Travel photos and journals from across Asia [1997-2025]
Day 22 to 24 Tbilisi It was time to take the Mitsubishi back to Tbilisi, a two-hour drive away. The beast had performed well, despite being a little underpowered, and the drive back was uneventful aside from the last ten minutes of traffic lunacy in the capital and Google Maps sending us down tiny back…
Day 20 Kvareli The drive to Kvareli was a short one at just 40 minutes, so we killed some time checking out sights on the way, such as Gremi’s Archangels’ Complex, a 16th-century church and castle and the Kvareli Wine Cave. The wine tunnel was built in the Soviet era to store wine and was…
Day 18 Gudauri to Telavi Today was a driving day, and the weather had turned pretty grim for the first time on the road trip, with low clouds and fog. We diced with the hundreds of trucks that ply the E117 and drove down out of the mountains and onto more rural roads that would…
Day 16 Gudauri It was a short drive to our next stop at the popular ski destination of Gudauri, so we stopped off for a quick hike to Arsha waterfall. From there, it was back down the E117 to the Kobi gondola (cable car) … which was not running. We also stopped at the Jvari…
Day 12 Tbilisi to Stepantsminda Our whirlwind stay in Tbilisi came to a premature end, but we’d be back. The city had a youthful vibe to it that we didn’t experience in more conservative Türkiye, and I suspect it will change a lot over the next decade with development in the name of “progress”. Today,…
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…