don't like to use litter bins

The newly fixed fan and Leigh’s stomach, aided by masses of Immodium, both managed to hold up for the descent back onto the scorching plains and as the night fell we found ourselves entering the outskirts of Delhi. Although we were unsuccessful in our hunt for a cheap hotel we did somehow manage to find ourselves chatting to a local man who said his friend could put us up for then night.

Uprgade!

As we followed a strange scooter into the darkness for the second time on the trip I had visions of an Indian palace far away from the huge mosquito breeding ground that passed for a canal next to us. In reality things weren’t so luxurious and we found ourselves in the unusually decorated house of a fashion designer. After directly asking whether we had any of the infamous Manali Cream he looked disappointed and set about explaining his career highlights which included apparently designing outfits for Michael Jackson and Bryan Adams as well as Armani, Versace and numerous outfits for Bollywood’s brightest and best (none of whom we had heard of… yet).

Dehli Fort

We really appreciated the offer of the floor to sleep on when we were stuck in the middle of the strange city but the lack of doors or windows meant that none of us got more than a few minute’s sleep at a time as the bugs feasted on our pink bodies. We left grumpy and tired and only had a whistlestop tour of Dehli before deciding to continue down to the tourist haven that is Agra.

The Taj Mahal, one of the most famous landmarks in the world, left us feeling a little underwhelmed, especially after the beauty of Iran and we spent more time grumbling that foreigners had to pay and entrance fee forty times greater than the locals did than admiring the epic mausoleum.

Taj Mahal

That we were all so jaded by such an amazing sight showed us how tiring driving through India had been; we had only just had a break up in Manali and now we almost immediately felt like we needed another one. As we fought back to the car through the hordes of hawkers one at least brought a smile to my face: “Sir! You buy buy fridge magnet? Twenty Rupees!”

“I don’t have a fridge”

“It’s okay, you can buy fridge here too!”

Trying to get closer for a photograph...

We spent the evening in a nice little guesthouse where the porter/chef cooked us a great curry and seemed blown away that we actually spoke to him normally and treated him like a human being. I don’t know if he was just used to being spoken to like crap by other guests but he just could not stop smiling and trying to help us out, he even went away and cooked us some pancakes on the sly then sneaked them into our room under the nose of his boss.

The next morning we had planned to drive south to Mumbai and the coast after a quick look around the city’s second famous landmark, Agra Fort. But first we had to find it...

We had largely given up on the GPS and maps and resorted to asking people for directions and the first Tuk Tuk driver we pulled up next to looked like a knowledgeable fellow.

“Agra Fort?” Paul asked him hopefully and slowly.

The man looked thoughtful and slowly rubbed his beard whilst looking in the middle-distance, “Hmmm... Agros Port?” he repeated slowly, seemingly unaware that we were over a thousand kilometres from the sea, “No, I don’t know”

Agros Port

We found it ourselves later in the morning, the man had been standing a few hundred metres from it, and after a quick stroll around were back on the road south to Mumbai where certain Bollywood fame awaited us.

Coming next time: Will Paul finally emigrate to Shittsville, USA? Stay tuned!

Trip Stats!

Days on the road: 158

Tanks of fuel used: Ninety-one

Miles covered: 17,097

Countries visited: Thirty-two

Antibiotics taken: Too many

Posted via email from It's on the Meter

Bike Bombs, Massages, and 'the' Muslim Gym, our last leg of Pakistan.

2011-10-17T09:13:00.001+01:00

By Leigh

Meeting Johno and Craig in the hotel room was a huge relief; the Iran/Pakistan visa problems that had been dogging the whole expedition since we had left in February and were finally resolved. We wouldn’t have to worry about the paperwork for the next country until China and its bureaucratic nightmare. Within a few minutes a detective from the local station arrived at our hotel introducing himself followed by the same words we had come to expect, that we would need a police escort for the next part of our journey through Pakistan. Paul and myself were new to this experience but Johno and Craig had endured this for the past week and were getting sick of the delays caused by escorts. However, all agreed that we should not ditch and run otherwise this could have resulted in the same outcome that the Swiss couple who were kidnapped in the previous week (the Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility).

Overload!

We slept early that night as the heat and humidity was already starting to drain us, the tiny fan was providing life support instead of comfort to the room, with frequent and usually scheduled power blackouts across Pakistan this can become a problem.

Awaking the next morning we packed Hannah and I had a look at the damage that had been caused by the engine fan eating the radiator, however I did not do what I usually do and mess around with it because Sukkur was still a dangerous area and I didn’t want to strand us when the car still seemed to be working. As usual the police were late so we grabbed some breakfast and filled up with diesel. Still no police, waited a bit longer, still no police. Thirty minutes after they had supposed to arrive we had enough and hit the highway without them, we decided were now in a different province in Pakistan to the kidnappings and knew that it was nonstop to Multan. (The Red Cross security advisement downgraded the area from Extreme to Highly Dangerous so, relatively speaking, all was fine!)

Backseat Driver...

The drive was great if not still hot, observing some brilliantly designed trucks with their decoration (if you have been to India and seen their trucks, times it by ten and you will get Pakistani truckers), arriving in Multan just before dark. What we didn’t realize however is that no hotels within our price range accept foreigners in Multan, this is because the security situation here was worse than the previous city and only the expensive hotels could afford the armed guards. Pulling up on the high street we were sticking out like the biggest sore thumb you have ever seen, our attempts to cover up our sponsor stickers didn’t alter the fact we were driving round in a black cab (something we neglected to think about whilst preparing Hannah in Iran).

The growing crowd of people around our car were harmless and just curious, we began to be increasingly uneasy about our position “all it takes is for one person out of this crowd to phone his mate” I said. Then a young teenager pulled up on his motorbike “no attention, no tension” looking amazed at the car but worried for our safety we realized that people around us were becoming uneasy about our presence and we knew this was the time to leave.

We followed ‘Notension’ guy around on his motorbike as he said he took us to a historical building in the city, they were the only fluent English speaking Pakistani family for miles. They translated to ‘Notension’ guy what we were doing and that we needed a hotel as they did not have the room to keep us here for the night. He said he knew where a hotel was that we could stay at (our earlier attempts had failed and it was now getting dark). Our first arrival was at a house where he dropped his bag of ice, that was now a bag of water and jumped back on his bike , to take us on his tour of friends in Multan.

Our third stop was at a gym aptly named “Muslim Gym” where he wanted us to come and meet his friends and work out. Notension guy was now attracting a lot of attention, not what you want in Pakistan. Starting to get frustrated at this supposed hotel, we had to chill down our passenger, Ozzie Craig, who was becoming increasingly (characteristically) angry, as we all were. Our new friend, however, was loving every second of this adventure. Leaving his bike at the Muslim Gym he got in the back of the taxi with us, waving out of the window at his mates, taking pictures and ringing his entire phonebook. We, however, were tired and ready to crash for the night.

The next venture for our hotel took us down a small back alley in the night time where we found out there was a height restriction so had to reverse Hannah 200 meters back, with multiple cars and motorbikes behind us trying to get through. Tempers were now running high and reversing into the only side street we could find the shouting began. Demanding that ‘Notension’ not show us off to his friends anymore and he needs to take us to the hotel now, he got the hint.

Hotel groupies, and 'Notension' guy hugging Craig

Arriving at his suggested hotel it was well and truly dark, we found out quickly that he knew the hotel owner but didn’t know that he too didn’t have armed guards for foreigners. We had had it, being traipsed around an extremely dangerous city by a guy who wanted to show us off to his mates and his hotel couldn’t even take us. Whilst the rest of the team were raging in the taxi Paul got out and pleaded with the hotel owner that we could hide the car and no one would have known that we were ever here.

After some debating he agreed, hiding the car in his garage we started to calm down and we could finally sleep, the hotel owner did want to phone the police to let them know that we were here and if it was OK, he also said his friend from the US was here and if would want to chat, I volunteered and had supper whilst being told that two weeks ago there was a massive motorbike bomb 40 meters from where our hotel was and this is why it is so hard for the city have any foreigners at the moment. I also discovered that Pakistanis like their conspiracy theories “Bin Laden isn’t dead the US just want to tell everyone that” (the US timed their raid on Bin Laden just before we entered Pakistan, thanks for that), and many more.

Walls Icecream to chill my sweaty beard.

