OverlandSphere
Overland Travel, Expedition & Adventure Information for 4x4, motorcycle and truck overlanders
It was about on day two that the bushes on our rear suspension failed. Long suffering, these rubber buffers prevent a metal on metal clash in the suspension components. Although this didn’t halt our progress, it made us wince every time we hit a medium to large bump, which happened about every three seconds. It did nothing for our confidence…
Just before you read the next installment, we would like to thank eveyone who has suported us by reading this blog, and by kind emails and messages. It has really meant a lot when the chips are down to know that people are thinking of us back home. We are now well over half way, and have clovered over 15,000…
Back at home when we were planning this trip, I would occasionally be asked which parts I was most worried about. I would reply Sudan or Northern Kenya, Somaliland having been a late spontaneous diversion. My worries were mainly based on a lack of knowledge about what things were like on the ground in these places, and the true risks…
The sun was almost extinct as we climbed the steps in front of Berbera police station to find an old man in a wicker chair. Two armed men in dusty berets flanked the Police Chief but he himself displayed no military attire. He wore only a swathe of burgundy fabric, richly embroidered and firmly swept around his bent body.…
Ethiopia, the homeland of Haile Selassi, is the heartland of Rastafarianism. As such Addis Ababa it is still firmly in the thrall of the Reggae that Selassi brought back from his exile in Jamaica. Before Reggae however the music heritage lay in Jazz and Swing. In the first decades of the 20th century Addis moved to the sound of Abyssinian…
It was a slightly drunken promise but none the less it was an invitation to Africa. Taking advantage of an absent boss, stretching one weeks leave into two and just enough time to get jabbed, insured and booted. I was off to Ethiopia to meet the ramshackle doctors on their travels. When I met them in Gondar it was the…
It was with nervous excitement that we made our way from the village of Wadi Halfa, Sudan’s northern frontier town to the port, although we had come to the conclusion that this was a rather grand title for what was in fact a single jetty and crumbling customs building. Wedged into the back of a tuk tuk we watched Africa’s…
Wadi Halfa is a Nubian town on the Sudanese shores of Lake Nasser. This huge man-made lake has divided the Nubian people and displaced them into southern Egypt and Northern Sudan. The deliberate inundation of the old city of Wadi Halfa is still a source of resentment and a favourite topic of nostalgic lamentation amongst the older tea drinkers of…
It transpires that Aswan is a tourist hotspot. We discovered this when we tried to buy a kofta roll and paid five times the going rate for it. People visit in order to cruise the Nile and visit the colossal tombs at Abu Simbel. We arrived however to catch the ferry to Sudan. For this reason Aswan is also a…
Merry Christmas everyone! You can find our Christmas video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a56bHM4hfMM&list=HL1356340210&feature=mh_lolz Yesterday we manoeuvred our car onto the Aswan ferry barge, at great cost to our nerves and some cost to nearby freight products that were crushed and mangled in the process of clambering onto the tiny area of roof space allocated for our car. An ordeal I think every…
Cairo – 10,472 miles The taste of freedom was fresh on our palates as we approached Cairo, and our excitement offset any apprehension we should have felt on approaching this hotbed of political strife. The world’s media was honed in on this city as the crowds expressed their discontent with the current government. The Egyptian people famously ousted their leader…
As we pulled our mud-caked vehicle alongside the twilight outline of the Flintstone’s Cave hostel in Goreme, Cappadocia we were greeted by welcoming staff and a few friendly Erasmus students. “Looks like you’ve had fun, what have you been up to?” one enquired. It would be a few days before the obscure images of the past 24 hours had cleared…
We drove from the Turkish border to Tekirdag, a slightly grisly port town on the south coast. We arrived late and went in search of food. In a café at one o’clock in the morning we met Tayfur. Tayfur is a French language student studying in Tekirdag who very kindly offered to accommodate all six of us on the floor…
It was with a reluctant parting of eyelids and a woollen head that I surfaced. My slumber had been prematurely interrupted by shouted chants and sounds of a ruckus in the street below. I stumbled woodenly to the open window, squinting in the sharp morning sunlight. At length my eyes focussed on the Thessaloniki magistrate’s court not fifty yards away,…
Two things stood out from our brief visit to Albania, the cars on the road and their drivers. I read somewhere that in Albania 80% of cars are Mercedes. Although this seems ridiculous, our experience told us it couldn’t be far from the truth. This is apparently due to a large scale smuggling operation after the government collapsed in the…
I will have to continue this post as our only remaining Wallace has gone missing. He was last seen bartering with a wizened old man over the purchase of some antiquated padlocks. The price was settled at a bag of gold coin and Bas’ immortal soul. Bas certainly has an eye for a bargain. So with Bas otherwise engaged in…
If there is such a thing as simplicity in life, I have yet to find it. I had lamented over how previous life was filled to bursting with work, emails, social commitments, an over-stretched fleet of interests and ambitious future plans. “On this great journey we can live day to day, we can read books and write and develop new…
‘You’ll pretty much just need your flip flops and board shorts Guy’… This was the advice given to me from my brother, Sebastian, prior to joining the three intrepid doctors for the first several months of the trip through Europe and Turkey. For some reason these words have echoed in my mind, in between the shivers and teeth jitters, during…
I was astounded on first visiting the little boy’s room in Austria to find a toilet basin that appeared to have been installed backwards. Most Europeans are accustomed to a watery sink hole at the rear with a gentle, ergonomic upwards slope towards the rim at the front. However this new and alien specimen has its pool hard at the…
We left Bratislava across the Danube. I was excited to cross this great river that has always formed one of history’s most significant borders. Looking across the misty banks, I could picture anxious roman legionnaires at the limits of civilisation, surveying the dark, endless unknown from their walls. As we crossed over the space-age soviet bridge, I imagined we were…
Well what is there to say about Prague? I suppose most of what went on in Prague must inevitably stay in Prague. There was our first burglary, brilliant Belgians, pedunk-a-dunk, free beer and two midgets in a cage. The rest is unutterable. Weary, bleary eyed and slightly sheepish we left the capital of Czech and struck out towards Bratislava in…
“It was the best of times, it was the würst of times” Daniel Nuth That day we arrived in the city of Brugge in time for lunch and a wander around. The weather was melancholy, the indicators still didn’t work and the wobble we had noticed since replacing our transfer box was worryingly present. On the plus side, the architecture…
Our journey to Dover had two key stops: my parents’ house in Somerset and Dan’s father’s house in Maidenhead. Dan and I took our cars up to Somerset and waited for Rich who would drive up once the landy had passed its MOT. We had been frantically dashing around for the past week trying to get everything ready. We still…