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’…One advantage of having a border crossing on top of a mountain range is you can bump-start your bike when the starter motor has just failed. Such a positive mental attitude was brought on by the knowledge that we were finally on the last leg of the journey and a cold beer was waiting on the campsite a few kilometres away.

That cold beer did greet us, did taste good and did go straight to our heads after six weeks of abstinence. We spent a few nights at a campsite that is famous with overlanders on the ‘hippy trail’ to India. Perched on a cool hill above the grotty garrison town of Dogubayazit (‘Dog-Biscuit’ to those in the know) the campsite hosts many long distance travellers as well as hardy souls about to scale Mount Ararat. We lazed around, visited the local castle and patched up the starter motor that had shed its magnets (just like the previous one had done a year before). The repaired starter managed to spin the engine about 50% of the time and lasted until we got to Milan in Italy where the bike got a very expensive and well deserved brand new starter motor.

The Castle at Dog Biscuit

I started to look for the ‘ghost of holidays past’, expecting a creeping desire to get home as quickly as possible; I often feel a pull as strong as a rubber band once the exciting part of the holiday is over. But this time things were easier; there was little at home to pull us back in a mad rush and we had a fixed schedule of visits to old friends through Europe.

The south-eastern corner of Turkey was significantly different to the parts we had been in before. The area was far less populated and the local Kurds seemed to share the feistiness of their Iranian neighbours. That area was one of only three or four on the whole trip where the local kids had used us for stone throwing practice.

Riding high over volcanic ridges, we headed for two sites called Nemrut Dagi, both supposedly associated with Nimrod, the architect of the Tower of Babel. The first Dagi was a volcanic caldera, providing a scenic campsite and a hot spring to bath in; we were clean again but smelled of sulphurous eggs. Onto the second Dagi to see an ancient temple complex and massive carved stone heads, followed by a steamed apple pudding made with fruit picked from the trees that shaded our tent.

Sculptures at Nemrut Dagi

We knew that the most logical way to get across the huge expanse of Turkey was to follow the southern coast, whilst trying to avoid the belt of holiday resorts. Several overlanding friends had warned us about the shock of seeing towns full of sunburned tourists so we shot along the motorways and bypasses, towards Olympos where we had stayed more than a year before. The guesthouse owners were surprised to see us again; Suliman the waiter was delighted and the owner was as grumpy as ever. I asked about the whereabouts of the owner’s cute white rabbit that we had petted the previous year: oh, what a tragedy... At the end of the previous summer a neighbour’s dog had taken to chasing the rabbit, so Suliman had taken the rabbit home to his village in the hills. Unfortunately a vicious cat took a fancy to rabbit meat and killed the rabbit; subsequently Suliman’s father shot the cat. Life in the raw!

We made our way to the western end of Asia and the port of Cesme where we had arrived sixteen months before. We almost managed to sneak through customs with an expired Carnet document, but a keen eyed official noticed the mistake and after a few hours Georgie informed me that we would have to pay a $5,000 dollar fine. I pretended to hand over the keys to the bike and after a few laughs, the customs officials waded into their rule-books and (amazingly) through the Turkish Customs Intranet pages; I wondered how long we had been away! Throughout the process a quiet old bloke acted as our interpreter and when I told him that we feared that the boat would leave without us, he told us, “don’t worry, I am the Port Manager and I authorise the Pilots to take the ship out. I won’t allow the Pilots onto the boat until you are on board.” We love the Turks!

The Intranet site presented a solution and we paid over a much more reasonable $50 fine. Fate was stepping in again, as $50 was the exact amount we had saved on the ferry tickets by using the bogus ‘Journalist’ identity cards we’d bought in Bangkok. What goes around comes around!

Two days on the boat and we approached Ancona in Italy, which to our delight turned out to be a lot prettier than we had imagined. And then up to Milan to meet Alessandro and Francesca, the overlanding couple we had met in Iran. In the time it had taken us to plod to Milan, they had ridden to India, helped to build a school, visited a family that they sponsor and flown home, leaving their bike to be shipped from Mumbai. Milan was a proper reintroduction to Europe. We arrived on Sunday and had to fight through a traffic queue to get off the motorway, and as if to tell us that ‘some things don’t change’; the queue was caused by people trying to get into IKEA. Our hosts started a trend of friends who were outrageously glad to see us home and sought to make up for the dirt and variable cuisine on the road by washing all our gear and feeding us huge amounts of fine food.