Finally getting to bed we said goodbye to No tension guy who then said that he would wake us up at 7am and sure enough he did even after the repeated protests of the group that were getting up at 9am. We also woke up to a floor 3 inches full of water from the water cooler outside; soaking all of our clothes and bags in filthy effluent.

Breakfast was enjoyable; watching Johno being massaged by no tension guy walking on his back in the front garden, not a sight you really want to witness first thing in the morning.

Lahore Fort, surprisingly in Lahore.

Our next and final stop in Pakistan was Lahore, completely different to the rest of the Pakistan we experienced, greenery, civilized roads and amazing people. Very similar to Delhi you can still see many of the colonial buildings, and mannerisms of the people left over from the British Empire.

Admiring the view.

We were invited to witness a Muslim Sufi festival and taken there in the evening, thousands of people were in the crowd, sitting at the back you couldn’t help but smile at the energetic atmosphere of the crowd. Suddenly we were pushed to the front of the stage along with two Americans and told we were sitting with on stage with the higher up’s.

Us at the back of the stage before we got dragged up.

Foreign office advice warns of visiting any crowded areas, this is relatively hard when visiting mosques, bazaars or just wondering down a busy street. But when you are sitting on a stage, in Pakistan, in front of a crowd of people which had suffered a bomb attack a few days before; you kind of ask yourself “what the hell am I doing here?”.

It's on the Meter, Live! on Stage.

This thought soon abated as the singers performed on stage whilst money was showered above their heads, people dancing and watching the guy obviously combining religion and drugs busting moves out at the front of the stage.

Meeting celebrities?!

The night ended well with me losing my shoes to a fortunate Pakistani, so stealing Paul’s as a replacement to walk home at 2am, getting lost, hitting security checkpoints along the way and having an fascinating conversation with the Texan about how he could discuss politics in a place who voted in George Bush Jnr. and don’t believe in evolution.

This guy really loves religion!

The next morning we packed up and headed for the border, once we crossed it we would have completed the most dangerous part of our expedition; all survived (although extremely exhausted, sweating like dogs from our beards) and would be hitting India for a week’s break to recover.

Waga Pakistan/India land border.

Filling our departure forms, covered in flies and being pestered by the guard to change money, we were actually disappointed that we could not spend more time in Pakistan to experience the people and their culture more, it is right that parts of Pakistan we drove through were dangerous, but this involves a tiny minority of a country with 177 million people and we had an amazing adventure there.

Trip Stats:

17,000 Miles.

143 Days.

31 Countries.

86 Tanks of Diesel.

1 Awkward back massage.

Posted via email from It's on the Meter

Johno's Eulogy

2011-09-28T17:34:00.001+01:00

Whilst Johno was battling border guards, the last blog from Paul ended as he was being deported from Dubai…

I was sat alone in my holding cell, with nothing but 400 bribery cigarettes for company, which is of little comfort to a non smoker. I had to wait five hours until my deportation flight back to Dubai, my phone had no credit on it and if Johno couldn’t take the taxi through the border, the whole expedition was in jeopardy. I started doing the maths of us driving back, London to… London, via Iran. Would it be enough mileage to break the world record? Possibly, but how could I look anyone in the eye afterwards, we would be failures forever more. Those idiots who went for a road trip around Europe in a black cab with a winch on the front. Maybe we could drive to Cape Town? I didn’t fancy our chances in Somalia.

Things looked bleak. In fact, things were bleak.

The view over Dubai from the 43rd floor

My flight came into Dubai’s ‘terrorist’ terminal two, known so because it’s the jumping off point for such salubrious places as Kabul and Mogadishu and I managed to get a message to Leigh about picking me up.

‘Sorry mate, we’re in the cinema watching Transformers 3. It’s kick ass, meet us here at the Emirates Mall, it won’t finish for another two hours’

I was furious, hopping mad. One of the worst days of my life, Leigh couldn’t even be bothered to pick me up and it was about then that I realised that I had left the bribe cigarettes in my cell as well. And I wanted to see that film! It’s not that I minded losing the cigarettes, they were for bribing Iranian and Pakistani guards with so pretty pointless now, but it meant that the same people who deported me are now enjoying real Marlboro lights (impossible to get in Iran). I hope they gave them a really nagging cough that takes them a couple of weeks to shake!

I spoke to the Emirate behind the help desk to enquire about buses.

“Bus? Why don’t you take a taxi?”

“Well I just spent $200 to be deported from Iran and now have ten bucks and 4 Dirhams to my name”

“um… we don’t have buses around here. ”

They did. In fact there was a bus stop right outside the terminal, in full view of his desk. It did, however, only take you to the parts of town where the Pakistani workers shipped in as cheap labour lived and not the glitzy mall where Leigh was enjoying watching Shia Lebouf fight big machines with an exceptionally beautiful girl thrown in for good measure. In 3D.

Eventually I found a taxi that would take me to the metro for $10 leaving me the 4 Dirhams for the ticket. I found the stop marked ‘mall’, found the cinema and waited. And waited, and waited. I got a text asking where I was, was it the Mall of the Emirates?

No. Apparently I was in the Dubai Mall on the wrong side of town and that, yes there are lots of large malls in Dubai with Cinemas. Who’d have thought?

This day couldn’t get any worse.

Not a bad pad...

Eventually Leigh and I found our way to the place where we would be staying. Chris is an old friend of my mum’s, a geologist working out in Dubai and all round hero. He had a huge apartment on the 43^rd floor of the Radisson hotel, overlooking Dubai in all its gaudy finest. It had a pool on the roof, a gym and even a sauna (a pointless extravagance in the Dubai summer, but that didn’t stop me from using it…). An expert and passionate chef, Chris housed and fed and watered us in a manner that one could easily become accustomed too; especially after camel stew in the desert and my terrible camp cooking.

Johno was going to try and take the car across the border. The problem lay in the fact that it is registered in my name. The last few blogs have outlined his adventures in detail, none of which we knew about. We sat by the computer for days waiting for some scrap of news, unable to leave in case something vital happened. Surfing Google for any info about Pakistan, online newspapers and blogs, as well as checking constantly for texts or emails.

Then we saw it on a news feed

“two western tourists kidnapped from their car in Baluchistan”

No more details were known. There probably was no more than a small handful of tourists in that part of the world at once (it’s not one of the regular routes served by Thomsons). It had to be them.

This was it. The trip was finished and I’d have to start writing a eulogy for Johno

“Johno Ellison. An all-round good bloke, A traveller, a writer, the master of fancy dress with an unhealthy love for Bonnie Tyler and wearing Daisy Duke, girls denim shorts…”

And then there would be the paperwork? All we knew about Craig was that he came from a made up sounding place called ‘Waga Waga”.

We kept pressing refresh for an hour and then a new story came up

“Two Swiss tourists kidnapped in Baluchistan”

It wasn’t Johno and Craig, thank god. But it’s quite hard to be too overjoyed when you know of the misfortunes of that unfortunate couple. They are still in captivity, but last we heard their release is being negotiated and we wish them the best of luck.

We finally got word from Johno, they had made it to Quetta safely and we would meet them in a hotel in Sukkur, a few hundred miles north of Karachi. Very soon, Leigh and I found ourselves on an Emirates flight, flirting with stewardesses to get free beer. They just seemed relieved to have somebody on the flight who could speak English, and no, there is no alcohol served on flights to Pakistan. The only other westerner was an overweight, balding American, whose bumbag clenched his ‘Bagram Airfield’ T-shirt to his ample midriff. We wondered what his story was, he could be a lethal killer, specialising in ‘the fat white man in Taliban country’, off to spy with the 3000 other CIA based around Quetta… or he could just work in the Burger King or Subway on the base. Either way, his obnoxious behaviour endeared us to the stewardesses further. But they still didn’t serve us beer.

Pakistan

80 people were killed the day we arrive in Karachi in riots and violence. We weren’t hanging around and got in a taxi and went straight to the bus station. The whole city was tense, but fortunately we didn’t see anything actually happen. Driving along the main highway out of the city, a man who was squatting in the central reservation taking care of business in full view of everyone; ‘Welcome to Pakistan’, we quipped. We went through two metal detectors and a full body search for weapons and bombs before getting on the coach. This was not very reassuring.

