Sometimes I get this thing where I’m utterly at peace with the world and I think “there is no where I’d rather be than here”. Wadi Rum was this place. Rust coloured sand lead up into towering mountains of orange and it was just beautiful. Our group took a convoy of jeeps out to a [...]

Tick one off for a Seventh Wonder of the World.  We got into Petra and the town of Wadi Musa just before midday, meaning our trek through the valley was going to be at the hottest point in the day.  In the Middle East.  During Summer. On the way in, we passed a sign encouraging [...]

Another early morning crossing to the Jordan border where we had to get used to a new Kings face plastered everywhere.  Amman was just another busy big city to be honest and we only had 2 nights here.  Our first day there was a huge electrical fire so we couldn’t even go downtown.  We spent [...]

The oldest inhabited city in the world!  We were warned that the bus station in Damascus was going to be utter chaos and we weren’t let down.  We watched, impressed, as our little tour guide stood in the middle of about 20 Syrian taxi drivers all yelling at her and at each other.  She did [...]

I was well ill at this point.  My Western stomach decided it had had enough of Eastern food and was living off liquids with frequent sprints to the bathroom.  We left Aleppo for Hama to spend the next night. We meet out minibus driver, a really sweet Syrian man who, like most Syrians, had no [...]

We boarded a bus with a group of excitable Syrian men who I’m pretty sure used us as a decoy tourist bus so they could smuggle some sort of contraband in.  I saw some of them hiding various bits and pieces in the bus’s smaller overhead compartments.  We noticed pretty quickly that in these parts [...]

Our last stop in Turkey was in Antakya which I wish we’d never done.  It was awful.  I didn’t bother taking any photos as after the fairy tale that was Göreme, this place was dirty, crowded and dodgy.  The next paragraph are some of the notes I took while we were there: Second only to [...]

After the nightmare bus trip we were pretty shattered.  We found our agency who told us that there was a problem with the hotel we booked, but not to worry, he would put us in another for the same price.  He laughed when Marcelo asked about air conditioning and told us they didn’t yet have [...]

Somehow, we woke up on time but pissed around long enough to miss our bus to Pamukkale.  We sprinted to the bus station with our giant backpacks and missed it by about 5 minutes.  There were about 6 bus companies all sitting next to each other at the station and despite the fact the bus [...]

It was either Selçuk or nearby Kusadasi as our next stop. We ended up going to the tiny sleepy town of Selçuk and I’m glad we did as Kusadasi sounded huge, touristy and expensive.  Selçuk has its own quiet charm and we were pretty quickly talked into staying one night longer here than we though [...]