Ride Earth

I’ve been in Yerevan for about three weeks and the hold-ups continue. My friends here like to joke that by the time I finally get this deep-winter sleeping bag and pedal south towards Iran, it’ll be spring and I won’t need it any more!

That may turn out to be the case, but in the meantime it’s still well below freezing by day and by night, and I’ve heard reports that temperatures in the deserts of not-too-far-away Turkmenistan are still approaching minus thirty - even the nearby Iranian city of Mashhad is currently experiencing nighttime lows of minus twenty-five, according to an Austrian cyclist. I’ll certainly feel much happier with this new sleeping bag whilst cycling towards the Tibetan plateau, where the altitude will have more effect on temperatures than the time of year. (more…)

I arrived in Yerevan last Wednesday. I have been staying with some wonderful new friends who work at the French Embassy here. From the first village after crossing the border into Armenia from Georgia, Tom and I decided to cycle alone to Yerevan.

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We knew that as we headed out of Europe and into the Middle East and Central Asia, we’d be cutting through as much red tape as we would snow and ice. So maybe it was a good idea that we’d expected it, as international bureaucracy is becoming a bigger pain in the proverbial than a brand new leather saddle! (more…)