The End

Queensland

Back to Australia

Well, after nearly a year I'm back home.

Camping gear is unpacked and the bike waits, upsidedown, for an overdue service. It's been a week, and it will probably wait a while longer.

I did plan on bringing the blog up-to-date with my culminating jaunt around Europe/Spain, going so far as half-finishing a few little posts, but for now it's summer and I've got people to catch up with. I'm also a bit sick of writing about myself. It's time to reintegrate. Time to use pantries and cupboards.

I've got some ideas for other bits and pieces that I may or may not scribble in the future, but either way it's adios for now. To anyone who read and offered feedback or kind words, thanks. If you're reading this as a tourer/traveller seeking more information and you think I might be able to help, don't hesitate to email. If you've arrived here and you're not quite sure how, just take a moment to appreciate the internet.

Have a good 2013,

- Daniel

Iran: Sep 10 - Oct 4

Tehran- shiraz - yazd - esfahan - Tehran

I could have written about Persepolis, about the glory of VIP buses or the constant and limitless kindness of everyday Iranians that drove me to renew my visa and stay for an extra two weeks.

Instead, here´s a customisable letter for use by touring cyclists. I wrote it specifically about my time in Central Asia and Iran, but hope that you can use it for any country. Just circle the most appropriate option.

Saraghs - Tehran: Aug 23 - Sep 9

Saraghs- Mozduran - Mashad - Quchan - Shirvan - Bojnurd - Chamanbid - Azad Shan - Kordkuy - Sari - Surk Abad - Firuzkh - Damavand - Tehran

Why I Ran

Take a plan incubated over two years and enacted for eight months, largely through a part of the world where visa inflexibility, sparse highway pickings and prohibitive seasons force a long-view itinerary, and you might stumble over something skipped in highschool physics: inertia rides a bike.

Turkmenistan: Aug 20 - 22

Turkmenebad - Mary - Saraghs

Golden Plans

After 40*, roads start to bubble and it´s hard to maintain original dash-across-200km-of-uninterrupted-desert plans.

Following Uzbekistan´s night riding, I thought Turkmenistan might be the place to set a new record. Before midday of the first day I had travelled only 30 km to Turkmenibad, where I instead found a crumbling hotel with a shower I sat under for two hours.

Uzbekistan: Jul 24 - Aug 19

Oibek - tashkent - samarkand - bukhara

Going Solo

I couldn´t get a Coke without comment.

"Adin?" asked the old woman with the rheumy eyes. One?

Tashkent: Jul 24 - Aug 3

Tashkent

How to Build a Central Asian Capital

Aim: To create a city-shaped mausoleum for common sense.

What You'll Need:

The Pamir Highway: Jun 29 - Jul 23

Murgab - khorog - dushanbe

Why By Bike?

Why by bike?

That was the million-dollar question as I slumped over my handlebars, a slight snowstorm pecking at our backs and Ak-Baital pass still a long climb ahead.

Kyrgyzstan: Jun 14 - 27

Irkeshtam - osh - bishkek - osh

Homeward Glances

Sometimes it's the closing in that makes you realise how far you really are.

We had raced from the border with a brief stopover in Osh. The first leg was in a hatchback so crammed we took turns lying on our panniers with feet dangling out the rear, the second in a rack-equipped stationwagon where the comfort of greater sprawl space was offset by the looping mortality song of tyres screeching around blind descents at 130 km/hr.

Xinjiang: Jun 13

Ulugqat

Blind Deaf Justice

Well at least Dheiu no longer has to worry about coming up short if a conversation turns to talk of pushing the Chinese deaf around.

Here's the exchange as a montage. Cue The Benny Hill Show's 'Yackety Sax' for full effect:

Xinjiang: Jun 2 - 12

KASHI

Uyghur Please

Kashi sits in the far northwest, nestled against the Taklamakan Desert in the Xingjian Uyghur Autonomous Region. In its Silk Road heyday merchants converged on this oasis city from Central Asia and China on heavily-loaded, slow-moving caravans.

Xinjiang: May 23 - Jun 1

URUMQI

Why is a Chicken Like a Chinese Train?

After a certain point it can start to feel like travel might just be about practicing your nod in different timezones.

Beijing: May 14 - 22

Beijing

Our Long March

You can't play the Good, Culturally-Sensitive Tourist all the time.

Sometimes you need to retreat from what's outside--find a backpackers' hostel and binge on Cohen Brothers' story-telling and Monopoly Deal.

Inner Mongolia: May 10 - 13

Erenhot

Under the Weather

Here's a good joke: someone cashed-up/job-free/21st Century enough to be travelling for five months pulls up to a blog and says,  I'm just not feeling it this week.

