Jon Faine - From Here To There

WHERE WE WERE EACH SUNDAY: JUNE 2008 JANUARY 2009

Top Ten Songs from the iPod

Dont get me wrong, we had a fabulous time, but rather than romanticise our expedition I prefer to accentuate its shortcomings and let the reader judge, on balance, where the truth lies.

Somehow, I convinced myself that it was a good idea. Somehow, I convinced myself that it was do-able. Now I shake my head when I realise we drove 39,231 kilometres in six months and play a slide show of highlights in my head. We crossed twenty countries and went from our front gate in Melbourne to Trafalgar Square in London without using an airplane. We drove through a snowstorm in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, and across the Torugart Pass at Kashgar in western China into Kyrgyzstan in winter, all without snow chains. We diverted around horrific car crashes on mountain roads in teeming rain at Tongren in central China and avoided an Iranian Paykal sedan doing cartwheels on the freeway near Tehran. We wove around the shores of the Caspian Sea, navigated the desert in Turkmenistan and island-hopped by ferry from Timor to Flores to Sumbawa to Lombok and Bali in Indonesia, then on to Java and Sumatra.

We learned to say hello and thank you and please in nearly thirty languages and dispensed fluffy toy koalas that traumatised small children in obscure mountain pockets from Laos to Kurdistan. We threw a frisbee across borders and taught customs officers from Timor-Leste to Uzbekistan how to drop-punt an Aussie Rules football. We gave a hitchhiking soldier a lift on the Armenia Azerbaijan border, earning smooth passage through roadblocks for our charity.

We ate bark and ox blood and dog and worms and pigs ears and eel and blood sausage and curries so hot we nearly fell off our chairs. We bribed police across Indonesia, Cambodia, China and Turkmenistan. We ignored parking tickets in Jakarta, Ulaan Baatar, Milan, London and nearly got towed away in Paris. We still have credit on our freeway passes in Singapore and Switzerland. We flouted Londons congestion charge and Ashgabats curfew. We went down one-way streets and were threatened with traffic fines in Tehran and Samarkand. We had one puncture in -13 degrees in snow in No Mans Land between China and Kyrgyzstan and a buckled wheel and ruined tyre from a massive rock in the Altai Mountains in Kazakh Mongolia.

We dented someones bumper bar in Cambodia (US$5 compensation) and left black rubber tyre marks on the side of a marauding swerving taxi in Turpan in Muslim Uyghur China. We got lost everywhere. We did not take a GPS but used maps and a compass. We asked for directions in mime. We never ran out of fuel. We paid a whopping A$2.66 a litre for diesel in Hovd in western Mongolia, and filled up for the total of an astonishing A$2 for 144 litres in Jolfa in western Iran. (That is not a typing error 144 litres for less than A$2 or A$0.0125 a litre.) Nothing on the car broke except the CD player jammed. We had nothing stolen from our luggage or car anywhere. Jack was pick-pocketed in Jatujak flea market in Bangkok and that was the only time we were preyed upon. People refused payment for food and fruit in Indonesia, Laos, all over China and in Uzbekistan.