UnPlaned

Ladies and Gentlemen… here is a raggle taggle guide to how we made it home, bus by ferry by taxi by bus. Some of the trips might take you much less time, some might take hours longer. It’s a bonkers, beautiful trip to make; you can’t timetable for some happenings that might happen. But dive [...]

In the morning, Rita is gone. We leave her flat for a bus to Prague, where we have two hours to wander.
Prague. We mainly spend our time eating noodles in a Chinese-run traditional Czech pub full of cigarette smoke and Chris Rea. When you’re travelling constantly, cities rushing past you at a rate of three [...]

We change trains in Budapest, eating falafel on the platform and wishing we could go and hear Lucy play her violin.
On the train to Brno, we share a slot with a young family and an IBM worker on his way to Bratislava. The worker lived in Omagh for years and has a strong Northern Irish [...]

Leaving Prishtina in the morning, we bid farewell to another set of new friends. To get to Belgrade and then on North towards the Czech Republic, we’ve got a complicated journey ahead of us: because Serbia doesn’t recognise the existence of Kosovo as a separate country, it’s not possible to cross into Serbia from Kosovo [...]

We meet Vigan outside the Grand Hotel, one of the few structures in town that looks solid. He is stubble-chinned and greets us with a generous smile. We’re led through side streets to Tingell-Tangell, one of Vigan’s two bars –I’m booked to play at the other one. It’s the spit of an East London coffee [...]

Our bus is waiting. It’s full of big-faced men from Kosovo, looking tough and joking loudly across the aisles. The atmosphere is good. We leave the vast labyrinth of Istanbul station at 5.
* * *
We’re dumb animals in a clamour of incomprehensible language and occurrences, only each other’s daft humour for company. The Kosovan men look on [...]

I wake with my leg worryingly swollen. We’ve stopped at a service station outside Istanbul. I jump down from the bus and jog on the spot manically, head full of Deep Vein Thrombosis. I take my socks off, wiggle my toes. My leg returns to something like normal. Back to sleep.
* * *
It’s raining. A [...]

Still no sleep. It’s four in the morning when the bus arrives at Antakya.
“Out”
Says the driver.
“What?”,
say us.
We have to change buses here, he tells us in an elaborate series of gestures. Shite, say us. We heave our bags into the empty terminal, no idea when the next bus to Istanbul is. The desk for our [...]

One taxi driver steals our biscuits, and another takes us to the bus station. There, two companies offer buses to Istanbul, our next stop. One is a couple of hundred Syrian pounds cheaper than the other.
“Don’t go with them”
The more expensive one advises us,
“they will stop in Antakya and make you pay more”.
The man speaking [...]

Here ıs the fırst batch of ımages from Damascus, Syrıa.
…more to come.
Bılly
(CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE)