Real journeys. Real lessons
Stories to spark your next trip
Journeys I've actually done
15 stories
Kuwait Bay · Kuwait · Asia
Kuwait after dark: driving into the desert tent camps
By four in the afternoon I had finished every sight on my Kuwait City list, with a flight out only late that night. So I did what the map suggested: crossed th…
Kuwait City · Kuwait · Asia
Turning a Kuwait layover into a highlight
Kuwait was a deliberate layover: I landed in the morning with a flight out late at night, and one day proved exactly enough. It nearly ended at the airport, th…
Moynaq · Uzbekistan · Asia
The ship graveyard where the sea used to be
At Moynaq, in the far north of Uzbekistan, fishing boats sit rusting on dry sand. Not beached, not abandoned near the shore. Stranded in a desert, with no wate…
Tajikistan · Asia
The Austrians who would not pay the border fee
We reached the border late at night, deliberately, on the theory that there would be fewer people. There were fewer people. There was, however, a group of Aust…
Iran · Asia
Iran: the most hospitable country you're scared of
I arrived in Iran nervous. Years of headlines had done their work, and I expected suspicion, hostility, maybe worse. What I got, within an hour, was strangers…
Iran · Asia
The Iran the news never showed me
Everything I thought I knew about Iran, I had learned from the news, and the news only ever shows you one Iran. There is another one, the one people actually l…
Kazakhstan · Asia
We drove the Mongol Rally through Central Asia
I wanted to see Iran and the Stans, and I found an adventure race that went exactly there. Then I looked at the dates. I had a full-time job, and disappearing…
Kazakhstan · Asia
Overlanding the 'stans: what it's really like
Everyone warned us before we left. You will be robbed, they said. You will be shaken down at every checkpoint. What actually happened across the Stans was the…
Khiva · Uzbekistan · Asia
My brother won a melon arm-wrestling in Khiva
We rolled into Khiva, the walled desert town in western Uzbekistan, filthy and exhausted after days of driving, and found the place in the middle of a local fe…
Kyrgyz steppe · Kyrgyzstan · Asia
We knocked on a yurt to buy the local drink
After the deserts, Kyrgyzstan arrived green and lush, with horses and cows on the plains and yurts scattered across them. Then we saw one close to the road wit…
Mashhad · Iran · Asia
The shrine I feared, and the joy I found instead
There was one place on the whole trip that I was quietly dreading. In the country's holiest city stands one of the largest and most sacred shrines in the Islam…
Pamir Highway · Tajikistan · Asia
The Pamir Highway, at twenty kilometres an hour
The Pamir Highway is one of the highest roads in the world and one of the great drives on earth, and the first thing it teaches you is patience. It took us 29…
Ashgabat · Turkmenistan · Asia
Ashgabat: the white marble city with nobody in it
You come down out of the mountains and the city appears below you, white and gleaming, and it does not look real. Ashgabat is built almost entirely from white…
Darvaza · Turkmenistan · Asia
The Gates of Hell, at four in the morning
In the middle of the Karakum desert, a wide crater in the ground has been on fire for decades. They call it the Gates of Hell, and driving to it is most of the…
Samarkand to Khiva · Uzbekistan · Asia
The Silk Road in a week: Samarkand to Khiva
Uzbekistan hands you the Silk Road in a straight line, and a week is enough to drive it properly. Three great desert cities, each entirely distinct, plus a det…
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