An Antipodean Adventure

By Richard Reed

This is the true story of two friends embarking on a year-long adventure of comedic ineptitude driving across half the world in a modified Land Rover Ambulance raising money for the charity, ActionAid. Our trip would take us skipping through the riches of Europe and Turkey, across incredible Iran and Pakistan, journeying up through the hysterical humidity of India to the coolness of Nepal and the Himalayas of Tibet, before arrowing down through South-East Asia towards our final destination of Australia. On the way we’d be molested by men, chased, ruin a perfectly good balcony, bribe the police, hide in an Army Base, get molested by men again, get propositioned, get robbed, have the privilege to view some fantastic charity work, smoke Afghan marijuana, ride elephants (unrelated to the last point), almost kill a wedding party, and break down nigh on a hundred times. And get propositioned again. Hopefully that sounds like a tale worth reading, but if you’re still undecided, let me assure you that the second week was even worse!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Reed
• Release date: Jul 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311140302

Richard Reed

Traveller. Photographer. Writer. Lover...not a very good one. Person. Glasses wearer. Sandwich eater. Biscuit aficionado.I've had previous articles published on-line in motorbike websites and for Land Rover Monthly UK when completing the Antipodean Adventure. My travel adventures are entirely self funded and, these days anyway, are split between my day-job commitments and my ever insatiable wanderlust.

Book preview

This was the best year of my life. The freedom was luxurious: like waking up every day in the warmth and comfort of your own bed, rolling over to the cool side of the pillow next to your beloved and realising it’s a Saturday morning and work is a million miles away.

Of course, it wasn’t actually like this: I woke up every day in a tin-oven utterly exhausted after a restless night’s sleep sweating like a turkey on the night before Thanksgiving. I’d wipe the sleep from my eyes trying to remember where the hell I was, and slowly come to the realisation that yet again I wasn’t arising next to the bronzed goddess of my dreams, but opposite a mosquito-bitten Irishman with a complexion paler than scared milk. But bloody hell that was a good year!

This is the true story of two friends embarking on a year-long adventure of ineptitude driving across half the world in a modified Land Rover Ambulance raising money for the charity, ActionAid. Our trip would take us skipping through the riches of Europe and Turkey, across incredible Iran and Pakistan, journeying up through the hysterical humidity of India to the coolness of Nepal and the Himalayas of Tibet, before arrowing down through South-East Asia towards our final destination of Australia. On the way we’d be molested by men, chased, ruin a perfectly good balcony, bribe the police, hide in an Army Base, get molested by men again, get propositioned, get robbed, have the privilege to view some fantastic charity work, smoke Afghan marijuana, ride elephants (unrelated to the last point), almost kill a wedding party, and break down nigh on a hundred times. And get propositioned again. Hopefully that sounds like a tale worth reading, but if you’re still undecided, let me assure you that the second week was even worse!

Chapter 1 – The Set-Up

An optimist is the fellow who doesn't know what's coming to him.

J.J. O’Connell, General, Irish Defence Forces

Personally, I like to take my victims to the edge of a freezing abyss, and then I pounce! Robinson Crusoe had Man Friday, Phileas Fogg had Passepartout, even Tango had Cash for God’s sake, but could I entice anyone to drive across the world with me from the UK to Australia? Could I hell! I had spent two years mulling over almost every detail, laid my hands on guidebooks for every country, plotted a path along the best landscapes, mountains and edifices. I’d researched embassies and consulates in every country, identified passable roads at different times of year, looked into visas and points of distinct danger (quite a few of those). All of these were present and correct, apart from a travelling companion. I had originally planned on traversing those 12,000 miles with my girlfriend, but after a painstaking final split that was obviously going to be a terrible idea. I then spent much of the year saving money for a special four-week trip to see her when she was travelling in India, but after much brooding and sitting around in my underpants listening to The Smiths, I finally succumbed to the sensibility that this was an even worse idea than the previous one. In fact, it was the worst idea since Captain Cook smothered himself in lard and bacon in the hopes that potential cannibals were vegan. What I needed was to get away from it all – to escape.

