Plan B

Bob says: Plan B was pretty simple for us to come up with, as we only had a one way transit visa for Russia and Russians being Russians they may not have been overly helpful in letting us back. So, we decided we would get back to blighty as soon as possible, sell the beautiful hilux ( simply the best car ever made), stick some backpacks on and fly to Kazakhstan hopefully by the middle of August to resume our travels.

Bucharest, Romania

Bob says: Bucharest is still very much recovering from its bloody past. Evidence of the revolution and Nicolae Ceausescu's communist dictatorship is everywhere. The 3rd picture shows the vast palace of parliment constructed towards the end of Ceausescu's evil reign. Ceausescu's vision was to turn Bucharest into a Paris of eastern Europe that included its own arc de triumph and champs ellysee. In order to finance this, the lunitic put his own people on rations and began exporting most of Romania's food. Unfortunately for Bucharest he got as far as levelling one sixth of the city including a lot of historic buildings, laid the road for the champs and built a mini arc at the end of it. This man was clearly a lune of the highest order, which may go some way to explaining his fascination with the french.
Ruth says: Whilst in Bucharest we had a visit to the Chinese Embassy hoping to obtain our visa. However, when we handed in our application forms we were told that we would not be issued with a visa without flight receipts. When we informed them that we were driving we discovered that we needed permits for all the different Chinese provinces. We investigated this further and also found out that we would need a so-called guide to drive with us the whole time. This amazingly applies to all foreign vehicles. The expense and time involved in this process was just not available to us, so we had to come up with a plan B!
Bob says:You may be wondering why we didn't check this out beforehand, but the information on this is not as readily available as you might think. Plus, if we'd crossed every t and dotted every i before we'd set off then we might still be home.

Bulgaria

Bob says: Unfortunately we were pretty slack in Bulgaria and failed to take any photos. And due to a date we had with the chinese embassy in Bucherest we did not have enough time to properly enjoy it. We stayed on the Black sea coast in the resort of Sozopol for a 2 days soaking up sun on the beach and enjoying the very cheap cocktails and beers.
One of the best things in Bulgaria is the road side billboard advertising. There is nothing in Bulgaria that cannot be sold by a bikini clad beauty, usually super imposed over the advert with no real reference, anything from loft insulation to baked beans. Perhapes the finest example of these was the advert for watermelons, now there is only one way to sell watermelons, so I will leave it to your imagination..........happily the Bulgarians did not!
Ruth says: There were down sides to Bulgaria too. The toilets were the most diabolical things ever. Really filthy squatter toilets and crumbling down shower blocks that you can smell 100 metres before you reach them. But it is strange what you can get used to in a couple of days.

Mount Olympus

Bob says: Mount Olympus is actually several peaks that are all seats of the Ancient gods. Mytikos is the tallest peak and was first officially conquered in 1913 by, you guessed it , an Englishman ( although I suspect a few ancient greeks may have made it).

Mount Olympus

Ruth says: this was the hardest physical thingI think that i have ever done. The climb that we did was supposed to take two days but we had a very tight schedule and i wanted at least one day on the beach before we left Greece, so we decided to try and climb Olympus in a day. It is 2918 metres high, that's almost 10,000 feet. So, quite big really.
We set off on our climb just before 10 in the morning and didn't get back to the car until 8:20pm.
When we first started the climb we were overtaken by a group of 19 year old boys. I wasn't very happy about being overtaken as it hadn't happened to us yet on any of our walks, so we practically ran up the mountain for the first two hours, overtaking them and not letting them catch us up again. Anyway they didn't make it all the way to the top so we were obviously far fitter than them.
The picture with the yellow and red blob (one of the markers) is the last bit of the climb to the summit. As you can see it was literally a rock climb. It was unbelievably steep and by this time we had been climbing for about 6 hours, just going up. I don't know quite how we made it. It must have been Bob's sausage chilli, and just a little bit of chocolate.
Bob says: Pure yorkshire grit, no messing, up and down in a day.

More Meteora and Monastaries

Kalambaka and the Meteora

Bob says: Yer Greeks are famous for many things, feta cheese, smashing plates, using the tradesmans entrance.....etc. So why not these outstanding rock formations. In scale and beauty the meteora are on a par with Ayers rock, maybe even the Cow n' Calf.
Not content with the already superb rocks , yer greeks decided to build monastaries on some of the rock pillars, about 16 in all. How is anybodies guess, anyway it took them about 250 years.
These rocks are the single most impressive natural phenomona, baring the wifes behind, that I have seen on this trip.