Welcome to Erenhot, where something like homesickness rode the coattails of boredom.

Ulaanbaatar: Apr 30 - May 8

Mutton-Mouthed Wild West

Ulaanbaatar is the sort of capital city you inherit when your ancestors were nomads, your closest neighbour is Russia and you sit on top of staggering amounts of recently-tapped mineral wealth.

Bowlegged ex-horsemen lean onto canes next to rich young things. Both travel over cracked footpaths past drab Soviet-era tenaments, outlying gers and just-built skyscrapers, skirting crumbling roads where everyone is a taxi driver but no-one covers manholes.

Gobi Day 7: Apri 29

Gobi Desert

Final Stretch

On day seven we rode a measly 10 kilometres before we found another truck willing to take all the way to Ulaanbaatar, still some 400 kilometres away.

The driver had been more eager to accept us than his passenger. By the time we hit the sealed road at Choir I understood why: the passenger was the one who had to hide whenever we passed a traffic police checkpoint.

Gobi Day 6: Apr 28

Gobi Desert

Thumbs Down, Thumbs Up

The ride out of Sainshand began perfectly. Within an hour the only reminder of civilisation was the train track to our left and the arrow-straight road that dropped us into a shallow depression; from here, rolling forward through a treadmill-disconnect of pared-back uniformity, the near crests of desert met the sky like the sharp edge of a shrunken world.

Sainshand: Apr 25 - 27

Gobi Desert

Sainshand

Sainshand is a sandblown collection of gers, hotels, rundown restaurants and never-full bars that ekes out a living from the train line snaking through. It has neat rows of windbreaking trees and no grass. It's about as much town as it's fair to expect in the middle of a desert.

Gobi Day 5: Apr 24

Gobi Desert

Kaput

After a carton's worth of fried eggs and a track crew's worth of introductions, we left Tuvshihbat 's and went to pack the tent. The afternoon before we'd done our best to clear some of the broken glass we would discover covers the ground of every Mongolian settlement and city; it looked like dew in the low morning light but put a few holes in our groundsheet nonetheless.

Gobi Day 4: Apr 23

Gobi Desert

Mongolian Homestay

"Horsey!"

Tuvshihbat was leaning towards me, the one English word he knew especially incongruous coming from his heavy Mongolian face. In his hand was a camera which showed him standing proud in thick snow, resplendent in a traditional Mongolian deel. He was next to his 'horsey', outside the house we'd been beckoned into.

Gobi Day 3: Apr 22

Gobi Desert

The Culinary Circuit

Imitation Nutella on bread that started out stale and got no better with time; two-minute noodles eaten dry and without flavour to minimise thirst and avoid the added weight of stove-fuel; baked beans carried from Beijing; Mars Bars that hit like they'd been injected; sardines whose overwhelming salt and oil assumed a better taste than the memory of the choicest panfried salmon.

Gobi Day 2: Apr 21

Gobi Desert

Rewired

It took a moment to get my bearings when I crawled from the tent on day two.

Morning stillness sat heavy. All was quiet. Wrapped around us were low rolling hills, sandy stretches and rocky patches, a landscape of horizontal bands painted with a rationed palette of autumnal yellows, oranges and browns. With no dustcloud-trailing trucks, and forgetting the east-risen sun, it was easy to be disoriented by the emptiness.

Gobi Day 1: Apr 20

Gobi Desert

It Felt Good to Be Out of the Rain

Day one arrived like an apology.

We woke to limp flags and a brilliant blue canopy, spring-brisk weather better than any since Thailand.

Gobi Day 0: Apr 19

Gobi Desert (Sainshand)

Dry Run

We could have done more to know more.

We had made it to dusty Zamyn Uud after a sleeper train from Beijing, passing the spaced-out mudbrick houses of Inner Mongolia before being stamped through the border town of Erlian and into the real Mongolia.

Beijing: Apr 10 - 17

BEijing (sleeper train)

Climbing up the Walls

When I was eight or nine we bought a kitten.

Cat I was a slow-moving ball of orange whose care was meant to steer us children away from lives of wanton selfishness. Dad ended up feeding it most days and all I really learnt was that I prefer dogs. Nevertheless, when it shuffled off its mortal coil some years later, we were soon at the pet shop, lined up for a replacement.

Hunan: Apr 5 - 9

Yongzhou

The House that Jack Built

We met Jack in Yongzhou.

We had just arrived and were beginning our daily game of looking for a cheap hotel. When he called out, 'Hi, how you going?'--he was sitting on a motorbike parked in front of a shopping centre--his face was so honest, his English so clear, his demeanour at seeing a black and white guy riding past so refreshingly calm, it was all we could do to stop.

