Nov '13 - Jan '14 After a brief sojourn back in the UK - a wonderful week seeing my mum, Simon's family, old friends and meeting five newborn babies! - we flew to Guatemala, a slight diversion from our original travel plans, to attend the wedding of my step-sister Paulina to her now-husband Claus. Their wedding was brilliant, and soon our intended two-week stay in Guatemala ended up stretching out to two months… as we spent more time with my dad and family we...

For our own future recollection, just a few of the best bits of part 1 of our travels (14 countries, 6 months and almost 28,000 miles later…) MOST MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES: The Vietnamese Road Trip - just amazing. Amazing people in Iran…"Welcome to Iran!" Indonesian boat trip (the scary & the beautiful) Birthday week on Koh Rong, Cambodia - turning 34 has never been so much fun. Gobi Desert trip, Mongolia…totally vast, remote and 'away from it all'...

Our excitement about the swish and comfortable bus we were travelling in from the Iraq-Turkey border was short-lived, as half way to Diyarbakir we switched buses and we were now travelling in a tiny version of said coach, which looked like some sort of community bus for the elderly. This certainly seemed to encourage the community spirit among the passengers however, who were all very friendly and who we got talking to at a rest stop (those who spoke English anyw...

With only 2 weeks on our Iranian visa and now on a deadline to catch our flight from Istanbul to London at the end of October, it was time to hot foot it out of Iran and start on the homestretch - overland to Turkey via Iraq. From now on I will mostly refer to our time in Kurdistan Iraq / Iraqi Kurdistan as just 'Iraq', for simplicity, but this part of Iraq is not the Iraq you see in the news. The region's slogan is "The Other Iraq", and while it's technically...

After Yazd we headed to a tiny village (pop: 1000) called Fahraj, in the Dasht-e Lut desert, to break up our onward journey to Shiraz. The Dasht-e Lut is a large salt desert in south east Iran, and the village of Fahraj was like a mini-version of Yazd, with the same historic buildings in its old centre which included a crumbling castle, and what may well be the oldest purpose-built mosque in Iran. There was only one guesthouse there, the Farvardinn Desert Inn, ow...