Grand Caravan Overview

Today we leave London, flying 12.5 hours to Singapore. Whereas, our 22,500kms Singapore to London journey required:
• 61 days
• 29 trains (12 of which were overnight)
• 11 buses
• 1 plane
• 1 taxi when the bus broke down

LOST
• A $2 second-hand reading book
• One of my three pairs of underwear, left drying on a sunny hotel windowsill (two pair were enough)
• Kazakhstan air security confiscated our camping cutlery forks (owned since Girl Guide days), deeming them weapons of mass destruction. But they let us keep the knives!
• Shoe leather – my trusty Keen sandals may now need to retire. On average we walked 10 kms a day throughout the 61-days.

FOUND
Lots of new memories (provided dementia doesn’t set in). An awakening to new ways of looking at the world, including the realization that the countries of Central Asia will likely be part of the world’s new regime. Peter Frankopan, states in his 2016 book The Silk Roads; A new history of the world:
‘I wanted to show that the decisions being made in today’s world that really matter are not being made in Paris, London, Berlin or Rome – as they were a hundred years ago – but in Beijing and Moscow, in Tehran and Riyadh, in Delhi and Islamabad, in Kabul and in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, in Ankara, Damascus and Jerusalem. I wanted to remind the reader that the world’s past has been shaped by what happens along the Silk Roads. And I wanted to underline that so too will its future.’

Scrolling through the topics of my daily reports you may think me a religious zealot, but it is impossible to ignore how spiritual beliefs (and politics) have shaped the region we ventured through. Once again let me steal Ernst Cassirer's quote who succinctly states:
‘Man cannot escape from his own achievement. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience.’

As for us, we will soon be re-grounded in our NZ universe of an overgrown garden, overdue tax returns and diary appointments. During our adventure the life-cycle didn't stop - good friends died and our first great-niece, Eva Aroha made her debut.Read more