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...

(Beginning - mid October) After a 10-hour stopover in Moscow airport (no sign of Edward Snowden hanging out in our transit lounge), we arrived in Tehran late at night…and our entry into our first port of call in Iran was very different to that of Bishkek. We had booked into a midrange hotel for the first couple of nights, and it was a real treat to be met by a hotel driver on arrival! Definitely a first. That and the lovely hotel we stayed in made for a ...

(End September - beginning October) After waving goodbye to our new found Tibetan and animal friends, we were off again, starting a rather long journey to Kashgar in the very north-west corner of China. This involved a bus to Xiahe (+ overnight stop), a bus to Lanzhou in time for an overnight train (32-hour journey) to Urumqi (+ overnight stop) and then another overnight train (26-hour journey) to Kashgar, 3400km later…quite epic. It was an interestin...

Mid-end September So here we were back in China, our aim being to travel through western and northern China towards Central Asia, for the start of our journey westwards through some of the 'stan' countries and the Middle East. Our first stop in Western China was Chengdu, the capital city of Central Sichuan province. Now suffering withdrawal from our regular coffee fixes and the amazing Vietnamese food, we were worried that eating and drinking in China was j...