After 20 hours of travelling, we found the hotel with a London taxi parked outside. We bundled into the cramped room where two very sweaty men were waiting, spreading themselves wide so to catch the feint breeze emitted by the far. They both looked like they had acquired a few gray hairs and lines in their skin and a healthy tan (of dirt), but it was good to be back together.

Craig still hadn’t changed his T-shirt.

Posted via email from It's on the Meter

If you've been kidnapped the World Record is f**ked" and other tales of concerned friends

2011-09-21T18:07:00.001+01:00

By Johno

Apologies for spelling mistakes etc - this was written after a a very long stint without sleep

[Now only two, Craig and Johno were left waiting to cross the Iran-Pakistan border after two days of trying...]

We were woken at 6am by the blazing sun and the usual ear-splitting call to prayer from the mosque less than a hundred metres away.

Today was the day that we would finally make it to the border and see whether we would be able to cross with the car passport and registration documents that bore neither of our names. At 7am the police escort came to pick us up from the completely unsecure compound where every Western overlander stayed. Soon we were stuck at the final Vehicle Checkpoint before the border with our blood slowly boiling as we began the now familar process of waiting and waiting.

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Some of the guards

Luckily a few nicely-spoken words with the most important-looking guard did the trick and soon a scruffy young uniform was jumping in the back seat and urging us to the fabled border with a, "Yala! Yala!"

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His haste to get back to important duties of throwing stones at Taliban prisoners and polishing his mirrored aviators meant that he pushed us through the sea of people in the border post buildings. The documents were signed and stamped like a dream and within less than an hour we were free of the ordered chaos of the Iranian side and into the dusty bustling charm of Pakistan.

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Pakistani trucks

The immigration official spoke a charmingly quaint English, "HellohowareyouIamfinethankyouforasking!" and stared at my Indian visa for what seemed like an age before stamping me through into the promised land.

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Personal Customs consisted of two plastic garden chairs outside under a palm-leaf lean-to and the large guards with larger moustaches insisted Craig and I took their chairs whilst they helped us with every aspect of the form. After the hassles of leaving Iran and the unhelpfulness of her guards I wanted to clap every Pakistani official on the back and vigoursly congratulate him but instead we settled for hearty handshakes and beaming smiles.

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The car customs were in the town of Taftan itself and inside a huge noisy hall another shambolic official pulled down a suitcase sized book from a huge stack, opened it in a cloud of dust and set about copying down all the car details. By mid-morning all we had left to do was change some money, find some fuel and try to find the German biker Michael who had crossed the previous morning.

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Our first armed escort was a meek young policeman and the money changer, obviously one of his friends, at the bazaar offered us a rate of 80 rupees. This did not please Craig who had read online that the rate was 85, although I did try to point out that this was the official rate, not the rate offered to two haggard Westerners in a two-horse border town in the middle of the Pakistani desert.

"Take us to the bank, we'll change money at the bank!" Craig demanded.

"Bank no change money".

"Take us to the bank!" he roared!

The bank flatly told us that they, 'no change money' and we traipsed back to the first guy.

"The rate is 80" he told us, without the hint of a smirk.

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With our tank topped with diesel and no sign of the German we wearily set off into the desert to parallel the Afghanistan border to the regional capital and danger hotspot of Quetta.

After a short while we stopped at the first of many guard posts, most sporting the old British Regiment names, and filled our names and details down in another large book. We were immensely relived to see that Michael the German had passed through the same post on his bike very early that morning and we spent the afternoon trying to catch up with his signature whilst we swapped various gnarly armed escorts.

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The ride went very well with the vast area of nothingness cut by a smooth road and blessing us with reasonable temparutres and by the time we arrived at the town of Dalbandin for our first night's stop we were starting to wonder what the fuss was about.

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We soon found out as I logged onto the Internet for the first time in days to find increasingly desperate messages from Paul and Leigh saying they had heard reports of a pair of Europeans that had been kidnapped in the region earlier that week and asking us to get in touch as soon as possible.

"If you've been kidnapped the world record is f**ked!"

[[posterous-content:pid___7]]

I noted their concern and began penning a suitable reply as I chatted to the hotel owner whose home computer I had hijacked.

"Oh yes, the Swiss couple," he nodded, "they were here only last week". He went on to show mephotos of him and the (still) missing couple from a few days before.

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Although it hadn't felt too hot in a speeding car the prison-like hotel room felt just like an oven. When the owner had told me the power went off the night at 10pm my heart had sank and I lay on the sweat-drenched bed watching the clock edge towards the horrible moment when I knew the ceiling fan would stop and the temperature in the room would skyrocket.

Sure enough, when it happened things became way too hot to think about sleep; even with the windows and doors fully open I was still dripping sweat and worst of all I had no water.

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Following a slight disagreeable over the restaurant bill we had been left feeling like we couldn't visit the local shop and the tap water was a definite no-no. Eventually I couldn't take the thirst anymore and went stumbling around the pitch black night in my boxer shorts searching for some water. I ended up finding an empty bottle in a bin and filling it with tap water then chucking in some purification tablets that I had luckily packed all those months ago. This was repeated about four times throughout the night.

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Sure enough, when it happened things became way too hot to think about sleep; even with the windows and doors fully open I was still dripping sweat and worst of all I had no water.

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An truck full of armed soliders escorted us out of the city the next morning; hopefully the last day that we would be deemed to require armed protection. We had arranged to meet Paul and Leigh at a hotel in a town called Sukhur that night. They had flown into the southern city of Karachi earlier that day and I had all fingers and toes crossed that the car would make as we followed a spectacular railway line that skirted the road with bridges from the 1800s named things like, "Mary Jane" and "Windy Corner".

[[posterous-content:pid___14]]

Of course, the hotel we had planned to meet in that night was now ridiculosuly expensive so I set out to find a cheaper alternative in the resonable-sized city. After going into five places and being told, "No Vaccancies!" I was starting to lose hope.

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"If it because we're white?!" I demanded eventually, feeling a little like Ali G.

"Er... well, yes" someone eventually admitted.

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Finally, after pleading and explaining our situation for hours Craig and I found a cheap hotel room about 10pm and headed out for dinner, forcibly accompanied to by some other guests "for safety".

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We had left a note with the first hotel explaining where we now were and were just wondering whether it had worked when the door crashed open and we were greeted by some familar wit. "Alright w**kers!"

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It was good to be reunited.

Posted via email from It's on the Meter

"I just wanna go to the border!"

2011-09-16T16:59:00.001+01:00

By Johno

*Warning: Contains strong language *

[The previous blog saw the car falling apart near the Afghanistan border and the team failing to find a mechanic who could fix it in the dodgy border town of Mirajaveh.]

I slept surprisingly well until I was woken by the ear-splitting Call to Prayer from the adjacent mosque at 6am. Michael the German had decided to cross the border today whilst Craig and I would return to the city to try to get Hannah fixed. We arranged to try to meet up on the less-restrictive Pakistani side just before the bike-riding police escort turned up at the hotel and took him off on his own. This seemed to be one of the first sensible things they had done; we were both going in opposite directions so it made sense for us to wait for another escort... or so we thought.

Half an hour later the escort returned, picked us up and took us to the first checkpoint where Michael was still waiting and looking like his internal temperature was already nearing boiling point.

The journey back to the city was an exact rerun of the previous day’s bullshit but in reverse and it was mid-morning before we reached the dreaded six-hour-wait checkpoint and tried to explain that we needed to go to a mechanic and then back to the border. As before, we were left waiting around, passport-less and with no information at all.

As we wanted to get the fan fixed, back to the border and over into Pakistan in one day we couldn’t afford to mess around and waste any time so when the guards weren’t paying too much attention I took the broken fan and set off walking down the street.

Although the taxi body is British the engine is a fairly common Nissan model from Japan and so luckily the first mechanic I showed it to knew exactly what type of engine it was from and wrote me down an address of one of his friends who should be able to help us. He had just finished scribbling when the fuming guards appeared and frog-marched me back to the station.

Armed with the address and with lots of shouting from Craig we eventually got an escort to agree to take us to the mechanic. But whilst Craig was loudly negotiating with the boss, the young, but armed, recruits on the front desk were taking up a major issue with me.
“Koola! Koola!” they kept asking, each time more loudly and with less patience. From their gestures it quickly became apparent that they knew we, or more accurately Craig, had stolen their helmet the previous day and they wanted it back.

