I rode from Madaba, the City of Mosaics, and home to a large Christian population, down to the Jordan River, dropping hundreds of feet in a glorious ride only momentarily rendered more perilous by being chased by a pack of ten to fifteen dogs at a checkpoint halfway down the descent. Seeing me screaming “FUCK” at the top of my lungs and pedalling like the clappers seemed to rather amuse the soldiers manning the checkpoint, but they were content to let me pass without question

I can’t remember where I saw Petra first, but whether it was a glossy full-page spread or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the images of a city carven in stone captured my tiny child mind, and I told myself that someday I would see that city with my own eyes. Whilst I had some reservations about the cost and efficacy of coming to Jordan from Israel almost solely for the purpose of seeing the former capital of the ancient Nabatean civilisation, I’d had a tip-off from a coll

Intro A two-week trip in ‘The Holy Land’ wasn’t in my sights until I realised just how inexpensive the flights were between Tel Aviv and Luton, the jewel in London’s crown of airports. A few months of planning later, and still the closer I came to flying out, the more nervous I became. From my limited school study on the region I really wasn’t too sure what to expect, or how to present myself to anyone curious about why and how I was travelling. Did being a cyclist make me mo

The rocks of ages: the Ottoman stone bridge and the 17th-centry Sinan Pasha Mosque, Prizren, Kosovo. Crossing the border from Bulgaria to Serbia, pedalling through the early morning chill of the no-man’s land between the two border posts, I felt a palpable sense of stepping out of the protection and regulation of the EU. As someone who works regularly with country risk reports and reads regularly the seemingly multitudinous threats to life, limb and reputation associated with

Before I embarked on my trip, I was interested to see when trawling Couchsurfing and Warmshowers (the cyclist’s equivalent) that many prospective hosts across Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania in their profile information added two words which stuck out from amongst the other biographical details: ‘no politics’ (variously spelled). From this I inferred that there seemed to be a new mindset among ordinary people – away from the teetering rhetoric of politicians and bureauc