With the UK to Australia trip set aside until I could find a suitable compadré, I had four weeks of holiday to plan, and serendipitously, my Irish friend, Dwyer, was longing for a break as well. Despite being at university together in Manchester, our mateship blossomed when we left the city and even more so when living on different sides of the country. We scoured the Internet to find amongst many things that piqued our interest, a site listing the top ten train journeys in the world. It will come as no surprise that at the top of this list was … the Canadian Rockies, but lying behind it was the infamous … Coast Starlight in the US. To ease the suspense, the Trans-Mongolian wasn’t mentioned in the Top 10 at all in fact, but when we thought of interesting train journeys, there was only this one that really came to mind. The emptiness of Russia, spanning nine time zones and experiencing bitterly cold weather mixed with a famously stolid, suspicious Communist culture was just too much of a draw card. We could drive that, you know, I suggested unwittingly, looking at the vast expanse of paper mass leading from the green Western Russia into the icy depths of Siberia and beyond. Are you mad? replied Dwyer on the other end of the phone. The train is much easier, goes right the way along, across Mongolia and into China. Besides, can you even drive?! I often get asked that question, mostly when actually behind the wheel.

Fast forward a few months, and we’d hopped and skipped through St Petersburg and Moscow on our way east into a Siberian winter by train. Dwyer wasn’t taking to the snow quite in the same way that ducks have that affinity to water, although if they tried swimming out here, they’d lose their feet. It was minus 160°C, which, for Lake Baikal, the ‘tropics of Siberia’, was relatively balmy for late November. Dwyer did remember seeing and indeed feeling his feet at some point, perhaps earlier that morning when still in bed or perhaps in the booming music-box of a decrepit taxi we’d caught out to Baikal, but at that precise moment, standing next to the largest freshwater lake in the world, he was properly ducked off. I can’t feel my toes! Jesus Christ! I have never been this cold in my entire life! he whined. Empathy isn’t at the forefront of many young men’s abilities, and so too with our relationship. I was perfectly fine, for example, so what was his problem?

Huddled over various open grates with thick jackets and fingerless mittens, traders grilled fresh omul, a beautiful smoky fish indigenous to Lake Baikal. That warming smell was enough to breathe a little life into almost any freezing body, and I happily made my way along the shore-line, scrabbling amongst the pebbles glued to one another in the frost, taking pictures of a pitch-black lake being pressed upon by an onerous slate sky. Bliss. This was a tough part of the world and the weary fishing boats tethered against their will to the small dock echoed the same sentiment. We had spent the last few weeks on the Trans-Siberian Railway from St Petersburg, and in a few days we would be turning south across the wonderful tundra of Mongolia and then into the metropolis of Beijing.

We found that the Russians were a hard people: stoic, distant, difficult to engage. Even one of their own, the great Dostoyevsky, said, the most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, ever-present and unquenchable, everywhere and in everything. And what does one do with all these eternally doleful Eeyore’s? The same as everywhere else: enrol them in a customer-facing job where they have a modicum of power, such as the Visa office in the Russian Embassy in London. I invested a good deal of time there practising something I thought the British were quite good at, but apparently we’re mere amateurs. The Russians dole out gold medals, pronounce titles and enter Olympic contests for the event known as ‘queuing’. On a frosty morning in October I joined a line outside the Russian Embassy for two hours and liked it so much I returned the next day as well – queuing they may be good at, but processing visa requests and reducing said queue, not so much. When eventually I was able to begrudgingly make my way inside, the desk attendee showed distinct displeasure at the fact that I had disrespected her entire nation and her comrades by not only surviving the queue, but in that process I had not once cogitated on the embarrassment of stapling my form incorrectly, like some kind of idiotic bastard. Thankfully she was in a jubilant mood and let it pass just this once with a warning and a sound thrashing, which I thought was fair, and certainly could be a lot worse.

Unlike Embassy staff everywhere, and Dwyer, the self-acknowledged antithesis of a happy-go-lucky-Irishman, I am an optimist. This serves two purposes. The first of which, naturally, is that everything has a bright side, that out of the bad will come the good and that generally everything will be all right. It’s not a question of whether the glass is half empty or half full, I’m simply happy that there’s a glass and I’m the current owner. The fact that some liquid substance inhabits that vessel is purely an extra sprinkling of sugary delight on what is already an exceedingly good-looking situation. The other side to being an optimist is that sometimes, just sometimes, said optimist negates carrying out thorough research because they’re of the idiotic assumption that prospects will simply fall into place. Once the cards are turned over, not only will they have a four-of-a-kind but they’ve probably won the hand of a wealthy oil baron’s daughter in the process. Thankfully, Dwyer was far more pragmatic and did his research about the trains, and I thought this bore well for any future travelling expeditions. For example, one assumed that there were several trips a day through the hinterland across the Urals, and I could simply jump on and off much akin to my days as a greasy student on a Eurorail pass. Not so. Miss one, and you’ll be waiting for three to four days for the next. And what’s more, when we were there, we got the feeling that the locals would like nothing more than to see stupid foreigners stranded. Or frozen. Or both.

Dostoyevsky’s damning blanket generalisation of Russians proved absolutely bang-on in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg. There was a distinct lack of cheer in any Russians we met: waiters; policemen; passers-by; train staff; even tourists. Friends told us that apparently laughing and smiling in public are seen as a weakness in Russian society, which effectively tranched us into a league of our own pansiness, and so it proved throughout our journey. Russians I’ve met since the trip have insisted that they themselves are a shy people and the communication barrier would have really put up walls (like those in Berlin, badam-tsh! Am here all week!), but then nodded in agreement with Dostoyevsky just the same. I’d like to say that we endeared ourselves to the locals as much as we could, but that wasn’t always enough. In St Petersburg for example, with the vodka rattling around inside of us, we thought it would be a good idea to take a shortcut in the dead of night straight across the Winter Palace after side-stepping some monstrously large park gates. I’m still mystified as to why we tried such a thing. In fairness, we did make it almost the full length of the park before we were spotted and duly escorted by Russian soldiers to a small hut where the captain used our own translation book to tell us that we were to be fined. We were then summarily dismissed as idiots, and with very little complaint from us I might add.

In Moscow we did fare better, although our tendency to meet men that killed for a living was far too frequent. Seemingly a lovely chap of youthful appearance, one of the first Russians we spent time with, was an ex-KGB agent who had become a bodyguard for Dwyer’s friend Anne, who worked as a director in one of the aluminium companies. Anne was a fantastic host when we were in the capital: she showed us around Moscow; put us up at a hotel right near the Kremlin, which was far beyond our means; sent her car (a Land Rover, naturally) to pick us up for dinner; and even arranged tickets for us at the Bolshoi to see Swan Lake. It was quite surreal at the time. Neither her driver nor the bodyguard spoke a word of English but the bodyguard carried a gun, which meant that he entered places first, and we were to follow. We liked him immediately, mostly out of fear.

Years earlier, Anne was a guest speaker on HR Policy at the company Dwyer worked at, and he admonished her for something or other he fundamentally disagreed with. It turned out that after a lively debate post-presentation, they both shared a love of Irish folk music and the friendship blossomed ever since, and it was fun to see that Anne still remembered the whole encounter extremely well. It was Anne’s secretary, a kindly soul called Misha, that enabled us to have our first real conversation with a Russian that didn’t involve handing over money, and after a few days I have to admit that there were times he almost, almost laughed.

Misha was our guide around Moscow when Anne was working and he was excellent company. He was a small, lovely man with a neatly trimmed beard and peaked cap, but had spent a lifetime not relaxing, and was wound up tighter than an 1812-Overture-hating coiled cobra in a box of jangling tambourines. He used to work in the Peace Corps for several years teaching English, but obviously any negotiation skills he must have picked up were no use on Russians: whilst we traipsed to our room through the famous, humungous Hotel Russia, the envy of all Moscow, Misha was confined to the lobby by security personnel. I can still picture him clutching his little cap between his hands, utterly forlorn at the realisation that he’d probably never get to see inside, let alone stay in such luxury.

Leaving such extravagance behind, we boarded the train from Moscow to Siberia and hopped into a small cabin with four beds. We found ourselves sharing with a beautiful girl from Novosibirsk who didn’t care for us one bit, and a young doctor called Petr who was going home to visit his father in distant Vladivostok. There were two very memorable aspects of Petr: one was that he spoke passable English and seemed fairly genial; the second caused a great deal of confusion and shame. Please allow me to elaborate on what transpired as the train plodded along that frozen railway line.

