Even More Moving Pictures

Here’s part two of the video project: “the hard part”. Same idea, but featuring a different song! A few moments from this one: 0:19 – Charyn Canyon, a nice spot during our short time in Kazakhstan, and featured in Ewan McGregor’s “The Long Way Round” 1:23 – Lauren’s favourite shot, a hard-earned moment at 4655-metre…

Moving Photographs

The thing about spending a lot of time totally care-free and cycling through the great outdoors is that you end up with a lot of video footage, and need to spend a proportionately large amount of time curled up in front of a computer painstakingly piecing it all into something coherent. Video was always a…

Roses and Thorns

And you thought the blog was going to finally end there? The first thing that anybody asks when you have been away for a year is: “what was your FAVOURITE place?” This is a tough question to answer: does it mean favourite challenge? favourite relaxing day? favourite meal? or does it really mean a recommendation…

Postscript

It’s been five months since we were subjected to the madhouse of late August crowds in Terminal 3 of Pearson Airport that greeted us when we stepped off the plane in Toronto. The place we left a year ago is much the same, and even some of the construction projects are still ongoing. Friends and…

Eurotour

We may have reached the end of our cycling trip, but we were not yet set to get back on a plane. My parents had met us in Budapest, and we would be spending a week together visiting the three cities of Budapest, Salzburg, and Vienna, before busing to Amsterdam to catch out flight home….

The Finish Line

Our final day of cycling began with rain, perhaps the most rain we have seen since Indonesia. We’ve biked and camped in the rain, but we’ve never torn down camp in the rain. It’s a particularly painful thing to do and pretty much covers everything you own in water. But it was the final lap…

A Week in Serbia

Our first experience with Serbia was crooked money changers along the border region, offering us laughably low exchange rates for our Bulgarian money. Serbia is not part of the EU, so the border felt like crossing into the “Wild West” of Europe. Add in the difficult-to-pronounce place names and a fierce thunderstorm, and the place…

Race Across Thrace

Once upon a time, we drew up a rough plan for this trip. Looking back on it now, it’s hard to believe that we were able to make it to all these places which just seemed like faraway, impossible dreams. You can also tell from the map that we really didn’t have much of a…

Among the Svans

Most of our travels in Georgia were in the lowlands, but we had heard great things about hiking routes in the Caucasus Mountains along the northern border with Russia. Let’s go for a hike! One winding, five-hour minibus ride later, we were breathing the cool mountain air of Svaneti, getting ready for a 4-day walk….

Leaving on a Midnight Train to Georgia

So many songs about Georgia, but alas, they are all about the OTHER Georgia. The Georgia of our story is the small nation in the Caucasus. Huge mountains separate this country from Russia, and the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea cut it off from Europe and Asia. Perhaps this helps explain why this small…

Azerbaijan is not Enough

Arriving in Baku, Azerbaijan, we advanced our clocks ahead by 1 hour…and approximately 20 years. Baku is a very well-polished, modern city built with oil money, and for the first time in months we were able to enjoy the comforts of home: pedestrian streets, a subway, WIFI hotspots, ATMs, McDonalds. A taxi driver almost backed…

Five days in Turkmenistan

For overlanders trying to cross from the ‘Stans into Europe, one of the major obstacles in the way is the Caspian Sea. This is a very unknown part of the world to us in Canada, but out here the jigsaw arrangement of all the countries is something we could draw from memory. There is a…