I played dumb as they got angrier and angrier and they even went out on the street, grabbed a passerby , put him in handcuffs and paraded him in shouting about the, “Koola!”, evidently trying to say that if I didn’t give it back I would be arrested. Luckily Craig had stashed it in the roofbox so their search of the car turned up nothing and I eventually persuaded them, with some Oscar-worthy angry shouting, that I didn’t know where the bloody thing was and that the German must have taken it.
It now serves as a rubbish bin in the back of the taxi.

The mechanics fixed the fan just after lunchtime for the bargain price of $30 meaning that it looked like we might actually make the border... if we could avoid the problems of yesterday. All we needed was to top up the fuel we had used going to the border and back...

When we stopped at the fuel station in the brewing dust storm I genuinely thought the policeman was going to run over, drag me out of the car and beat me down.

Despite repeatedly telling them that we needed Gazolé they had turned down the busy road back towards the police station. As we were following right behind I had to take the split –second decision whether to follow them to certain-faff or whether to cross the busy intersection, ditch the armed escort and go back to the petrol station then deal with the consequences afterwards.

I caught the look on the driver’s face as they realised we had totally ignored them and carried on and in any other situation it would have been hilarious. But that now we were in a notorious border city essentially running away from the armed police it was rather scary.

A few minutes later, maybe halfway to the fuel, the police car screeched up at the side of us with sirens blaring. The driver looked like he was about to explode and just his face scared me into following him to the next junction where he started to turn back towards the station again.

So once again, I was faced with the same situation and once again I ignored the police and headed towards the fuel. By the time they caught up with us we were almost there but the livid gesturings of the two officers tightened my stomach and bought me out in an immediate sweat. These guys were seriously angry. I was definitely for it.

Fortunately, very fortunately, for me as soon as we got to station they saw someone they knew and walked over, embraced and started chatting. When they turned their attention back to us they were only mildly annoyed and soon we had secured some diesel with our remaining US dollars and were ready to give the border another go. Or we would be if Craig hadn’t locked the keys in the car leaving us stranded in what was now becoming a sandstorm with the already irate escorts.

Luckily whichever Midlander built our taxi [super-secret break in advice removed] didn’t do a very good job and so by early afternoon we were all fixed, full of fuel and ready to brave the escort pass-it-on charade again. After much more shouting and pleading we got the current escort to take us around the ring road and quickly arrange the guard for the next section. We now had 40km to do in 55 minutes; things would be tight but there was a small chance we might actually cross after two days of trying.

On the way to Bam Craig and I had spent the night in a little tourist town and headed out to dinner after finding a hotel. As we were walking up the street a local man had accosted us, “Where are you from? What is your impression of my country? Do you want to have dinner with me?”
Not knowing the town, we agreed to go for dinner, jumped in the guy’s car and soon found ourselves at a Home Appliances shop.
“I just have to work for a few more hours then we will go for dinner,” he said beaming, “if you are hungry now I can go get you some biscuits or something?”
We thanked him and explained that we were very hungry after driving all day and said our goodbyes and went to find our own food.

As we were finished up our roasted chicken takeaway he suddenly appeared, “Come and meet my family!”
We declined, telling him we were tired from the drive and once again saying goodbye.

When we arrived back at the hotel we were amazed to find our new buddy sitting in the lobby waiting with an inane grin covering his face. Especially since we had never even told him where we were staying, “What time are you leaving tomorrow?”
Craig was reaching the end of his tether, “Look mate, we’re leaving early, we don’t need your help. Thank you very much but go away!”.
He said it better and much more directly than I ever could have and the stalker quickly left the hotel, although the idiotic grin never left his face.

The next morning we were woken very early by a rapping on the door. A sleepy Craig opened the door to our pushy friend, “What do you want to do...”
“Look mate! Piss orf! We told you already we don’t want your help! GO AWAY!” and with that he slammed the door in his face and exhaled vocally.

This had given me a flash of Craig’s temper but the last two days had showcased it on full-blown mentalist mode. Granted, the hassle we had been through with little water, no food and intense heat, would have stretched the patience of a saint but Craig had repeatedly been getting right into the faces of the recruits and bawling his head off. Craig is a big guy and I was genuinely amazed that he hadn’t intimated some of the young, skinny AK-47 wielding guards into some kind of action. I was just waiting for the moment that he went too far and a gaggle of 18 year olds would launch themselves onto him and start beating him with their rifle butts.

Now we were back at the final checkpoint with the border and escape from our escort hell almost within grasp. The problem was that we had gathered the border closed at 5pm and it was now 4.51pm, if we were going to make it we needed to leave this instant.

Of course, that never happened and this finally pushed Craig over the edge. He unleashed a stream of high-pitched choice insults at the people manning the checkpoint screaming that they were, “Facking cants!” and demanding that they, “Let us out of this facking sheethole!”
As I tried to reason that there was no way we would make the crossing tonight his attention was turned to the poor guy sitting in the back seat clutching his rifle but looking like he would be more comfortable in a school uniform. Craig turned round in his seat and lunged towards the “facking cant” shrieking that he was going to kill him. I will never know how he didn’t get a rifle-butt to the face.

[This whole incident happened to be caught on video... see it here, it’s better than I could ever describe it]

That evening we found ourselves once again in the hotel car park trying to make something to eat from the leftover dried food in the cab and Craig sat shaking his head in shame, “I can’t believe how much I lost my temper today”

The following morning, all being well, we would attempt to cross the border after two days of trying. After all we had been through there was still a chance we wouldn’t be able to cross as the car documents were all officially in Paul’s name. If we were turned away and had to rerun the gauntlet of police I don’t think even my normally over-serene temper would be able to hold up.

Trip Stats:

Days on the road: 137
Miles covered: 16,057
Meter reading: ?
Tanks of fuel used: 83
Tempers lost: Many

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Police chases in the Wild Wild East (...of Iran)

2011-09-13T06:24:00.001+01:00

By Johno

[The previous blog saw Paul and Leigh stuck in Dubai leaving Johno to drive the car across Baluchistan with two new companions...]

Baluchistan is name given to the large expanse of barren desert that straddles the Pakistan-Iran border and is so notorious for drug-smuggling, banditry and kidnappings that all foreigners must be accompanied by compulsory armed escorts. The desolate area was used by Pakistan for testing nuclear weapons less than fifteen years ago and Baluch separatists and bandits have carried out a spate of kidnappings of Western tourists over the last five years.

Despite this the first few hours of our morning drive were much the same as rest of Southern Iran; smooth roads flanked by lots of sand and very, very hot. We encountered the first escorts a few hours outside of the city of Zahedan and reluctantly gave our passports over to the rag-tag bunch of men wrapped up in Lawrence of Arabia-type scarves and sporting AK47s with friendly but bored grins. We had been pre-warned by other overlanders that the Iranian escorts carried your passports for the duration of their escort but it was an extremely uncomfortable to see our whole identity ride off in a cloud of dust and a white pickup truck.

Every few miles, once we had caught up with the passport-wielding guards who had invariably raced far ahead in their 4x4s, we were passed over to the next group of soldiers as we desperately tried to keep our passports in sight. Each new escort seemed to bring with it more firepower, first the AKs, then American M60s then, as we got to the city, truck-mounted machineguns.

On the road

The city was where our frustrations began. Instead of going around the bypass and straight to the border a further 50km ahead the escort took us into bustling city and to a local police station. The next six hours were a nightmare of increasing tempers and incompetent police; each escort took us a few kilometres before we ended up sitting outside the next police station whilst they attempted to organise another ‘escort’ for us to essentially take us around the corner. What was most frustrating was that the escorts had now gone from heavily armed soldiers to a single unarmed skinny teenage police recruit sitting in the back seat of the car clutching our passports. Even worse, we were now sitting outside the police stations for hours on end, making ourselves much much larger targets than if we had just zoomed through to the border.

Before we had left on the trip we had debated a load of different ideas including running the car on vegetable oil and even using a fuel cell in an attempt to reduce the carbon emissions from the 7000 litres of fuel we estimated we would use. In the end all of these were discounted as logistically impossible and we settled that diesel was the most sensible choice, reasoning that, “Diesel is everywhere because all the trucks use it” and, "Where the hell are we going to find 40 litres of chip fat in the middle of the desert?"

