recent posts
- 19. AI translation and silent wedding bells on the back road to Erzurum
- A New Year’s Update
- 18. Kars vs. Bicycles – getting acquainted with Turkey and its legendary shepherd dogs
- A walking tour of Vatan: Istanbul’s inner city plastic recycling neighbourhood
- 17. A journey into the volcanic and ancient Armenia
Category: Uncategorized
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It’s gets cold at night on the high mountain plateau, but wrap up in enough layers you can lay down and enjoy the solitude. There were no strange animal noises, early morning tractors, or herds of sheep – it was just me, the crickets, and occasional distant call to prayer. Just don’t expect much in…
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Hello and a Happy New Year to you. I hope you enjoyed the Christmas festivities and haven’t burdened yourself with any overly ambitious new year’s resolutions. It was always my intention to return home from this trip in time for Christmas 2025: a goal that was achieved with about two weeks to spare. Since then,…
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Turkey seems like quite a big place after spending time in the Caucuses. If you combined Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan into one country, Turkey would still be over four times the size (also, good luck trying to govern that imaginary country – it lasted only 36 days when they gave it a go in 1918).…
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Whilst I was travelling through Turkey, a three-part podcast was released called Boy Wasted, investigating the death of a young Afghan refugee in an Istanbul recycling facility and the murky underworld of Turkey’s import-driven plastics recycling industry. It has for several years struck me as odd that Turkey has become such a major destination for…
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Route planning is a savoured pass time for some and a necessary evil for others. I enthusiastically fall into the former, but it can occasionally induce a headache when the ‘perfect’ route in your mind collides with the constraints of our imperfect world. Armenia has an abundance of such constraints. So from Georgia, unless you…
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Greetings all, I hope you’re keeping well and have been enjoying the blog. It has been a great privilege to spend my time this year cycling through all these different countries and attempt to document my experience. I had hoped to maintain the c.fortnightly publication schedule which seems to be where things have settled, but…
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When you search for guesthouses around the northern Azerbaijani/ Georgian border crossing you get virtually no results on the Azerbaijan side, for some reason all the B&Bs seems to be over the border in Lagodekhi. So although I would be entering the country after 9pm on a Sunday evening, confidence levels were high that I…
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Salam! This is another bumper edition of the blog, documenting the biggest cultural and climatic shift of the journey so far. If you are a cyclist considering visiting Azerbaijan and have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with a comment or message me directly (e.g. via Instagram). Foreword on the Caucuses The…
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I’ve never flown with a bicycle before. The prospect has always seemed daunting to me – it can be bad enough sometimes just getting on a train. With flying, get the packaging all wrong and you could be in for extra charges or even having the bike flat rejected at check-in. Then there’s the prospect…
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I was about to enter my final Nordic country of the tour, but unlike in Denmark where I felt as free as a bird to hang around the nice places, take long diversions, and generally not give time a second thought, that luxury was now a thing of the past. Any time spent straying from…
The Cycling Brit 