Travel Tramp’s March Travel Round Up

Here’s my travel round up for March!

I’ve been on the road a lot since my last ‘proper‘ round up of events in January, when I headed on over to Bali for a few weeks in the Sun. I explored an abandoned theme park, did a spot of SCUBA diving and drank far too many Bintang Beers. The usual stuff.

Now I’m back on the route I originally set out to do, from London to Lhasa (with an added Bali break of course) and I’m covering too much ground and seeing too many awesome sights to be able to produce a linear blog on the website within a decent time frame. To put it into perspective, I’m still publishing articles from Kosovo, which I visited way back in November! And unless I was able to write 2 or 3 articles A DAY, there’s no way I can keep the pace of writing coherent with the actual pace of travel. I’m no super blogger.

So I thought I’d give you all another ‘proper’ round up of events, so you can keep track of where I am and what I’ve done, and then come back in the future once I’ve put together a ‘proper‘ article for the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen!

January saw me soaking up the sun and killing my liver in Bali. I risked the roads on a motorcycle to find some pretty empty beaches in the north, and some pretty awesome shipwrecks underwater. I got back into SCUBA diving after a long time away (we’re talking years) and got into spearfishing (for the first time).

Oh, and I saw some wild Orang Utans on a little side trip to Malaysian Borneo.

Then I headed back towards Europe. Or is it Asia. Or somewhere in between. I landed in Istanbul to carry on the journey I set out to do originally. I’m back on the road to Lhasa. Although there’s still a few thousand miles to go!

I travelled down the Mediterranean coast, saw a few ancient ruins.

And a few recent ruins from the Greek-Turkish population exchanges which occurred after World War I.

I attempted to walk 500 kilometres along old Roman roads in Lycia, and only made it 100 kilometres before realising I was unprepared, out of shape and lacking a map.

So I caught a boat to The Turkish Republic Of Northern Cyprus, a country which doesn’t really exist, being recognised only by Turkey, and I went on a road trip.

There were wild donkeys and abandoned holiday resorts. It was great.

I went to the ‘real‘ Cyprus too, but there wasn’t much going on.

Then I caught a boat back to Turkey, and I saw the mountains and caves of Cappadocia. I even had my first ever hot air balloon ride, courtesy of Butterfly Balloons, and stayed in a cave for the first time, courtesy of Ottoman Cave Suites.

And after floating around in the sky for a bit and living in a cave for a week I went and climbed a mountain to look at some giant heads. Really old heads from olden times, on Mount Nemrut.

This last week I’ve travelled through Turkish Kurdistan, you know, the bit that everyone says to avoid. It’s been rather pleasant.

There’s even a town called Batman. Although the locals weren’t quite as amused as I was by this fact…

And there’s a 12,000 year old city which the Turkish government is going to flood soon.

I had some great Easter Eggs too.

Two months after landing in Istanbul, and I’ll soon be leaving Turkey for Georgia. Then I’m off to Armenia, Azerbaijan and Central Asia!

I’ll be stepping up the blogging game too, and there’s articles galore lined up for April so keep checking back for more!

Richard Collett, March 2016.