The length of the train on the Trans-Siberian Railway is enormous and subsequently, the train comes equipped with a dining carriage to keep the masses armed with vodka, food and more vodka. One afternoon, Dwyer suggested going down to the food carriage five times in as many minutes, which meant he was absolutely ravenous and was about to eat his own fingers. Dwyer, like myself, matched Napoleon’s idiom perfectly in that we marched on our stomachs, and although neither of us are fussy, when there is no food to be found we are utterly miserable. I asked Petr when the food carriage was open, to which he replied, It’s not open today, and winked at me. Unsure of what I just saw, a wink and a smile being something I was unaccustomed to in Russia, I repeated the question. Again came the reply that, There will be no food served today, followed by the wink. This was a sure sign I thought, that this man, this man Petr, one of the most sociable men we’d met in an otherwise humour-mute Russia, was indeed having a jape. And any jape at my travelling companion’s expense meant that I was all for it. With Dwyer getting ill-tempered I kept winking at my good man Petr with all the knowing smiles, telling Dwyer that no food was around today and we would simply starve. With giggles choking me back, I summoned Petr to tell him that indeed there was no food available, with again, a quick wink to me. Queue grumpy moans and complaints from Dwyer until the doctor got up out of the carriage, exchanged some pleasantries with the carriage attendant and confirmed once again that there was no food. This man Petr was laying in the drama; he could play Richard III at the Globe Theatre in London at this rate. Dwyer was incandescent with confusion and some rage at me for laughing and being in such a good mood despite facing the prospect of grumbling bellies. We then trampled on down to the food carriage to find to my utter dismay that indeed no food was available. And the cause for all the confusion of what I thought was a merry jape? Petr had a glass eye, the winking was simply trying to keep the eye moist, and what’s more, this glass eye stared at me when I was asleep too. I hate to even think of what Petr thought I was doing in winking at him.

The last Russian we met of note was also one of the most colourful, and to date the only smiling soul we encountered in over 3,500 miles of railway. Boris was most certainly not his name, but since we never even got close to knowing it, that will have to do. Boris decked himself out in large rubber yellow windproof trousers and jacket, and although he looked like he sailed the high seas, he seemed equally capable of simply robbing a clothesline and turning up in either a fisherman’s outfit or a pair of bra and pants. One thing was clear though: our man Boris was drunk enough that you could set sail on the fumes coming off him. We ran into him in the local supermarket in Irkutsk when we were buying biscuits, he naturally was buying more vodka and sausage – a favourite to take the sting out of the vodka when drinking it straight. This large oaf stood chatting to me, or rather talking at me, through his helplessly broken teeth, in purest drunken Russian for about five minutes, and in this short time, I was utterly and hopelessly out of my depth, chucking in an occasional niet or da when feeling it appropriate, or quickly backtracking to one or the other when seeing that it displeased. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dwyer staring at groceries with his back to me, shoulders heaving trying to stem the tide of chuckles. He’d abandoned me in my time of need, and I’d have done exactly the same. For all his failings Boris was still the most engaging individual we’d met on our way into an icy Siberia, where the smoked omul was probably a close second.

Despite these social faux pas and runs-ins with the constabulary, we had an incredible amount of fun whilst in Russia, laughing off almost every incident, and this to me indicated a fairly solid travelling partnership. The only potential issue was in communicating feelings, something that typically young men are rubbish at doing anyway. Although back in Siberia, he seemed to be getting the hang of it.

Right, off to the feckin taxi, I’m feckin freezing! stammered Dwyer, giving up on the Lake. I asked him to wait a second, to take a moment to behold the mighty Siberia, and besides which, I had an idea: it was time to float the big adventure. At most other times Dwyer goes through a bizarre process when I announce any new brain patterns: first the eyebrows inch higher then the eyes follow suit to the heavens before sinking to the carpet as if summoning help from the dark forces. Dwyer is an intelligent man, and I can imagine that talking to the likes of me every day with my unerring enthusiasm would be grating. But the chill in Siberia had penetrated even his ice-strewn beard and facial muscles, so I took the non-movement as a sign to continue. You know the trip I had planned with my ex-girlfriend going overland to Australia? Well, I’ve spent a very long time researching it, more than on the Russian trains, and it would be incredible. We could raise money for charity, buy a vehicle and do it up, get published in a magazine perhaps and see countries like no one has ever done before. Would you be keen to come along? Dwyer took his time in responding, as always.

When? came the dull reply.