Food fest in Milan

Probably one of the longest lasting shocks involved with coming home was the weather in Europe. We had enjoyed and endured more than a year in hot climates with just a few heavy downpours and a couple of snowy days in Japan, but we assumed that our bodies would easily readjust to the colder climate. When locals in those hot countries had seen us walking around enjoying the odd spot of rain I had joked that “Englishmen are born waterproof and with antifreeze instead of blood”. But from the moment we left Milan and entered the Alps, we knew that our bodies had changed beyond belief. A couple of days in the Swiss Alps brought us back to camping on damp earth and forced us to buy new thermal underwear. The effect of the cold turned out to be much more severe than we had anticipated. Even though the subsequent winter was not particularly severe, we had to keep the central heating on high and I took to wearing a hat around the house.

I had forgotten how beautiful Switzerland is, but we both remembered how arduous it can be walking up and down mountains; we took the cable-car up one hill, walked along the top, picnicked on chocolate and cheese, and then took the funicular back down to the valley below.

Swiss Picnic

To the German border, where we encountered the first and last real challenge to the Enfield’s paperwork. “Where was this vehicle registered?” led to a twenty minute interrogation about the provenance, insurance and customs duty of Georgie’s bike. I had forgotten that the section of the German/Swiss border we had chosen to cross is notorious for giving motorists a hard time. To the west of Lake Konstanz the border twists and turns, with roads repeatedly cutting across the border. Germans often work on the Swiss side and know the backroads that avoid the border crossings and the spot checks often imposed on vehicles from the neighbouring country. We eventually satisfied our German border guard that we knew the law, did have insurance cover (even though the paperwork was still in the UK) and we would be paying the custom’s duty back in the UK.

Southern Germany was another wonderland, with smart people cycling and roller-blading through orchards full of ripe apples. We returned to see my old boss Ingfried and his family. More wonderful food, cycling to a village fair and smoking a Turkish water pipe with their son Marc. I let Marc ride the BMW, and thankfully his parents didn’t explode in fear of the consequences.

Next to Nuremberg, to meet our old friend Sabine and to visit the World War Two memorials. The gods smiled on us again. While Georgie took photos of me goofing off pretending to be Hitler on the platform from where he viewed the Nuremberg Rallies, I put my GPS down so as to get a fix on the platform’s location. And then I wandered off without picking up the GPS. That’s the GPS with all the waymarks and routes we had collected over the past seventeen months: I hadn’t backed it up at any time on the trip! It took thirty minutes for me to realise my mistake and I tore back to see if there was a one in a million chance that it was still there. I noticed a group of school-kids as I ran along, possibly the same school-kids that I’d seen from Hitler’s platform. It was worth a punt, so I ran to their teacher and… realised that I don’t speak German (except for the words necessary for ordering beer, food and petrol). So I babbled in English, explaining that I had “left a piece of electronic equipment up at the platform, and have your kids seen anything?” “What sort of equipment did you lose?” I fell back on the description I had used for the past 17 months “it was an electronic compass”. “Ah, a Garmin?” she asked, correctly identifying the fact that I was oversimplifying things for her and putting a brand name to my GPS; we were definitely back in the west! And lo, one of the lads had found it, and handed it over and in return I gave him the only small notes I had; fifteen Euros, made up of five Euros that we saved at the museum by using our dodgy student cards bought in Bangkok, and ten Euros we’d found on the ground right by the ticket counter. What goes around come around, yet again.

Spot the GPS?

Into Belgium for the first time on this trip, the ghost of Georgie’s old job in Brussels was laid to rest as we visited her old boss Roel and family. That’s where we were struck by a change that had happened while we were away. When we left, dial-up internet connection was the norm, and when we returned broadband connection had been taken up by the professional types we were staying with. Back in Europe we were repeatedly laughed at when we asked friends “can we use your PC to get our emails and can you log on for us” only to be shocked by the reply “just switch on, it’s logged on all the time”. They’ll be making bikes with fuel injection next!

Before the final leap over the channel to England I had a bone to pick with two girls from Gent. Iris and Trui were a major factor in Georgie’s decision to buy a bike and ride it home from Nepal. I decided to ‘let the girls off’ as Georgie and her worrisome bike had made it home safely. Cat and Luc, who we’d met on the way out in Turkey, came for a meal with the four of us; circles within circles.

Tough biker chicks and their ice creams

It was around that time that I realised that the return to Europe was not turning out to be the terrifying and shocking experience that we had feared. For the past seventeen months we had dealt with ‘a hundred bizarre things’ every day. Now the prospect of meeting relatives again, arriving home, getting jobs, etc. just seemed like ‘yet more bizarre events to deal with’; some we would plan for whilst others would jump out at us. But at least future bizarreness would be in familiar circumstances and we’d be able to address it using English rather than murdering someone else’s language.

The only way to return to the UK after a monumental undertaking is to sail into Dover; airports and other seaports just don’t compare to the sight of the white cliffs. Tears and lumpy throats welled up as we sat on the ferry from Calais to Dover.

