Travel photos and journals from across Asia [1997-2025]
Day 11 Türkiye to Tbilisi Today was our flight to Georgia, and after a battle with the traffic and a very unpleasant stint in SAW airport (one of the worst I’ve ever been through), we were crammed onto the two-hour Pegasus flight to Tbilisi. After navigating past a grumpy immigration officer and finding an ATM,…
Day 8 Cappadocia to Eskişehir We’d planned an early start to head up to the lookout to get some photos of the balloons at sunrise, but the weather had turned, and all flights were cancelled. We were very lucky to get on one at this time of year, it seems. The journey to our next…
The main attraction in Cappadocia is the sunrise hot air balloon flights, and we were up at 05.30 ready for ours. After a lot of faffing around in a minivan doing pickups from various cave hotels, we were driven out into the boonies where the balloons were being filled in the pre-dawn light. A quick…
Day 5 Ankara to Cappadocia Another driving day was ahead, and leaving the city on Saturday morning after another fantastic breakfast was relatively easy. An hour and a half south was Tuz Golu, a massive 1,650 square kilometer endorheic salt lake in central Türkiye and a popular stop for bus tours. The lake went on…
Day 3 Istanbul to Ankara It was time to move on, leaving our Istanbul Airbnb and grabbing a cab to the car rental place, which also proved challenging due to the traffic. There is zero traffic control in Istanbul, so everyone parks and drives where they like, which includes buses squeezing down tiny cobbled streets…
Our second major road trip in the year we both turned half a century had arrived, and this one was taking us out of Asia and to the west. We would be spending almost a month exploring Türkiye (formerly Turkey) and Georgia, where we both get a one-year visa on arrival, so leaving the Asian…
Day 13: Fukuoka Today, we wanted to sample some evening street food, so we set out a little later and walked over to the Canal City shopping mall, which turned out to be another multi-floored collection of empty shops selling hi-so brands. It did have a fancy fountain that would come on for a little…
Day 11: Asakura to Nanzoin Today, we had to return the van, and the weather remained grim, but there were a couple of sights to see on the way back to Fukuoka. The first stop was Amagi Park at Asakura, which was one of the top spots to view the cherry blossoms. The annual Sakura…
Day 10: Kurokawa Today, I turned 50 (an entire decade since we went here), and to mark the occasion, the weather was cold, wet, and miserable, but I was determined not to let it make a difference. We would stick to the plan for the day, which involved motoring north to the Daikanbō lookout first…
Day 8: Aso With the boat trip over almost as quickly as it began, we were on the road again for the hour’s drive north to the Aso-Kuju National Park, which is home to Japan’s largest volcanic caldera and one of the largest active volcanoes in the world. We checked out the Asobo no Sato…
Day 7: Nishiki to Takachiho Today was a driving day as we had to head around three hours north to get to Takachiho, where we had booked a boat trip for the following day. We decided to avoid the boring toll expressway and take the scenic route through a spectacular river valley on Highway 212….
Day 5: Sakurajima to Ebino Leaving the still-smoldering volcano in the morning, we pointed the van north, driving through the coastal town of Kirishima and toward the Kirishima-Kinkowan National Park, where we would spend a couple of days hiking. Before venturing into the national park – free to enter in Japan – we checked out…
Day 3: Ume to Miyazaki Temperatures dropped below zero again, but there was no snow overnight, just a layer of ice on the front windscreen. When the van and ourselves were suitably warmed after a coffee, we headed south to Nobeoka to fuel up and fix the rear tire, which had picked up a screw….
It was time for a return trip to Japan to celebrate my fiftieth in March. We’d originally thought of going to Sapporo and Hokkaido, but flights were either fully booked or silly prices for that time of year due to the skiing season, so we opted for Fukuoka and Kyushu instead. Kōdō (行動) is the…
Ban Rai is a quaint little town in the hills in western Uthai Thani province and this was to be our next location. Named after the owner’s pet, the Owl Yard campsite was a pristinely kept spot, clearly aimed at Bangkok glampers with power sockets at each pitch, trolleys available to cart the gear from…