Well, I’m thinking we leave in about a year and a half, in June or July. It’ll then take about ten months to get to Australia. I’ve arranged most of it – where we need to get visas, border crossings etc. I just need someone to come with me. Dwyer wiped the icicles forming around his mouth. It was never my intention to drag Dwyer out into the kind of land where even polar bears wear woolly jumpers and then pop the question, so to speak. Although unconsciously perhaps I needed to see what he was made of. Even after a few weeks in Russia and spending some considerable time with him at university, I could never tell what he was thinking. Not that he was complicated or deep in thought, but simply because his countenance constantly expressed a scene of glumness, like he’d had a stroke that rendered both sides of his face immobile. I’d like to say I saw a glint in his eye that expressed excitement that touched him to his very marrow, that a smile crept across his frozen jaws and that his voice trembled in enthusiasm at the mere prospect of the journey, but then I’d be taking some artistic license to the tune of confessing the Mona Lisa hanging in Paris wasn’t one of my best pieces. He nodded slightly, I’ll think about it. It was still the most eager I’d seen him. Dwyer tramped off towards the omul traders and the waiting taxi, his monotone voice barely audible as he trailed off into the whiteness, muttering something about his feet.

In answer to Dwyer’s original question back in London concerning my driving ability, I could technically drive, but never claimed to be any good at it, nor indeed like it for long stretches. A drive across 12,000 miles of terra incognita such as Belgium, with nothing but our wits to rely upon for our survival? Now that could be met with relish, and what’s more, we wouldn’t be tied to the train tracks either – that just seemed to be too restrictive. I’d always despised the mere thought of a package holiday, or any kind of limitation really, as planning a trip seemed the most exciting part: having someone run after me making every effort to ensure my experience was ‘satisfactory’ repels me. In London I was seemingly surrounded by people that wanted a comfortable life with a house, a wife, 2.4 children and a job that you didn’t actually as much as like but couldn’t afford to realistically leave. It didn’t sound very comfortable to me. The word still makes me uneasy. ‘Comfortable’. It slips so easily into life. Cardigans, slippers, girlfriend, house, marriage, children … death. Not happy, not ecstatic, not alive with senses buzzing from a new experience. Just, ‘all right’. Not that I’m a hedonist, far from it, but I love the experience of something a little different, a little bit special. Of being made uncomfortable. It’s the lack of comfort I enjoy, pushing myself, testing my character in multifarious situations, meeting saints and villains that draw out the personality of a country. There is the inevitability of course that a scenario is encountered that I cannot simply saunter through without considerable sweat on my brow and a jolly sore bum from a prolonged interrogation, but that’s just defeatist. Maybe it’s the stereotypical wartime British attitude in me that’s been drip-fed over generations by my parents and theirs in turn. I even find myself cutting back on the luxuries of life and then reasoning to myself that ‘well, there is a war on’. And it’s true – somewhere there always is. Having to put effort into our existence brings boundless, bubbling optimism, and despite the different outlooks on life, Dwyer and I are old souls: aching to seep through our Generation X softened flaky exterior we want to ask our brethren probing questions about the war effort over a cup of Bovril, remarking that we don’t know how lucky we are, for there are a lot more people worse off you know, oh yes! I knew one bloke, lovely man … he didn’t even have a head! And you never heard a word of complaint from him!

And so, on a very icy trip to Siberia, the seed was sown with Dwyer and less than two years later, after copious amounts of time playing with our ever-trusty Land Rover¹, an optimist and an Irishman with a pessimism distilled through hundreds of years of evolutionary pedigree, were ready for a big adventure of driving from the UK to Australia overland.

Chapter 2 – Setting the Tone

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

John le Carre

Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.

Chekhov

I’ve always wanted to breakdown in Belgium. Exotic, distant. It’s one of these little things you dream of as a child, along with catching your balls in a zip or being caught naked walking around school and no one being the slightest bit impressed with the assets on display. Belgium; a land full of wonder. For example, one might wonder, what the bloody hell is in Belgium? And you’d be right to question that. But once you’ve broken down in Belgium, a whole new plethora of opportunity gapes open to you: where else could a vehicle breakdown other than the second country out of the twenty-five or so we were to travel through? Lots of places, as it happened. One of them France, which is actually where we broke down, roughly twenty-three hours after setting off. See? Belgium: exotic, distant.

