Since the moment we packed our bikes in Almaty we feel a little bit lost. After more than 8 months on the road, through seasons and countries, leaving the bike and keeping on going without them is weird. I have to say that it took me these entire first two weeks in China to get used to a different way of moving around. As I wrote on our Facebook page a few days ago: “on the bike the ‘in between’…
What better than a rainy day in Almaty to put together some sketches about our much enjoyable time in Kyrgyzstan? For sure one of the most beautiful countries we’ve crossed on our bikes. And since our cycling days are over for this trip, better to indulge in good memories to keep our minds (and legs!) distracted from the fact that we are not riding, right? So… enjoy!
After rushing through Turkmenistan, the first feeling when we crossed the border into Uzbekistan was: relax! Less kilometers and the time for a cold beer, as a kind of a reward. The more we travel East the less we know about the countries we are cycling through: on the good side, this gives us fresh eyes to look at what we see and experience. We like to talk to the people we meet, ask them questions and learn about the…
We knew it would have been a challenge – and it was – but we were ready. Given the fact that we crossed Turkmenistan on a 5 days transit visa we couldn’t learn much about it or experience its life and culture, but I guess that’s somehow what they want: you can get a tourist visa only if you book a guided tour (and that was not in our plans). For all the others it’s just transit, no matter the…
It could have been an horror story, but it’s not, even if it can be scary, sometimes, maybe at night… Anyway. Kilometer after kilometer we noticed a presence with us. Well, actually we noticed it right away but, anyway. Maybe a good check by a nose and throat specialist would have been enough, maybe before starting this trip, maybe. Anyway. It is what it is and now this presence is with us, it follows us, sometimes it flies on us,…
Half time. Better, a little bit more than half time: we’ve been on the road for six of the eleven months we gave ourselves for this trip. It’s easier for us to count time instead of distance: we don’t know if we are half way to Mongolia and we don’t know if we are going to get there in the end or if we will pack our bikes to come back to Europe somewhere else. As we said from the…
We don’t know if a bi-monthly recurrence is common for podcasts but it sounds like a good timing for us. This third podcast is mainly about music – with two different intermezzos. Recording conditions are never the best possible but, as you know, we have this punkish attitude that keeps telling us that it’s better to have something published for you to listen to instead of aiming for perfection (that never exists anyway). This podcast comes just a few days…
A month has passed since we published something on this blog. But time is a bizarre entity when traveling like this (and even more since we’ve entered Iran). Furthermore, my writing was focused on two different projects: the first was a song that a friend asked me for his band‘s new album; the second one was a short travel story to apply for the World Nomads Writing Scholarship 2019. It’s about an adventure we lived in Turkey in November 2018,…
We published just two photo galleries here on the website (Greece and the Balkans) after creating albums on our Facebook page. But photos increase in number and internet connections are not always fast enough: uploading pictures on Facebook and here takes a huge amount of time. Since our Fb page is public, even those of you who do not have an account can read what we write and take a look at the pictures as we post them. So here’s…
Some of you may know that Mery has the gift of drawing and you may also know that she mainly uses it for her job, creating beautiful characters and images for her activities with children. She is not a professional but she has a great hand and an interesting out-of-the-box creative approach (that’s why she also helped me a few times when I was free-lancing in PR and marketing, many years ago). While I was working on the audio editing…