Guangxi: Mar 24 - Apr 4

Wuzhou - Daoshu - Taiping - Mensheng - Yangshuo - Guilin - Quanzhou

Last in Translation

The language barrier is set higher in the Middle Kingdom.

In Hong Kong numerous travellers warned us that it stopped being easy once we entered China Proper. You have to communicate on their terms, they said. No one speaks English. In a world where everyone else I meet speaks three or four languages and looks bored with each, the Chinese would, with a few exceptions, be stubbornly, trend-buckingly monolingual--well, at least we'd have that in common.

Guangdong: Mar 21 - 23

gaoming - zhaoqing - de qing

Chinese Concrete

Forget pandas, Ming architecture and Confucian riddles. That's a painting. To begin with, China sprawled like a country-sized construction site.

Earth-movers and semi-trailers rumbled past pounding jackhammers, tracking dirt and scattering gravel. Elderly Han streetsweepers with milky eyes and faces like carved wood worked their oversized straw brooms towards the road shoulder. There sit mounds of crushed rock, broken concrete, cement and rebar.

Hong Kong: Mar 8 - 20

Hong Kong(plane)

The Glam, the Grime and the Waiting

It turns out people fly to Hong Kong just to shop. Apparently that's a thing.

It was hard not to feel a little out of place as the unlicensed taxi made its way past the looming steel and glass facades of Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon.

Koh Tao: Feb 27 - Mar 5

KOH TAO (FERRY)

Koh Tao: Take Two

I first visited Koh Tao in early 2009. Back then, it was part of a short Southeast Asian jaunt that started the itch for something bigger.

Nearly three years later, here I was again.

Koh Phangan: Feb 18 - 26

Koh Phangan(flight/ferry)

Full Moon, Partly

Koh Phangan began the bike-free, one-bag-only holiday within our larger trip.

What we thought would be little more than a stepping stone on the way to Koh Tao ended up sucking us in for over a week with its own special gravity.

Selangor: Feb 12 - 17

Kuala Lumpur

Capital City Cool-Down

Wealthy, clean and impersonal, Kuala Lumpur followed India like a just-in-time decompression chamber.

On our first full day in Malaysia we caught up on missed sleep and television downloads, not leaving the guesthouse until mid-afternoon.

Maharashtra: Feb 9 - 11

Mumbai (by sleeper-train)

The Limits of Adjustment

After nearly six weeks it can be tempting to think that India has lost the power to shock you.

After all, there is much you can grow used to.

There are the reactions along the way from people who are curious, cheerful and polite; while we might have been too worn to always offer them the response they deserved we still knew we were fortunate to be able to expect such genuine friendliness.

Goa: Feb 3 - 8

Palolem Beach - Calangute – Panaji - Madgao

The Vehicle-Spotter's Guide to India

By the time we left Goa we had cycled 2,000-odd kilometres, caught two trains, a few buses and enough rickshaws to build a real car. Here's what we learnt about the happy chaos of Indian transport in the process. 

Trains 

India Rail knows it keeps India running and will delay your service until you notice too. Each day almost as many people as live in Australia travel on trains that are cheap, more crowded than any bazaar and -- if the cautionary illustrations are to be believed -- rife with prancing villians who enjoy nothing more than injecting your unguarded food with drugs.

Karnataka: Jan 30 - Feb 2

Mangalore – Udupi - Gokarna (by train)

Indian Doppelganger

Here’s a fun game if you visit the subcontinent: Indian Doppelgänger.

It’s easy to play and easily adapted. The key aim is to spot someone who closely resembles someone else. Beyond that, the rules are yours. You can search for all doppelgangers or only those of certain categories: friends, family and acquaintances or celebrities; the living or the dead. A points system encourages group games but it’s still a good solitary pursuit.

Kerala: Jan 18 - 29

Thiruvananthapuram - Varkala Beach – Kollam – Allepy (by houseboat) - Kochi – Thrissur – Calicut - Kalpetta (by bus) – Kannur - Kasargord

The Keralan Panorama

Kerala’s is a conflicted identity.

The wealthiest state in India is simultaneously the site of the world’s first democratically-elected communist government and a tourism board that proclaims it “God’s own country".

Tamil Nadu: Jan 4 - 17

Chennai - Mahabalipuram - Pondicherry - Chidambaram - Tiruchirappalli - Dindigul – Madurai – Virudhunagar – Tirunelveli – Kanyakumari

A Sense of Things

Naivety dies a quick death in Tamil Nadu.

My conceit had been to imagine I had any idea of what was coming.

I had anticipated colour: the explosive red of drying chilies, the alabaster white of ancient temples, the rust-mottled carriages of skyblue trains in front of swollen green foliage.