Fromeward Bound

Taking the long way home from Japan to Frome, UK

Category: final route (Page 1 of 2)

Croatia route

March 1, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Whilst the European leg of Fromeward Bound was, by necessity, a bit of a dash for the finish line, a short stay in Dubrovnik was always on the cards. And for good reason as things turned out. Aside from being a pretty city; the Game of Thrones connection held high novelty indeed! From Dubrovnik we made a quick visit to ‘Meereen‘ (aka Klis Fortress, near Split), after which our time in Croatia came to an end and we were off into Slovenia!

[Geography pedants will note that this post should technically be called Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina! But as we only drove through 30km of Bosnia, we’re not counting it as a ‘visited’ country]

Montenegro route

February 21, 2017 / / 0 Comments

By virtue of it’s size, our time in Montenegro was incredibly short – easily less than 24 hours! The one impression we came away with was that it’s a very pretty place – lots of lots of picturesque villages, the sea to the west and big mountains to the east. We’ll come back one day and explore properly!

Albania route

February 21, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Contrary to the popular belief of everyone we spoke to in Greece, Albania did not turn out to be full of bandits hellbent on robbing us and making off with the car! The reality was pretty much the same as every other country we’ve passed through; people were kind and keen to help out however they can. Case in point: within half an hour of arriving we found ourselves taking a ‘shortcut’ on a small track (as a result of missing an earlier turning.) As we passed through a small village the locals flagged us down, told us the track ahead was out of action and then invited us in for several beers.

Greece Route

December 10, 2016 / / 2 Comments

It’s official! Fromeward Bound stage 1 is now complete!! We rolled up at Clare’s parent’s place in Greece sometime just after lunch today.

Plan A was to arrive in very early January. Then about a month ago we formulated plan B, which would see us turning up in mid-December. As it turns out, we’ve arrived even earlier! Mostly that’s down to a combination of cold and darkness – for the last 3 or 4 weeks we’ve had to huddle up in the car from 5pm until 8am, which means we end up playing a lot of Scrabble. To be honest, there’s only so many times Clare can continue to lose and retain any sense of dignity so we made a break for the comfort of home!

From here we have a bit of time to sort things out; the roof rack broke in Mongolia, then broke some more in Uzbekistan and now needs a full-on repair; our oil change is about 3000km overdue; the fuel filter needs replacing; and there’s a few new bits of furniture we want to make for the car.

We also need to plan the next bit of our journey home…. the weird thing being that we could probably be in Frome in 5 days from here!

Turkey Route

December 7, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Our first night in Turkey was great – sat by the sea in our chairs enjoying the warmest night’s camping for months, drinking a nice bottle of wine (amongst the piles of rubbish left by previous occupants – sigh.)

From there on, however, the rain kicked in and didn’t let up. I’m not sure if our tactic is best, but when the weather is grim and the landscape becomes invisible we hit the gas and drive, which is the way things went in Turkey. One night we thought the car was going to blow over as we were battered all night by wind and rain whilst the thunder and lightning raged overhead – it was easily the loudest (and most persistant) thunder either of us have ever heard!

4 sleeps later we were checking into a nice hotel in Istanbul where it wasn’t raining 🙂

Istanbul has been a bit of culture shock for us – after months of either being in the middle of nowhere, or in the cities of friendly countries like Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, it was a bit of eye opener to suddenly have people in our faces every 10 steps trying to rip us off or get us to do something we didn’t want to do – time to toughen up and remember our street smarts! That aside Istanbul is a fascinating place to spend time wandering around.

Our statistics followers will be fascinated to hear that our highly accurate in-car thermometer recorded it’s lowest temperature thus far here in Turkey – a whopping -14ºC.

Georgia Route

December 5, 2016 / / 0 Comments

I think I can safely say our visit to Georgia was pretty much all about the cities! And the wine.

We really wanted to drive out to some of the northern countryside regions, but after driving south from Russia through the Caucasus Mountains it was apparent that both winter and the snow had arrived making access difficult. We tried one route over a mountain between Kutaisi and Batumi but got turned back after 40km as the road was closed due to snow 🙁 We’ll just have to come back another time!