In Iran, things weren’t so easy in practice; most fuel stations didn’t carry diesel and in those that did a fuel card was needed to purchase it. However, along with road tax and insurance, we hadn’t been given the opportunity to get one meaning that we were reduced to sweet-talking local truck drivers into lending us theirs to fill up our relatively small tank. The upside was that when we did manage to find diesel, it sold for the bargain price of 10p a litre.

Now, halfway through the city, I spotted a fuel station and told the young man in uniform in the back that we needed to stop and get Diesel or in Persian, “Gazolé!”. Apparently diesel was impossible to come across once over the border so I wanted to fill everything up before we entered the nothingness of the Baluchistan desert.
“No gazolé!” he insisted, motioning forward “straight! Straight!”

I reluctantly followed his directions, figuring that he knew a better fuel stop up ahead but was annoyed to find as we drove around the corner that we were pulling up to yet another police station and he jumped out with our passports in hand.
“Hey!” I shouted, “What about the gazolé?”
“Yes, yes. After lunch” he called back, disappearing through the guardroom into the station buildings.
“Wha, wait...” we started, exasperated, but he had already disappeared with our precious passports.

We tried in vain to talk to the young policemen manning the front desk but in reality they were bored, angry young men, probably forced into a role they didn’t want and who knew less about what was going on than we did. This translated into them winding us up for their own amusement by constantly mockingly telling us to wait a further five minutes and telling us that we could go after lunch. Understandably this didn’t go down with us too well and tempers frayed as we watched the clock ticking towards 5pm, the time we had been told the border shut for the night.

This is my pissed off face

After waiting around for hours with no sign of movement I finally decided enough was enough and that I needed to take matters into my own hands.
“Wait here with the passports,” I told Craig, “I’m going to get fuel”
And so, before the recruits could stop me I jumped in the car and set off unescorted to find the earlier petrol station.
I was soon flanked by an older, more smartly dressed police officer on a motorbike, furiously trying to catch my eye and motioning for me to turn around but after ignoring my better judgement and disregarding the Iranian police chief we arrived at the fuel station.

Of course, they had no gazolé.

I had seen another station, further up the road and after pleading with the officer on the forecourt and telling him it was only 2km away he reluctantly agreed to follow me.
6km later, after 4km of more angry signals to turn around, we got to the petrol station that evidently did have diesel, as shown by the huge line of trucks queued up.

After pushing in at the front, I encountered the next problem: as I was standing there, trying to negotiate the illegal use of a fuel card right next to a senior policeman I obviously wasn’t having much luck. But in the end the policeman actually ending up negotiating a deal with a huge truck driver, although he was asking for triple the normal price, an outrageous 30p a litre!
I lied that I only had 80,000 Rials left; nowhere near the amount they were asking and to my surprise the policeman took out his wallet and forced his own money into my hands, allowing us to make the deal and top up.

When we arrived back at the immensely relived Craig and Michael we all assumed that the chief would take us immediately on to the next checkpoint but my indiscretion was rewarded with another hour’s wait. When we finally left we were fuming when we found out the next stop was just around the corner and to learn that we needed to wait here, in full view of all the city traffic, until another escort could hitchhike from the next station, 40km away.

This was all almost too much for Craig who was shouting in pure rage at the rifle-wielding men demanding that they to get us an escort immediately. Imagine his annoyance then, when nearly an hour later the young man in a shoddy uniform and with no weapon climbed out of a truck, took our passports from his colleague and impatiently motioned for us to leave.

Now it really was a race for the border, we had about an hour to do about 40km, not an easy feat considering the heat, the hills and Hannah’s ailing engine, plus the numerous escort changes. So it was perhaps almost inevitable that my gunning of the car would cause another problem with the fan and sure enough the temperature started to creep back up. Before we knew it we were standing by the side of the road, 25 kilometres from the Afghanistan border waiting for the car to cool down with the escort frantically urging us to get back in the car and hurry up so he could get home for his dinner.

We limped to within sight of the Pakistan border and were barely a few kilometres away when there was a final police checkpoint and a final swapping of escorts. Our goal was now within sight and we might actually make it out of Iran without Craig strangling one of the escorts.

As the guard went inside to write our details down we stared wistfully to the East before noticing that the yard of the compound was full of dirt-covered men kneeling in a line with their hands on their heads. A young uniformed man standing on the steps of the building was searching the ground for stones to throw at them and an armed guard stood lazily watching what we assumed to be captured smugglers.

Almost thirteen hours after we had set off we finally made it to the border itself and predictably it was shut down for the night and locked up tight. The poor young guard who had only been with us for the last five minutes took the brunt of Craig’s tirade of four-letter words and innocently told us that we would have to stay in the nearby infamous border town of Mirajaveh. Once our anger had calmed down enough for us to drive again we were escorted to the tiny Wild-West-like place and into a large hotel compound.

The place obviously had some kind of racket going on with the police and immediately tried to charge us an extortionate rate for rooms and to rip us off completely with exchanging Euros into Rials; with us having spent nearly all of our local money as we assumed we would be crossing the border that afternoon.

This was finally too much for the guys and Craig grabbed the opportunistic money changer by the lapels as Michael, the German biker travelling with us, shouted at the top of his voice that he was a thief and a robber. The stress of the long, scorching day had come to a head and things looked very ugly. Fortunately everything backed away from fisticuffs to the level of shouting and insults and I took the opportunity to jump in the car, ditch the police and hotel staff and try to find a mechanic to fix the car.

Take these, i've had enough

A little while later I was stood in the street outside a small garage with the car in pieces and the sun setting. I had pulled up to some white-robed locals, opened the bonnet and tried to explain the problem. They seemed to understand and I ended up nervously following one of them to the secluded side-street, full of apprehension that I was about to get robbed, sold on to the Taliban or maybe worse. Thankfully he took me to a mechanic who quickly jumped on the front of the car, started unbolting parts and sizing up a new fan.

I was standing there, being offered drinks, trying to chat to the smiling crowd of people and thinking, “So this is the place I need an armed escort?” when, almost on cue, the police from the hotel turned up and stood aside me shoulder to shoulder with me. At first I thought they were going to bundle me off to the hotel but they spoke to the mechanic in rapid-fire Persian and he quickly gathered up all the parts and put them in the back of the car, evidently having been told to stop doing whatever he was doing.
“No fix Mirajaveh,” the mechanic said, “you go Zahedan”

The policemen forcefully told me to come back to the hotel and leave the car, with no radiator or cooling fan, in a side street in a dodgy border town that is described by the Foreign Office as ‘particularly insecure’. It took all of my efforts to kick up enough of a fuss to get them to agree to tow the car back to the hotel.

I jumped in the driver’s seat and as I took the steering lock and handbrake off almost the entire crowd that had been watching the mechanic started to push me along the dusty road. For a moment I genuinely thought they were going to push me the whole way across town but they just positioned me behind a battered blue pickup that towed me to back our temporary jail.

Camping in the car park

Back at the hotel the staff had softened and allowed (or been forced by the police) us to camp in the car park for free. They had even brought us out some blankets and a watermelon; very welcome after a whole day of no food.

As I pulled the tents down from the roof something in the back of the car caught my eye.
“What the hell is that?” I said, shocked.
Craig smiled for the first time all day, “It’s karma”
Hidden in the back of the car was a metal policeman’s helmet, stolen from the most obnoxious and slow checkpoint of the day back in Zahedan.
I laughed and started putting the car back together, ready to limp back into the city to try to find a mechanic the following day.

[The next blog sees the team attempt to return to Zahedan to get the car fixed but running into the owners of the helmet...]

Trip Stats

Days on the road: 136
Miles covered: 16,009
Tanks of fuel used: 82
Items of police uniform stolen: One

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BAM! Two teammates gone and one car going...

2011-09-08T12:51:00.001+01:00

The last blog closed wth Leigh stuck in Dubai, Johno waiting in Iran and Paul being deported from Tehran...

Leigh: Sitting on a balcony, swigging a cold beer back. I had resigned myself to missing out on possibly the most adventurous part of the expedition (if not the most dangerous) and meeting up with the others half way through Pakistan. Jane suddenly passed me the phone telling me Paul was phoning and it was urgent, I knew straight away what he was about to say. The only words I had received from the phone call were “I’m being deported, my passport flagged up and I’m heading back to Dubai”. Desperately trying to get information out of Paul the phone went dead.