When you set off on a 12,000 mile journey of a lifetime and then just as suddenly don’t, it conjures images of a slightly deranged and certainly misguided Don Quixote, bidding farewell to his beloved lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and promising to bring back fame and as many bedazzling jewels of unparalleled value that his fair horse, Rocinante, can bear. But in my head, upon numerous proclamations, Don Quixote sets off into the sunset atop his filly, only for Rocinante to be unmasked as two men in a pantomime horse’s outfit, the rear of which has a gammy leg and with each step slowly falls behind the head. Whether Dwyer or I am the arse I’ll let you decide. Any quixotic comparison ends there, however, and I flatter myself to be part of such company. Although admittedly at such an early point in the journey, I could have done with some of Quixote’s resilience and belief, as we’d experienced a ludicrous descent from the exalted high of leaving on a journey we’d taken years in planning, and then wallowed in a disconsolate puddle of woe. But then I had a man with the hardwired emotional intelligence of a walnut to complain to, so that sobered me up from being too drunk on self-pity. That’s what friends are for, right?

I’d like to say that in leaving London it was tantamount to the Queen’s Coronation in the 1950s: cheery Cockneys packing the streets to wish us farewell; jelly and ice cream on splendid long Union Jack (and Irish flag) clad tables; young Patrick England, a Welsh boy from Scotland, pouring whiskey into the fruit punch so old Mrs Norris would get a little tipsy and start telling some of her famously rude jokes about nuns doing press-ups in cucumber fields. But alas none of this was to be. We accidentally turned up late to our own farewell, with my ex-colleagues electing to catch their prescribed train home from Marylebone Station rather than wait. I tearfully said goodbye to my girlfriend, Angela (who I’d met only recently), shared a kiss and embrace I still remember, and then went off to a friend’s house to give away my sofa, stereo and guitar. Erstwhile, there we remained, patiently sipping cups of tea until the traffic eased. I’m sure Captain Robert Falcon Scott in his expeditions to the Antarctic faced similar issues. On a warm Friday night in June, enduring one of those British summers that grandchildren are verbally tortured with, we set off on our adventure to the chalky cliffs of Dover.

The crossing itself was rough, but both Dwyer and I fell asleep leaning on a table aboard the 11.55 pm slow ferry as it lurched its way across the brown waters of the Channel to Calais. We managed a few miles in France before pulling over for even more sleep (we really spoiled ourselves) at a motorway service station. One of the few advantages we did have with our vehicle, other than being a great testbed for our mechanical ability, was that we’d essentially converted a 4x4 ex-Ministry of Defence ambulance into a mini-camper, enabling us to head off-road and then sleep in relative comfort when we got there. We had no air-conditioning, a window that opened only a tiny fraction, two cramped single beds, and if one of us stretched without due warning we’d take the other person’s eye out. Ah, the glamour of overseas travel!

Lying roughly twenty miles northeast of Calais along the coast, Dunkirk was our first stop, and it gave us a great chance to walk through the annals of the Second World War. This historic small town played host to one of the key scenes of battle in the 1940s between the Germans and the Allies, including my Great Uncle. It was here that the Anglo-French Alliance risked their lives in securing the retreat of 330,000 troops from the beaches, with roughly 35,000 French troops being subsequently caught by the Germans in protecting the escape. Although the British boats eventually rescued over 25,000 French, they almost didn’t: apparently the captain in charge of the evacuation signalled back to Dover ‘Operation Completed. Returning Home’, and one can imagine Winston Churchill replying, With the French Allies as well? Well, that’s some mighty quick work! followed by some slightly uncomfortable shuffling of feet and then engines being slammed into reverse.

It was a little beyond this town, on the motorway going south towards Lille, that we’d tombée en panne. Therefore, including the twenty-two mile crossing from Dover to Calais by boat, we’d achieved a whopping 164.1 miles in twenty-four hours, a massive 6.8 mph. This speedy coverage meant that in comparison we were a little slower than a chicken, domestic pig or a house mouse covering the same distance, but far quicker than a spider. We’d have thrashed a spider! Unless of course it was the Middle Eastern camel spider, which is a good deal larger than the average hand, and able to scamper along at a whopping ten mph. A camel spider could have even given us a lift.

As it was we had no team of camel spiders, domestic pigs or even a chicken to help push our 3.5 tonne behemoth, so almost crying with frustration and despair, we then had to phone the local mechanic, which made us even nearer to crying with frustration and despair. Clambering onto the top of the Land Rover to wrestle spare parts from the rooftop box whilst articulated lorries whizzed past at 110 kph wasn’t the best idea (didn’t stop us from trying), but our attempted repairs proved fruitless and we had to simply wait for our garçon to arrive, a young fella named Thierry. Unfortunately for us he was the most inept mechanic you’re ever likely to meet, and flat out refused to drive us to a local garage to fill up with LPG (Liquid Petroleum Gas, our alternative cheaper-than-petrol fuel resource), which is where we thought the problem lay.

