Our new camping mat arrived yesterday – a big thank you to Tina at Thermarest for getting it to us so quickly – so we were free to hit the road again. We’d spent the last few days debating where to go next and after flipping back and forth a hundred times we finally decided not to go to Jordan. There’s a lot we’d like to see there but the potential hassle of getting back into Syria would weigh on our minds since getting a visa at the border is never guaranteed. The last thing we want is to find our way back north towards Iran blocked.

Instead we’ve decided to stay in Syria, taking our time to explore a country that’s really grown on us. With that in mind, we set out on a loop that will take us down to Bosra, very near the border with Jordan, where we’ll explore the town’s famous ampitheatre and then head back to Damascus just in time to renew our visa for another 30 days.

Getting out of the city was surprisingly easy and soon we were on a quiet road heading dead south. We stopped for a little break to see a war cemetery which holds around 3,000 graves of soliders killed in the wars of 1967 and 1973. Our visit seemed to take the military staff on duty by surprise and they looked us up and down, then photocopied our passports and finally smiled as we pedalled off after spending some time in front of the large monument in the grounds. (more…)

After a month in the beautiful rolling-hilltop region of Italy called Le Marche, it’s time for us to move on once again. We have truly had a wonderful time staying with the Wills family, earning our keep by doing lots of painting and household chores for them, while sampling the local wine, swimming in the sea and admiring the view. On a good day we have seen mountains over 350km south of here — amazing! We’ve also done a fair bit of work for ourselves, ordering new sleeping bags, applying for visas and renewing our health insurance. So many things pile up when you’re on the road.

All good things have to come to an end though and now we’re up at the crack of dawn, ready to get a train to Ancona and a ferry to the Greek port of Igoumenitsa. From there we’ll take about 2-1/2 weeks to reach Turkey via northern Greece, where again we’ll settle down for a few days to collect various visas for the trip eastwards.

We’re a little nervous about the journey ahead. It’s hard to leave good friends — we get attached easily to people and places — and for the past year we’ve been on relatively well known territory. After Greece we’ll be treading new ground and Central Asia sounds like a challenge: tales of weeks of nothing to eat but mutton and rice and plenty of travellers falling ill with stomach woes. We hope we can rise to the challenge and keep our sanity while also enjoy the fantastic scenery the area has to offer.

We decided to take a day off after our epic ride yesterday and ended up doing some work on the bikes: taking apart the wheel and cleaning out all the dirt and grit that gets stuck there, regreasing everything and putting it all back together. Like most good jobs, this one took far longer than we thought it would and included a few minor hassles, including trying to figure out how to untangle Andrew’s chain from his spokes. Don’t ask how the chain got wedged between the spokes in the first place.

If you are tempted to do the same to your bike (take the wheel apart, not mangle your chain and spokes), here are some step-by-step pictures we took. Just click on the photo to start the slideshow.

You will need cone spanners that fit your bike’s wheels (we used a 17 and a 13 but ask at your local bike shop), grease, a clean rag and, if you plan to do the back wheel, a tool to help you get the back cassette off.

It was time to leave Budapest today, but not before we tried to sort out a problem that’s been literally keeping us awake at night. One of our Thermarest sleeping mats started to delaminate a few days ago. This means it develops a big bubble in the middle of the mat and is a bit like trying to sleep with a balloon under you – far from comfortable. The same thing happened in Morocco with our other mat and Thermarest kindly and swiftly sent out a replacement under their lifetime guarantee. Great customer service.

At the time, they had also suggested trying their distributors. That didn’t work for us in Morocco but since we were in a capital city on this occasion we thought we’d cycle out to Budapest’s Thermarest representative to see what they could do. Some good luck got us through a set of locked doors and into the right office, even with an English-Hungarian translator in tow to get our message across. The poor woman in the office didn’t know quite what to make of us but she called her boss who spoke excellent English and quickly sorted us out with a new mattress.

Success! And another gold star in our book for Thermarest. This time, however, we decided to try a different model of sleeping mat – the Z-Rest Lite, a closed-cell foam pad – and we’ll see if it holds up better to our intensive use. To give an idea of just what we were asking of our sleeping mats, we stayed in our tent about 170 times before the second mat gave up on us. That’s the equivalent of taking a 2-week camping holiday every year for 12 years. We’re still impressed with the Thermarest self-inflating mattresses, but maybe they’re not quite designed for the type of extended trip we’re doing. We’ll certainly keep you updated on our experiences with the foam pad. (more…)

After 12,000km on the road, it was definitely time for some new tires. The first couple pictures on the left show how cracked and worn our old Vredestein Spiders were. We were very happy with them though - not a single flat after all this time! Unfortunately, we couldn’t buy them again since no one seemed to have them in stock. Even Vredestein’s official distributors said they didn’t have any to sell us and an email to Vredestein’s customer service department went unanswered. A real shame that poor availability prevented us from staying with what we think is a great tire. Instead, we’ve plumped for the famous Schwalbe Marathon XRs. The standard has been set by the Vredesteins and we’ve heard so many good reports about the Marathon XRs. We’ll let you know in another 12,000km how the two compare.