We promised the people of Asia that we would do the trip, and then go home and have babies. We have delivered on that promise, or at least Georgie has delivered. All is well with us, Georgie is smiling after the ordeal and the baby is well.

Simon and Oscar

We have 2 pieces of very good news we’d like to tell you all.

The most important is that Georgie is now pregnant – the baby has already been exposed to the throb of a BMW engine – got to get that training in early!! The baby is due in February 2006 – we’re both very excited, but scared - this big adventure is more difficult to back out of than the last!

Secondly, the travelogues of our trip to Japan and back have been published as a 360 page book, along with lots more previously unpublished stories, dozens of colour photos, 160 black and white photos, maps, etc. Have a look at:

www.sorebums.net

Thankfully the reviews are good:

“It's an excellent read, very natural and genuine. Recommended!”

“a great read for every real GS'er”

We hope to see you all on a trail somewhere or you can give us a wave as you pass the baby-clothes shop.

Simon and Georgie

Leaving Iran marked the ‘end of the unknown’ for our trip; but not the ‘end of the unfamiliar’. Spending a year and half in Asia had changed us and allowed time for things to change back in Europe. So this chapter is unusual in that we deliberately didn’t write it on the road; in fact it wasn’t completed until almost a year later. Before and during the trip we had talked to many travellers and heard about the problems that they had readjusting to normal life after their travels. Many people couldn’t settle into the hum-drum life at home and would return to the road again. We realised that the story of our journey would not end on our return to the UK but would stretch out until ‘all the strangeness of home seems normal again’. This chapter includes many observations about how we adjusted to the ‘weird life of Europe and home’…

All of the travellers we had met said that Iran was a wonderfully hospitable country, with fabulous culture and sights. It sounded like a hotter version of Turkey, with cheap petrol but with just one social minefield; a strict female dress code. Of course our expectations were wide of the mark again; Iran is much feistier, challenging and tiring than we imagined.

My real regret with buying the Enfield is the state of exhaustion and pain it would leave me in each evening. One of the victims of this was my diary. Since Nepal, the entries were few and far between, to the extent that unfortunately I gave up early in Pakistan. So the sources of this newsletter are memory (oh dear) and photos.