Indulgent Rover

  When in Mendoza on a Celtic Rover expedition….on a sunny January day…it is imperative to sample some of the local wines which were some of the best I have had…and I have sampled a few over the years. One of the many advantages of being a more mature and …

G and I have just flown over the snowcapped Andes to arrive in a very sunny Santiago….such a contrast from Edinburgh in December and being catapulted out of christmas…actually quite the right thing to do! We have been decompressing and drifting through some sightseeing in the city interspersed with cafe …

In preparation for my trip around South America I decided it would be a good idea to learn a bit of Spanish so I set about it with some energy in Edinburgh with a very nice teacher called Natalie, however it became clear that a class twice a week was …

Unless you are attempting to cross the border in a vehicle between Russia and the Mongolian Altai mountains at Tashanta…. We arrived in plenty of time at the border having camped quite close by and there were only a few vehicles in front of us in the queue. There were …

Often in this blog I have tended to comment or post about the tough days, I guess because I think these are the more unusual for family and friends and more important for the record of the trip which are the two main purposes of the blog.  Just for contrast …

Time to chill…… This trip has been very much full-on for the past four months, that is, for me, a long time of 7 am starts and gruelling difficult 8 or 10-hour drives with only the occasional stationary day – and even then with a long list of repairs or …

As we were navigating our way across the Mongolian landscapes across light tracks which often just disappeared..I was reminded of one of my favourite books by Robert Macfarlane called The Old Ways which follows the tracks, drove roads and paths that form an ancient network of routes in the UK. When we …

It is important when on the road to keep up with sorting out the camp domestics such as shopping, fridge arrangements, cupboard stocking, clothes washing (and drying!) and being microbiology monitor….(I took this role much more seriously than G…possibly because I spend most of my working life researching parasites and …

While driving across a mountain road trying to navigate our way to Ulaangom in the Uvs province of Mongolia, we turned a corner and suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a village Naadam festival…all the more surprising as we had hardly seen any other vehicles or people on our …

I am sitting in my kitchen with the washing machine on and the dogs asleep in their bed listening to radio 4 and thinking about wild camping on the beautiful Kazakh Steppe, smelling the wild thyme, watching herds of wild horses and no-one in sight…. Adventuring is life affirming, sometimes …