Fearing that the UK customs officers might pull us for not paying import duties on Georgie’s Indian-made Enfield we had taped over the Nepali number plate on the front, which was written in Urdu. And fate dealt us another good hand; there had been a couple of British bike Rallies over in Holland that weekend, and so we disembarked along with a group of legal British bikes and sneaked back into the country.

Soremums - no more

The next few days were a blur of relatives and fine food. The animosity that Georgie’s mum had felt towards the Enfield was forgotten, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief having fulfilled my undertaking to get Georgie home safely. Let’s say that again. “Oh yay, oh yay, WE GOT HOME SAFELY”. What a good feeling. The total number of falls from the bikes was about eight for me and about three for Georgie, with the fastest being at about 20kph. I know people who would be happy to have so few ‘offs’ during a Sunday afternoon’s dirt riding!

The weight piled on somehow

And finally to Manchester where my house seemed to be exactly as I had left it, except for the balloons and welcome home bunting that the neighbours had taped up a week before. My brother Pad had told them the date that we were due to hit the UK, but omitted to mention that we’d be staying with family in London and the Cotswolds on the way up. So the house had been flagged as ‘they haven’t arrived home yet’ for a week. Luckily the local house-breakers seemed to have been on holiday.

Out with the bunting

And that was it, done. Kettle on, feet up on the sofa, put the telly on. “Job jobbed”, as my Mum would say.

Except that wasn’t quite ‘it’. We had all those ‘getting back to normality’ things to address. So almost a year after getting home, how did it go?

A key reason for getting home when we did was to arrive in time for my Mum’s 60th birthday; we arrived ten days before, which shows that the planning did come together in the end. What we didn’t plan for was my Dad being in hospital, nearing the end of a 10 year struggle against diabetes. A month after our return home he lost the struggle and died in his hospital bed with his wife and all his kids around him. We got home just in time.

The British winter drew in; not a particularly severe winter, but it really cut us to the bone. It seemed that our metabolisms had changed to tolerate the high temperatures we’d endured for the past eighteen months, and we were cold even once we remembered to wear more clothing.

Eating more helped to drive out the cold, but the rich western diet on top of more efficient bodies and a sedentary lifestyle soon drove our weights up. I returned to being the 100 kilogram monster that I was before the trip and Georgie grew heavier than she had ever been before. We faced up to the need for a disciplined approach to food, rather than the ‘eat whatever you can’ approach you can get away with on the road. One exception to the abstinence was an increase in Georgie’s home-made curries, using freshly mixed and ground spices; the trip was an inspiration.

Cars were bought; well actually one was exchanged for a case of beer, and we’re not sure if that was a good deal.

Then into the job market. One pledge that we made to each other was “we will get normal jobs that don’t force us to be away from home”, after five months of trying (and a short burst of working a in a call-centre – arghh!) I succeeded in the quest. Georgie was less fortunate and ended up having to get a consultancy job (which she loves) that takes her away from home (which we both hate).

Being back in the UK and in a work situation made us face one side-effect of travelling. We had become adept at discussing simple concepts in simple language; perfect for feeding ourselves and conversing with locals. But back home we were expected to discuss complex ideas using elegant language, but it seemed that our intellects had seized up through lack of exercise. It took months to get back up to a reasonable speed of articulation again.

The ‘five months off’ allowed us time to get back to some level of normality. We finally paid the customs duty for the Enfield and got it tested and registered for the UK. We organised the 5,000 photos from the trip and learned how to deal with recruitment agencies via the Internet. The BMW got some much needed love and care, but almost a year after returning home, I was still finding areas covered in brick-red Cambodian dust.

So it was time to plan into our next adventure. People would constantly ask us “so where / when are you going next?” We had toyed with the idea of riding down to Morocco during our first winter at home, or possibly to visit the Timbuktu music festival the following winter. But a few weekends away on the bikes proved that the wanderlust had been fulfilled, and that the decision to take a break from serious biking was well founded. Hearing presentations of ‘the joys of life on the road’ from other bikers at rallies did nurture tender shoots of enthusiasm for another trip, but these soon withered when faced with the energy that would be required to make the trip. No, the new big adventure seemed to be to follow our real desire and to get married and settle down.

So we bought two cats and made plans for our wedding. And at the time of writing this part, we have been married for 2 days, pretty much to the minute. Two days ago we gathered our families and few friends together in the English Lake District. I wore a light suit and a pink tie that coordinated with the trim on Georgie’s long slim dress. We swore our love to each other, laughed at the line in the ceremony about ‘…wherever our marriage takes us…”, cut a cake with a model of us on the BMW and danced on a boat sailing up and down Lake Windermere.

The Wedding Ceremony

The cake

The Reception

And that’s where our Big Trip ends and another long, probably-not-planned-enough journey begins. The next time we need to speak slowly in simple English may be to our children. Insh Allah!

The End (and The Beginning).