Thierry towed us to the insignificant village of Herzeele, putting me on the verge of a mental breakdown in the process when he suggested we go back to the UK to fix problems he did not understand. The real pain-in-the-arse of it was that he didn’t have the foggiest idea of what the problem was, and blamed pretty much everything on the vehicle from the valves, which were not normal valves, to the distributor, to the manifold and exhaust pipes. What was particularly galling about this was that Thierry had asked, quite innocently, where we were headed. Telling a mechanic that you’re travelling around the world on a huge adventure when you’ve broken down on your doorstep was embarrassing, and I’m sure he had a good laugh at us.

Of all the places to be towed to, Herzeele was a nothing of a town too: a collection of houses with a shop and a pub effectively, with a small garage pulling in woe-begotten foreigners as part of a tourist trap. It’s one way to drum up tourism I suppose. I headed to bed that night utterly distraught, but Dwyer was far more hard-headed, which was exactly what the situation needed. We slept very little and in waking up Thierry plodded along at about ten in the morning to tell us that he didn’t work on Sunday, which left us frustrated as all hell. But as one door closes another opens and Dwyer’s resourcefulness meant that instead of crying into a baguette we headed out to catch up with an old friend.

A hop, skip, a taxi and a train through Poperinge found us in Rosenstadt, Brussels, to meet Anne, who had put us up in Moscow years previously. With her partner Henri, they were thankfully both willing to meet us for a day to drink to our good fortune and laugh at our bad fortune. It was wonderful seeing a friendly face and again being subject to marvellous hospitality. We chatted over dinner and copious beers about her time in Russia and she seemed relieved to be out of Moscow in the end, and happy with her new man in a very affluent, leafy suburb.

On that beautiful Sunday morning, Anne and Henri introduced us to a bit of local history in a nearby chateau reminiscent of something from The Four Musketeers: huge wooden doors led to a big stone courtyard with chickens and cats roaming freely, stables and outbuildings on the sides, the slightly dishevelled red-bricked la maison dead ahead.

Over a few early morning red wines with some retirees, Henri told us that the owner of the house, Jacques, was an 81-year-old ex-Olympian who had competed in the rowing team for Belgium. At the tender age of seventeen, Jacques was heavily involved with the tank regiments in the Second World War, eventually travelling in the second tank that came into Brussels to release it from the grip of the Germans. And if that wasn’t enough, during that period he was in charge of a Prisoner of War Camp guarding two hundred of the top German officers. Stories like this beggar belief but abound in this part of the world, where we would go on to visit museums and read countless other stories of survival and immense tragedy in Ypres in a few days’ time.

Back in Herzeele, Thierry had no new ideas regarding our beloved juggernaut, and after some persuading near to the point of exasperation, he took us and the van to the Land Rover garage in Brussels, and he even stopped at an LPG garage as well allowing us to fill up. I had broken down previously when running out of LPG, and had obviously not learnt the lesson: switching between the two types of fuel was fine; switching between the two after you’d run out of LPG was disastrous! Before a Land Rover mechanic could have a look at it, we wanted to test out the vehicle once again with the newly filled gas. We chucked the distributor cap back on, attached all the spark plug leads, made our mandatory LPG checks and fired the engine up. The old girl started first time! If I ever go to Herzeele again, I will find that man and give him a wedgie the likes of which France has never seen!

With back slaps all around, the Land Rover garage recommended paying a cursory visit to some old-style engine experts just outside the famous Flanders Fields town of Ieper, where we noted with some surprise, shells from the First World War are still being accidentally dug up ninety years on. The reaction of the locals? To place them on the side of the road with very little fuss whatsoever, with no warnings or bollards or even safety ribbon warning people of danger. We were assured that bomb disposal experts trundle along on their rounds every few days, like a milkman collecting empty bottles, and they’d probably pick it up as they went past. Probably! I consider myself a fairly liberal man and am dead against smothering children from the ills of the world, the overprotective nanny state of the west where jaywalking is a crime because you’re not responsible enough to cross a road on your own, but for the love of God Belgium, these are bombs! Indeed, if finding bombs on a daily basis wasn’t enough, the town of Ieper remembers the First World War every single day. At precisely eight o'clock each evening, traffic is halted around the imposing arches of the Menin Gate while the Last Post is sounded, a tribute given in honour of the memory of soldiers who fought and died there during the First World War.

