For all the geologists/geoscientists out there - no, this is not a reference to GIS! For my Mum - don't worry about it, it's an in joke, you won't understand. So over the last week we drove through the infamous "Polygon" - the Soviet nuclear testing area... apparently there;s a huge lake, man-made in the fact that its a nuclear explosion crater. It's not on GoogleMaps, so we couldn't locate it... but if you want to visit some of the towns around Semey you need c...

4 and a half months on the road... wow! And I'm sure to all those reading this, it seems like 14 weeks of non-stop excitment and discoveries... well, that's true for a large part of it. But there's also the parts in between. The 6 hour drives, days holed up somewhere just waiting for the next step, the inevitable sick days, and search for a salad that's made without mayonnaise or meat. This blog post is about those moments. Such as Fintan's epiphany that being a...

On the road again! After so long in Kyrgyzstan it is hard to believe we are leaving! I was even getting quite worked up about crossing the border. It's been so long, I was really on edge! But let me go back over the last few days... We drove down from the mountains and gave a lift to our friend, Lucas, who got really excited about the car and doing a similar trip. He said as a trial run he was planning to go to Namibia for 2 weeks and hire a car, just to see how...

Yesterday we were up and on the road by 8am. Finally I am allowed to drive again! After a hour of driving at 50kph I sped up, only to be pulled over. Fintan jumped out with the documentation to sort it out. The officer claimed we were speeding, Fintan asked to see the camera, and it showed us travelling at 67kph in what the officer said was a 50 zone. I couldn't believe it - after all that time driving at 50, I was sure I hadn't been speeding! The fine was a ma...

Tashkent wasn't all that much to write home about, so I'm not… We left for the border, only to be turned around and told to go to Chinoz and cross there - the Tashkent border has not been open for 4 years! Would've been handy if anyone had mentioned that, but never mind… 70 km later we arrived in the middle of the lunch break. Sandwiched between 5 Mongol Rally teams. This was both good and bad. Firstly the good - one of the team members spoke Russian and he...