For 10 minutes I panicked trying to Facebook Johno to tell him not to head to the border and that there was a change in plans. Stuck in the middle with no influence or decision making to do, I left the fate of the taxi to the others and went to go see the new Transformers film (it was actually pretty good).

Mosque near Kerman

Johno: I stared at the screen in disbelief “Paul didn't get into Iran, so he is being deported back to Dubai.
We need to sort out the situation about getting the vehicle out of Iran,”

After spending all day walking through the 45 degree heat of Bam trying in vain to an Internet Cafe that was open on yet another of Iran’s public holidays I was genuinely expected a message telling me that Paul would be meeting me in a few days so we could cross the border together.

I returned to the hostel and the expectant faces of Craig, a German biker called Michel and the owner.
“Paul flew into Tehran and got deported, it looks like we’ll have to try to cross the border on our own”

The hostel owner looked at me like I had just told him that the Sahara was a little sandy, “He flew into Tehran with no visa? Of course he got deported, it’s not an open city like Shiraz”

Convicted teddy bears...

A week earlier we had finally solidified a plan after many arguments over record eligibility, costs and feasibility. Paul and Leigh would fly to Dubai where they would hopefully pick up their Pakistan visas whilst I would remain in Yazd with Ozzy Craig prepping the car for the harsh desert drive ahead. Paul would then fly back to the Open City of Shiraz where his Irish passport should, in theory, allow him to get a new Iranian visa in the airport. He would then get a bus down to the southern city of Bam where Craig and I would meet him with the car. The three of us would then drive over the Pakistan-Iran border, through the much-feared Baluchistan desert and meet Leigh, who couldn’t get a new Iranian visa in time due to his British passport, in southern Pakistan where the whole team, plus Craig, would continue on to India and our first beer in two months. In theory it all sounded so simple.

At first things went perfectly to plan; Craig and I fixed up the ailing Hannah in the narrow, scorching alleyways of Yazd, extended our Iranian visas to allow us to stay in the country whilst we waited for Paul and then started the drive down to the south. Meanwhile Leigh and Paul had finally achieved what they had been trying to do for eight months and been granted Pakistan visas.

Then things started to go wrong.

Stopping for a quick break

Driving through the deserts of southern Iran had been putting Hannah through some extreme temperatures; at one point the thermometer on Craig’s watch had read 60 degrees Celsius inside the front of the car and it was impossible to touch the pedals with bare feet or the gearstick for longer than a few seconds without getting burnt. However, up until now she had generally been coping well the temperatures and the all important TEMP needle hadn’t crept much over half, except on huge hills where she started to struggle.

Now, halfway to the city of Bam, I was driving up tiny inclines and the needle was moving incessantly up towards the red danger zone. When it reached three quarters I pulled over, popped the bonnet and stared into the engine bay.

In job interviews I like to pretend i’m an engineering genius but in reality I know less about how cars work than I know about how girls work. Without the team mechanic and general car whizzkid Leigh to hand the best I could do was stare at the pieces of metal and try to see something obviously wrong.

Craig the German biker

At first I figured that the gasket seals on the water pump had gone as I could see greenish radiator water bubbling from the joins in the metal but I eventually spotted the true problem. The large cooling fan on the front on the engine had somehow wedged itself against the back of the radiator, leaving a scary-looking gouge in the delicate cooling fins. The resulting lack of all-important cooling air meant even slight hills were defeating Hannah and as the road entered the hills just ahead some kind of quick-fix was needed until I could get to Bam and take a proper look.

The only option I could see, short of taking everything to pieces by the side of the road, was to cut the fan down so it was clear of the radiator and try to reattach it to shaft somehow. Thirty minutes later my soft Western hands were blistered and bleeding from hacking at the tough plastic with the sweat-drenched wire cutters but the fan was clear of the radiator and wedged back in place. When we set off the difference was immediately noticeable and we arrived safely in Bam later that evening.

Bam before and after the devasting earthquake of 2003

Bam was devastated in 2003 by a huge earthquake (or, according to one of the many ‘crazies’ we met around this time, by a nuclear bomb that was secretly tested by the government nearby) and now was in the midst of being rebuilt using ‘earthquake proof’ building methods. In practice these consisted of buildings with diagonal iron-girder frames stuffed with bricks haphazardly piled up in the gaps and held in place by a dab of mortar; they looked like strong breeze would blow them over.

It was in the shade of one of these dodgy walls that I set about draining Hannah’s radiator and removing the fan to try to come up with a more long-term solution to the cooling problem. As I sweated with the socket wrench and spanners I almost immediately found the cause of the problem.

Throughout the trip Someone had been causing problems for the entire team. It was Someone who had shaved half of Leigh’s head in Berlin, Someone who forgot to turn the lights off in Esfahan, flattening the whole battery and Someone who didn’t screw the lights in properly just before one bounced out and smashed on a particularly bumpy road. In short Someone allowed stupid mistakes to be brought up without causing an argument.
This time Someone had forgotten to tighten the bolts on the bottom of the radiator thus allowing it to slip back and cause all our current problems.

Attempting to fix the fan

But with the engine in pieces I was able to bodge the fan back in place, hopefully fixing the problem. My next issue was finding Internet in the nigh-on shutdown town and trying to log onto the banned Facebook to find out what was happening with Leigh and Paul. The results bought mixed feelings: it was great that Paul and Leigh had managed to get their visas but terrible that they would miss out on driving through Baluchistan. It now looked like I was going to have to drive the hottest and most dangerous section of the journey without the teammates I had shared the last four and a half months with. Aside from the kidnapping perils, the insane temperature, my lack of mechanical knowledge and the long driving hours it didn’t feel right to do a 1500 mile chunk of the journey without two of my closest friends.

Fortunately I had two new companions to join me for what most overlanders describe as the worst section of their trip. The first was Ozzy Craig, already introduced in detail in previous blogs and the second was a middle-aged German biker called Michael. He resembled an older, less buff Daniel Craig and was constantly talking to me about girls. He had met a beautiful 19 year old in Esfahan and fallen madly in love despite the repeated warnings of the hostel owner, Craig and myself that there was something dodgy about the whole affair. Although the owner told him it was likely to be a Secret Police sting or a ploy to snare a German passport he insisted he didn’t care, saying that “The love is too big!” and staring doe-eyed at his phone as he received flirty text messages like a besotted teenager.

So with Danzig Craig on his bike and Ozzy Craig in the taxi, helping me with the driving, we set off at 5am the next morning for the final push through the lawless border region and into the area the Red Cross and Foreign Office had repeatedly warned us not to enter.

The next blog sees the trio make for the much-feared border but run into trouble with the car, the armed escorts and forcing them to make a difficult choice for fuel...

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Did I ever tell you about the time I got Deported from a Rogue State?

2011-09-05T17:20:00.001+01:00

By Paul Archer

Iranian Coaches, Gangsta

Leigh and I arrived at Shiraz’s small airport to take the flight to Dubai, where we would hopefully be picking up our long awaited visas for Pakistan. I would then fly back as soon as possible to meet up with Johno to take the taxi through Pakistan, where we would meet Leigh (who would not be able to get a visa back into Iran). Check in and passport control went as normally as could be expected and we were ushered forward to the X-Ray machine. I removed all metallic items, but the standard little coin or belt buckle set it off and the security man made me stand up on a platform so he could search me

I surveyed the airport from my elevated position, watching the amalgamation of Arab men in white dresses and Persians in shiny shirts, as both arms were loosely frisked, moving to the armpits and then my chest. Gradually moving southwards, he found I had no weapons attached to my waist and used both hands to vigorously search my crotch. Grasping my manly-bits with both hands, he had a good feel and I went decidedly red. He moved around to my behind, gave both cheeks a gentle squeeze, ran his hands down both legs, returned to my crotch, copped another feel, resting there far too long to be comfortable, then a little longer, had a little squeeze and then lightly tapped me on my bum to tell me he was finished whilst giving me a half smile and cocking his head.

The Straw that Broke...

I was completely shocked, bowled into speechlessness, desperately wanting to point out to someone important that I had been thoroughly violated. Instead, in my embarrassment and for want of anything else to do, I grabbed my bags as fast as I possibly could, let out a noise that was half school-girl giggle and half puppy-kicked-in-the-face yelp and told Leigh.