Our new resident Land Rover expert, Luke, thankfully did manage to fix problems he understood, retuning the carburettors and adjusting the ignition timing for the second time in three weeks, so we were quickly on our way once again.

A one-hundred miles further on at one in the morning, we found that our engine was running far too hot for our liking, so back we went to Belgium – better to deal with the problem in thirty-five degrees Belgium than Pakistan in fifty! I swear we had actually driven the Land Rover previously: writing this seems like we’d just won a booby prize at the raffle! Luke pointed his experience at the head gasket and whilst this made us wince, this would have set us back a cool €2000 if we hadn’t done most of the work ourselves, under Luke’s tutorage, so the price was halved.

When finally removed, the head gaskets seemed to have very little wrong with them. Luke bashfully picked tiny little marks in the gasket as possible culprits but we both knew they were fine, which made us a little depressed as you can imagine, but not quite as depressed as seeing the engine temperature actually increase by two degrees from a before and after test. Now that was galling!² This was, according to Luke, standard, and the temperature did decrease marginally. On the plus side, for several days we did enjoy some incredibly hot weather in Ieper, and spent the days in the workshop and the nights enjoying some of the best beer on the face of this beautiful world before trying to ride our bicycles back to our campsite every night.

A late edition into the Land Rover as we had initially rubbished my Dad’s idea of taking bikes, but ended up taking them just in case – and they were fantastic! Having bicycles meant we could park the Landy a few miles outside of the city centre and just make our own way in and out, not having to rely on public transport, our own navigational ability, or the suspect reliability of the Land Rover.

Whilst in Ieper we enjoyed the publican hospitality of an old post office, Ter Posterie, which served up a range of over 170 delightful beers, some frightfully potent. I clearly remember sitting atop a barstool perfectly sober, indulging in a wonderful Trappist twelve percenter and then realising that to walk my legs needed to carefully test out the ground like a chicken in a minefield. However, you’d need to quaff plenty of these inebriants if you were at risk of being blown into flying mince every day by First World War bombs just through simply ploughing your field. A lot tougher than they look these Belgians!

So at the end of our first week, we’d spent most of the time running about from pillar to post on our bicycles rather than our preferred vehicle of choice, sleeping in a small tent we’d had no intention of using let alone making our home during a searing forty-degree week-long heat, whilst our trusty steed supposedly taking us around the world was laying spread-eagled taking one in the gasket. Not ideal … but the beer was excellent.

With the change in weather came the change in fortunes, and whilst our mattresses were drying off from an epic maelstrom, the Land Rover finally came together and we headed out of Belgium. The gods were clearly unhappy with our passing and screamed thunder and lightning at us all evening, with various vehicles aquaplaning across the drenched roads. Fortunately, our behemoth at 3.5 tonnes and wearing brand new tyres was not for moving and with such a horrendous start to our adventure, we just ploughed on through, hurtling through Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany to get some miles under our belts. Breaking down quite so early did completely wreck our plans of casually sauntering through Europe, but there was nothing we could do so onwards we pushed.

The Swiss Alps were extraordinarily beautiful, and since we’d been travelling for a whole two days straight, hitting a small milestone of just over 1000 miles from home, we afforded ourselves a luxurious break of a few hours in Lucerne to walk along the wonderful 14th century wooden bridge. We also had a swim in the welcoming cold turquoise lake, Dwyer being slightly put off by the resident ducks and their refusal to move – making swimming canard.

Switzerland, home for clocks, Alps, chocolate and a hell of a lot of guns (almost fifty per cent of the population has one), shares a border with the ineffably small and non-descript Liechtenstein, famous for absolute bugger all. There is, in fairness, a fantastic looking church at the edge of the capital Vaduz, but this Swiss tax-haven is essentially a one-road country, and the first capital city we’d driven through that when we pulled up for a stroll around, found ourselves genuinely flummoxed by the fact that we’d missed Vaduz entirely and were instead walking around a tiny village. We did find another couple of ‘features’ of