Not that being in the city was a hardship. Good food, fine wine and a massive range of beer to choose from!

Russia Route (Third visit!)

November 19, 2016 / / 0 Comments

It’s hard to believe it was only 4 days ago that I posted our Kazakhstan route, bemoaning the difficulties we were having with DHL – feels like weeks ago.

On Wednesday we were finally able to collect Brian from the DHL office – hooray!!! There was sadly only time for a brief celebration as we had to hit the road to reach the Russian border that same day. It was a pretty grim drive due to the weather but we finally crossed into Russia at 10:30pm. Once in Russia the next few days were all about getting to Georgia; battling over-zealous/corrupt soldiers at every checkpoint, icy roads, snow storms and rain to finally cross into Georgia this morning.

We’re now booked into a guesthouse in Tibilsi, having spent a very pleasant, blue-skied day driving south through the Georgian mountains. After the monastacism of Uzbekistan, the bleak remoteness of Western Kazakhstan and the blur of Russia, it’s like being in heaven. Seemingly every second shop is full to the brim with bottles of wine and the restaurants serve salad!

Kazakhstan Route (second visit)

November 15, 2016 / / 0 Comments

It wasn’t meant to turn out this way, but we’ve now been stationary for 5 days. The long and short of it is that DHL have let us down in a big way and failed to deliver Brian on time. He was meant to be ready for us to collect on Monday, then they said Tuesday, now they’ve promised tomorrow. Given that our Russian visa says we have to cross the border tomorrow, I’m not sure what we’ll do if they let us down again….

On a more positive note we’ve been staying in a lovely (but expensive) apartment with proper, fast internet and free laundry. So, we’ve been loading up on TV shows to keep us amused during the long cold nights in the car. We’ve also been eating lots of pizza.

The statisticians amongst you will be excited to hear that whilst we haven’t beaten our maximum elevation record, we have smashed our minimum elevation record on this leg achieving -49m!!

Uzbekistan Route

November 12, 2016 / / 0 Comments

I’m currently typing this from the city of Atyrau in Kazakhstan having crossed the border from Uzbekistan a few days ago. The entry and exit procedures from Uzbekistan border on the ridiculous with our exit taking over 4 hours. The border guards had a very thorough rummage through literally everything – including a good sniff of Clare’s baking powder.

Our time in Uzbekistan was, by necessity, short and we stuck to the sights, which meant many more nights spent in city hostels than normal. It was an interesting experiment but I think I’m happier when it’s just us and the car out in the countryside.

The next milestone will be our happy reunion with Brian (our drone) at the DHL office on Monday morning – drones are banned in Uzbekistan so we had to post ours from Tajikistan to Kazakhstan. With Brian safely back on board we’ll enter Russia on Wednesday and make a mad dash for Georgia over the next few days in accordance with the strict timetable dictated by our transit visa. We’re both excited to see Georgia 🙂

Tajikistan Route

October 24, 2016 / / 0 Comments

One of the ‘big ticket’ items on the drive home to Frome was always going to be the ‘Pamir Highway’ – a semi-paved roadway that starts in Kyrgyzstan and climbs up on to the Pamir plateau in Tajikistan before slowly descending to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. I can now report that we have successfully completed this leg of the journey and all expectations were easily met. Big, big mountains, cliff clinging roads and, for the latter part of the route, lots and lots of waving children. The road has a reputation for being a bit scary but, to be honest, the scariest thing was having to get the car filled up by bucket from a big unmarked tank – poor Tots!

So we are now in Dushanbe, which has turned out to be a very green, clean and friendly capital city. Not quite so friendly was the first restaurant we visited who decided to poison me by means of pizza.

As we’ve now given up on any chance to travel home via Iran, the big job whilst we’re in town is to get a Russian transit visa. Once we have this, we’ll be able to re-enter Russia north of the Caspian Sea and make the dash to Georgia. Our first embassy visit last Thursday failed on a few technicalities so today was attempt number 2. They have now accepted our application and are graciously going to give us 3 days(!) to clear 2 international borders and cover 1000km and all for the very generous price of USD127 each.

Before Russia we still have a couple more coutries to tackle – Uzbekistan in 6 days time, followed by a second visit to Kazakhstan.

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