He laughed, laughed some more, told me I shouldn’t dress like such a slut and instructed me to buy him an overpriced airport sandwich as he had run out of Iranian money.

I felt like an object…

Flying into Dubai in a dilapidated, old Iranian Airbus, we cruised through passport control, and with no luggage to collect we stopped only to buy a bottle of Gordon’s Gin (a tradition borne from the last time to two of us had passed through the airport, one which had previously resulted in 4am dancing on a bar with an Arab Sheikh, a failed attempt to persuade airport security that we were Julia Roberts’ entourage, stealing a bacon sandwich, losing all of my important baggage and almost missing the flight. Possibly a tradition we should stop…). We were to be met by Raul, an old friend from university and a certifiable life saver. He was the one who had arranged the Pakistan visa, and we are forever indebted to this wonderful fella. He was stood in arrivals in cool as can be in smart, stylish skinny jeans and black waistcoat combo, waiting for us. Leigh and I, who twenty hours previously had been in what felt like one of the most remotest spots in the middle of the desert, were wearing very tatty jeans, ripped t shirts, Iraqi Arab scarves and talib-eards that would make the any Pakistani militant proud, we felt a little underdressed. Along with Raul, was a completely unexpected surprise, Marie Shareen, another friend from university who was randomly in Dubai at the time. We piled into Raul’s pristine, air-conditioned car and he asked what we wanted to do first. The answer was a one-word deafening shout.

Beer!!!

It had been five weeks since our last beer, a can of special brew smuggled over the hills into the north of Iran and, and being average red blooded English twenty-somethings, we were gagging for a cold one.

Sandstorms Over Dubai

For those who have never been there, Dubai is a big, brash, money obsessed, show-town, filled with big brash, money obsessed people, driving big brash expensive cars to huge (brash…) shopping malls, cinemas and American fast food chains. It could not have been any further from the places we had been in the past three months and we were both suffering from the culture shock as Ferraris and Lamborghinis sped past us. It was ok, we would get a beer and everything would be alright. And it was (the first beer after five weeks in a desert, I can assure you, is amazing!), until the bill came. Each beer was more than our daily budget, so truly exhausted from travelling since before sunrise, we stuck with just the one and sought out where we would be staying.

Jane Ferguson is a war correspondent who works freelance for CNN. She is a thoroughly nice girl, has more guts and balls than any lad I know, a great cook and an awesome host.

We had managed to catch her in between trips to Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Sudan, where she (a 28 year old blonde girl) embeds herself with all sorts of unsavoury types with big guns, along with her camera, laptop and an obsessive nose for a story (never one to shy away from the media, check out some of her stuff here). Staying on the 14^th floor of a luxury tower block, we exchanged adventure stories (hers were better) before hitting the sack.

The whole reason we were in Dubai was because we had to be present for the Pakistan visa to be granted. However, the next morning a courier from the embassy arrived, collected our passports and disappeared, leaving us with an unexpected free day. Seeing as soon as the visa was granted, I would be heading back to Iran I wanted to ensure I maximised the luxuries available. It may be last time in a long, long time, but most importantly, I wanted to tell Johno all about it as he was stuck in the desert with a bi-polar Ozzie! Dropping by the supermarket I bought cookies, Cadbury’s chocolate, crisps, coffee, English magazines and (most importantly) cereal and cold milk; the greatest Western invention yet to noticeably travel east.

After a hearty breakfast, and a dip in the pool, the passports were returned by the courier, who told us we had no fee to pay. There, sat after 6 months of angst, failed embassy trips and plan B’s, were our visas to Pakistan in our passports. And, we didn’t even have to pay the fee!

Immediately I jumped on the computer and tried to book a flight back to Iran, five travel agencies and countless fare scanner sites later, I was still flightless. It appeared that Iran had yet another one of their bloody holidays that weekend celebrating some Ayatollah or other’s death. Eventually I managed to track down a flight to Tehran leaving two days later. As an Irish passport holder, I can get a visa on arrival at Tehran airport, but as they are closer to the main security agencies, they an make your life a bit harder than if you were to fly into one of the southern airports. It also meant days of travel to catch up. Without any choice in the matter (the only other flight I could find was over a week away, by the time which Johno’s visa would have expired), I took it.

Kobe Beef

We whiled away the evening, feeling very unadventurous as Jane’s friends from work came over for a few drinks and exchanged tips on the relative merits of hotels in Kabul. ‘Good parties at that one, but it gets bombed quite a bit…’

Swimming, sunbathing and eating good food blissfully took up the following day, only interrupted by a call from Raul, his mate was having a birthday meal, and we were invited. Fantastic, we thought as we wondered whether Johno was enjoying himself in the desert…

As last suppers before entering into the massively dangerous border region with Pakistan and Baluchistan go, it couldn’t go much better than this. Raul’s friend was a pilot for Emirates and was taking us to a highly exclusive Japanese restaurant; he pulled up in his brand new GTR sports car. Out come a pair of beautiful Ukrainian stewardess’ legs, followed by their equally stunning owner and the then by the Birthday Boy, Jassim, chucking his keys to the valet. He was twenty three and twenty one hours old. It was clear to me that at some point in my life I had a made a wrong turn.

We ate mountains of sushi, prawns and teriyaki, washed down by cocktail and Asahi beer. By the time the Kobe beef course arrived, everyone was too full. Well, everyone except for us two freeloaders who ate theirs, everyone else’s and started on their deserts. This was to the soundtrack of everyone joking that the next time they would see me, I would be on Youtube reading a ransom statement surrounded by nice masked men. The bill could have fed Hannah for months, but Jassim picked it up for all.

Birthday Boy, Centre

I found myself the next morning on a flight to Tehran, perched between Granma Omani and her family on their holidays, none of whom wanted to switch with me to be close to their loved ones because it would mean forfeiting their window seat. This meant that they would just have to shout over me in rapid, spittle infused Arabic for the whole three hours. It seemed my brief taste of luxury was well and truly over.

I followed a Westerner who looked like he knew what he was doing to a window marked visas and waited. A young, smiling Iranian prodded a form to me, which I dutifully completed and return to him, along with my passport. I waited and waited, but then I saw my young friend appear, trailed closely by a man in a neat suit and overly shiny (plastic) shoes, who was clearly his boss. He pointed at me, then looked at me sternly and returned back to their office in serious conversation. Half an hour later the boss emerged and asked me the usual visa type questions about ‘why I was visiting Iran’. I answered, and he replied that I needed another Iranian to vouch for me or I couldn’t enter. I scrolled through my phone for and Iranian who could do this for me. There was only one (well, technically two), the wonderfully couple who Couchsurfed us in Tehran. Before I left, they told me they could not vouch for my visa because they were afraid of letting the government know they were hosting foreigners, but I had no choice. I called them up, feeling truly awful to have to put someone in this position just for my stupid taxi adventure, and begged and pleaded.

They said no

I begged some more and told them the situation and eventually they reluctantly agreed.

Boss man disappeared to call them up. This was all I knew for half an hour until I saw a petit girl who would probably be very attractive if it wasn’t for the hijab attached to her head, although it was something she clearly wore with disdain, wander past clutching my passport and clearly looking for someone.

“Hi, can I have my passport back please” I asked smilingly

“Oh... are you Paul?” I nodded “ahh, I thought you were Iranian, I was looking or an… um, Irish man”

It appears I didn’t fit her image of small ginger men in green, sat on pots of gold with shamrocks in their hats.

“I need $200 dollars”

“I thought it was 50 euros?”

“Fifty? Most of them are costing $500, I’ve called in a load of favours from friends in booking to get you $200”

“But everywhere I’ve read says it’s a 50 euro fixed price visa?”

“Huh? This is for your flight?”

“What flight?!”

“Home”

“Home, what, where? “ I responded, getting more and more frantic, this wasn’t going well at all “ im coming to Iran, not leaving it”

“Yes you are”

“No, I’m not, I’d think I’d know..”

“Yes you are, you’re being deported”

“DEPORTED???”

I’ve never quite understood those moments in films when somebody gets some bad news and the whole world starts to spin until then. This was it, the expedition was over, finished, kaput, I was desperately trying to focus on the pretty girl with my passport.

“Is it because I’m Irish???”

