Follow the Sun – our crazy ambitious plan to drive around the world across five continents – had been a dream of ours for more than 30 years.  We had invested a lot of personal capital into this plan, our savings, our careers, our family, just to make this happen.  It’s one thing to say we’re going to do it, it’s a completely different thing to say we did it.

And the amazing good news is that we’ve almost done it!  We travelled all across and around North America, then south through Mexico, Central America, South America, Europe and southern Africa before Covid slowed us down.  That’s four continents down and only one to go.  And just when we were ready to hit the road again the war in the Ukraine broke out and our big plan of driving across Asia to Vladivostok, Russian’s port on the Pacific Ocean, had to change.  Bugger.

We tried to buy some time and in 2022 Tramp, Julie and I explored Ireland and Scotland before we left Tramp behind and did Iceland (amazing, by the way).  We were hoping that somehow, fingers crossed, we could complete our plan across Asia in 2023.

But early in 2023 we realised that travelling through Russia and finishing in Vladivostok was absolutely impossible.  Never mind, we’re flexible, we came up with a new plan to travel across Europe and Central Asia and explore the Stans, as they are called, before returning to Europe.  It wasn’t perfect but, well, it was still a huge adventure seeing new places.  We got all the visas we needed, booked flights, and headed off for our six month Central Asia adventure.  All systems were go.

And now comes the really bad news.  Despite all this, and now in the second half of 2023, the third country in the Caucasus region, Azerbaijan, still has not opened their borders to foreigners driving across their borders.  The reason – Covid.  And they’re not alone – Turkmenistan, another of the ‘Stan’ countries in Central Asia we had hoped to visit, is also still closed with the official reason being Covid. 

The killer is that Azerbaijan issued us with a visa and never told us about the closed land borders so we had every reason to believe we were good to go.  Sadly, that wasn’t the case.  You can fly in and fly out of Azerbaijan but you can’t cross their land borders.  I can’t tell you how many overland travellers we’ve met on this journey who are in the exact same situation as us. 

If you look at a map of this region you’ll see why this has stopped our big plan of exploring the Stans. We were planning to go to Azerbaijan, catch a ferry across the Caspian Sea and explore the Stans before returning the same way.  With Azerbaijan still closed, we can’t go south because that’s through Iran and Turkmenistan, the former of which is hard to pass through and the later of which is still also closed.  We can’t go north because that is through Russia and with Tramp being a US-registered vehicle it would be way too risky, even if we could miraculously get visas.  So to use a technical term, we’re stuffed.

Julie and I are gutted we can’t get into Central Asia and explore this fascinating part of the world.  It took us many days to re-balance and re-focus ourselves after realising our last big dream of Follow the Sun would be just out of our reach through no fault of our own.  But amidst all the disappointment, frustration and even anger we also know that we’ve been incredibly lucky to have visited over 70 countries on the Follow the Sun trip alone, all very safely and with fabulous memories that will last a lifetime.  And as a number of people have said to us, this is a crazy world we live in, made infinitely more complicated to travel in by Covid and the war, both of which are out of our control.

So we have a new plan which we are putting into effect right now.  We will turn around here in Georgia, spend extra time here, then head back through northern Turkey and into Europe much like we were going to in the last plan.  We will then ship Tramp to the US a bit earlier than our previous plan and spend more time in North America before finishing our amazing Follow the Sun journey in California in November, as originally planned.  Yes, this has been a huge bummer but we’ve finally got our minds around it now and we’re already enjoying our new plan…which of course is subject to change!