“No, of course not, we always give visas to Irishmen, in fact a couple of weeks I let a nice Irish man going on holi…” I cut her off, I needed to know

“But whyyy” the ‘why’ came out as more of a suppressed, primal yelp then a word,

“Something on our computers said no, your passport has been flagged and we can’t let you in, I’m very sorry, if it was up to me…” she trailed off as vivid images plunged into my head of the policeman with squiffy eyes photocopying every single page of my passport as we were quizzed by the secret policeman as to why it was we found ourselves camping by all that artillery. Every single page...

Eventually it sunk in, but still dazed I handed over the cash and was escorted to a waiting (cell) area with my own personal guard.

I had about £1worth of credit, so I called Leigh…

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Is it unethical to leave a dying man in the desert?

2011-08-28T11:09:00.001+01:00

By Paul Archer

Another breathe taking Mosque

In South West Iran, there is a small city called Yazd. One of the hottest places in the country, and what felt like the world, it was our destination after Shiraz.

FLAGS!

Heading along the sunbaked smooth road, we stopped at sundown; searching for a desert campsite we spied a mud fort and headed for it. Its rounded mud walls stuck out of the desert about three metres and we drove around it to find the only entrance. The inside was scattered with crumbling remains of houses and stables, some fully intact and others worn down to just a few feet of walls. Camping in a thousand year old, deserted mud ruin was quite an experience; eerily quiet, it had a spooky air to it and the disturbingly loose sand underfoot felt like it could give way at any moment.

Mudfort Entrance

Limping into Yazd with the car overheating in the sun, we found our hostel deep within the old mud town. Similar to the Medinas of Morocco, these old mud buildings are hundreds of years old, baked solid by the sun. High chimneys stick into the air all around, designed to catch the miniscule breeze and redirect it into people’s homes to cool them during their midday siesta. The whole place has a relaxed, medieval vibe and very little seems to happen at all. We were staying at the famous ‘Silk Road’ hotel, a proper hostel made from mud, centred around a cool courtyard and fountain; it was filled with the few travellers who go to Iran and it’s a well known jumping off point for overlanders trying to make it across Pakistan. Soon after we arrived, we heard

“G’day lads, ahh thought I saawh a black cab drive by”

…as a big lumbering Ozzie stuck his head through the door, still wearing the same T shirt, his brow beaded with sweat. Craig had found us again.

Yazd is the kind of place where you can’t but chill, literally. After waking late and lazing all day I made an attempt to wander the old town and visit some mosques at around 4pm but the relentless sun and 45°C temperature caused me to massively overheat and return to the hostel and lie in front of a fan. We were stuck there until we got some word regarding Pakistan visas in Dubai, but it was a nice break from the constant driving and staying in a new place every night.

Situated about 70km north of the Yazd is ‘Chak Chak’, home to the Zoroastrian fire temple. Zoroastrianism is the ancient religion that was the precursor to Islam in Iran. Their most holy place is the fire temple situated in the middle of the desert. It contains a fire which has been (apparently) been burning for 400 years and an eternal spring, dripping through its stone walls (Chak Chak literally translates as ‘Drip Drip’). We pulled together a gang that included Ozzie Craig and two Italian motorbikers and headed out into the desert to check out the temple. On route, an old man in a beat up car started honking and gesturing for us to follow him. The Italians spoke to him and it became clear he was going to show us the way to the very well sign posted temple; he was pretty insistant. All was going well until he pulled over to the side and told us to stop too. Obediently we waited as he climbed out of his car, grabbed a thermos full of tea, a water container and a big bag of sugar. He proceeded to shove these through the window into my lap and climbed in, completely uninvited, and told me to drive. It started to become clear then that something wasn’t right. He was about 65, and barely pushing five foot tall. He had stickers all over his chest where an ECG had been attached, a hospital wristband and his left sleeve had a large blood stain on it, as though he had wrenched out a drip. He started to rapid fire Persian, point to his chest and then made a cut throat motion. It appeared as though we had inadvertently picked up a dying man who had escaped from a hospital and were driving him into the middle of the desert where he wanted to pray one more time before he died..

Out came a packet of cigarettes and the old man sparked up, right in front of the no smoking sticker in the back of the cab. Realising his rudeness, he offered them around (there were no takers), spilt ash in Leigh’s ear and then berated me for driving too slow. Trying to tell him that we were going up a hill in a massively over heating taxi with five people in it failed and he continued to hit me and shout at me for my tardiness. He would then sporadically break into song in between drags because our sound system wasn’t working.

We arrived at Chak Chak three chain-cigarettes later and parked up. The temple is at the top of a hill and we started to make our way up. Our geriatric escapee, however, had other plans. First we must drink tea; obediently we drank the obscenely sweet black tea and started to get a little bit irritated with our unwelcome and uninvited hindrance and then started for the hill. Making our way up at a healthy pace the old man immediately lagged behind, looking back I could see him bent double, heaving, minutes away from death. I went down to join him, he pointed at his heart then coughed and spluttered and started to make his way up, only after insisting I take a photo of his bare-chested ECG patches.

Don't die

We eventually arrived at the temple entrance. Situated among rows of 80’s architecture platforms for the devoted, we were the only people there apart from the guard. He was sat under a sign that instructed women not to enter during menstruation, he stirred and started to unlock the temple of the eternal fire. Just before he did so, he turned to us and asked if any of us had a lighter…

Seriously!

Check yourself before you wreck yourself

The Eternal Fire (does anyone have a lighter?)

We entered to find the a cave containing an obviously recently lit fire, and a small drip from the ceiling into a Tupperware bowl.

Mildly disappointed we headed down, leaving the old man smoking away. The plan was to camp in the desert by Chak Chak and we all got ready to go. There then came a desperate noise from the steps, the old man was leaping down as fast as his little legs would take him. We still had his tea in the car. So we gave to him, he poured a small cup, started to sing again and sat down. We waved goodbye but again, he had other plans. We were to drop him back to his car… a 140km round trip from our camp site. We wanted to give this man as much distance as possible. If he died in the taxi it would be a real ball ache; we’d lose our awesome campsite and the paperwork would be a nightmare. Not to mention the secret police not being our biggest fans. We didn’t want to drive him to his car, but then we couldn’t leave a dying man in the desert… could we?

Could you leave this man?

Driving along the dirt track, he carried on singing, shouting, getting irate and smoking as we tried to tell him we didn’t want to drive back to his car. A car appeared behind us and I stopped and we flagged it down. The old man knew the guys (who were driving to Yazd), got out and started spitting in Persian. Never ones to miss an opportunity we all jumped back in and floored it, stopping, reversing and dumping his tea paraphernalia by the side of the road, then flooring it again.

He was their responsibility now!

We camped and woke up the next morning to check out a ‘famous’ shaking minaret on the way back to Yazd. It actually turned out to be a very cool celebration of inept architectural achievements, although climbing through its tiny crawl space was an unnerving experience knowing the structural soundness of the building.

Little Scamps

Shaking Minaret

That evening I went with a few travellers to watch the sunset over the city from the roof of a mosque. The heat haze over the mud roofs gave it a beautiful effect, although I couldn’t help but imagine I was playing the computer game Assassins Creed. The group included an Australian girl who had just got a six month marriage to her Iranian boyfriend by an Imam over breakfast, basically allowing them to legally have sex in the eyes of the religious police. To end it, they have to simply lose the marriage certificate. Very Iranian…

We finally got the word from our friend in Dubai with regards to our Pakistan visas. He would not be able to collect them, but if we flew to Dubai we could collect them ourselves. This was great news, but it involved getting another Iranian visa, a process that would take at least three weeks with a British passport, by which time Johno’s visa would have expired leaving the taxi in the middle of the Iranian desert. However, we found out that it was possible for me to get an instant 1 week visa at an airport with my Irish passport.

Assassins Creed-ish

Newlywed in the eyes of Allah

The next day Leigh and I were on a coach to the airport in Shiraz, where we would fly to Dubai to get our visas. I would then fly back to Iran and drive with Johno and Ozzie Craig to Pakistan, where Leigh would meet us. Hardly an ideal plan, but it meant we could get to India and the expedition would live another day.

Well that was the plan anyway…

Next up, Leigh and I sample the life of luxury, I get deported from Iran, Johno has the worst drive of his life and our tag along Ozzie starts a fight with a man and his AK47.

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