I was toying with the idea of going to a Turkish bath. It was a 'Must Do' according to all the advertising boards outside the travel agents lining the streets. It was just that something about the idea of lying on a slab being pummeled by a big bloke did  not attract me, maybe if it were a lady working on me I might have changed my mind, but that would be far too unseemly for Turkey's fairly conservative morals.

Ephesus was the largest city in Roman Asia, and second only to Rome in size with a population at its peak of over 400,000 people. It had all the amenities of a major city, parliament, theatre, library, public baths, housing,  many temples and a flourishing sea port. A number of calamities caused its decline and eventual abandonment, starting with being attacked by Goths, a huge earthquake causing many buildings to collapse, another sacking this time by Arab forces, and finally the silting up of its harbour, which economically ruined the city.

In a restored Silk Road Caravanserai near Urgup, the Sufi religious ceremony of the Whirling Dervishes is performed weekly. It is a separate order within the Sunni faith of Islam and although once practised throughout the middle east, it is now limited to small groups in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Indonesia.

Discovered by chance in 1963 when a homeowner, renovating his cellar, broke through an earth wall and discovered a passageway, Derinkuyu is a huge subterranean city in the Cappadocia region.The region has many of these cities which were built in the seventh century and used to hide from marauding armies, particularly the Romans who had a tendency to raid the Anatolia region to procure slaves.

Slow cooked lamb kebabs

I was lost. And now I could go no further. The path I was following had suddenly stopped at a huge fissure, with a thirty metre sheer drop and no obvious means to cross it. There was no way to climb down, and if I did get down there I might not be able to get back up again. There was nothing for it, I would have to return back and retrace the steps of my two hour journey to this point. As I was reluctantly making up my mind to return, a man in a faded cap with a small herd of goats appeared behind me. He looked at me with slight interest, probably as few tourists wandered into this valley, and then walked up to me.

View from an abandoned Cave house looking towards Pink Valley

The Basillica Cistern

Istanbul is a city that has managed to preserve its history well, despite being a pivotal battle ground between the Roman and Ottoman empires, being fought over, ransacked, and changing hands several times. With a population today of 19 million, only slightly less than that of the whole of Australia, it is a frenetic place that rewards wandering around on foot, or by ferry to avoid the constant traffic jams. Invest in a Istanbul Card to allow easy and cheap travel on ferries, trams, buses and trains, and then go exploring.

Ayaz Qala II. Dominating the surrounding desert

The forts rise majestically out of the Kyzyl Kum desert. All were built on the edges of the ancient kingdom of Khorezm, whose capital was Gurganj (which is now in modern day Turkmenistan). They were constructed to protect Khorezm from attack by foreign armies and Uzbek nomads. Their remoteness, on the very edge of Karakalpakstan, and the aridity of the desert, has helped preserve their mud and clay walls. I visited Ayaz Qala, a set of three forts about three hours from Khiva, and five hours from Nukus.

This is the statue of a fisherman that stood proudly outside the Moynak fish canning factory in Karakalpakstan on the Aral Sea. The canning factory was one of the most profitable in the Soviet Union, producing fish and caviar that was served at the tables of the Kremlin.

We left Ashgabat around lunchtime in a convoy of three 4WD cars, packed with tents, sleeping bags, food, water, and, of course, many bottles of Vodka. We were heading to the site of a Soviet mining accident in 1971 when Russian geologists were drilling for oil. They found gas instead, and the drilling rig collapsed into a crater. The gas was expected to burn out within days, yet 40 years later it is still burning brightly.

Khiva, like Bukhara, was a powerful city state on built on an old oasis between the Kyzl Kum and Kara Kum deserts. It grew to become a major trading post on the Silk Road, building up a specialty in slave trading. Khiva continued to grow and  developed a small empire, including much of modern day Turkmenistan, before it was overcome by Russian forces in 1873. With the formation of the Soviet Union it was included rather strangely in Uzbekistan, despite its people being mainly Turkmen in origin, and its history intertwined with that of Turkmenistan.

I was up at 5:30 AM, a time unheard of normally for me, but this was Bukhara, in the middle of the Khyzl Kum desert, with temperatures passing 45C by midday, so I had to overcome my natural aversion to getting out of bed.

Seeing as the Brazil World Cup tournament has just kicked off, I thought it was timely to post this Football influenced blog. I am not a huge fan of the game regarding it as more of an opportunity for 90 minutes of philosophical reflection, in between fleeting moments of excitement on the pitch.

I have always enjoyed traveling by train. It probably dates back to my childhood. We did not have much money when I was growing up, and yet almost every weekend my father took myself and my brother on a train trip to see every corner, every museum, every historical building, and every bloody railway station in the UK. It was a great education which left me with an abiding love of history, and travel.

Travelling in the wet season in Java (from November to March) is not recommended by most guide books. Roads do get flooded, and travel plans may be have to be altered. However like the children excitedly, albeit somewhat dangerously, playing on the flooded road pictured above, it can be enjoyable and a great time to travel. And with weather patterns changing globally, you never know what to expect whatever season you travel in!

The caldera at Mt Bromo in Java is a vulcanologists paradise. Four active volcanoes are located close together in a beautiful and easy to access location. A short journey by public transport from Probolinggo, or via bike from Malang (see this blog), and you are in Cemora Lawang, perched on the very edge of the caldera crater.

I needed to get to the volcanic caldera at Bromo, in the far east of Java. There were plenty of tours, but I had talked to others who had been cheated, abandoned at out of the way hotels far from Bromo, and generally suffered in cramped conditions on arranged mini buses out of both Jakarta and Jogjakarta. The closest city to Bromo, Probolinggo, has a particularly nasty reputation as the place to be ripped off in, and I wanted to avoid it. So I set up my own, more manic, trip to the caldera.

Back in Yogyakarta there was one volcano I had not visited yet, Mt Merapi, or Fire Mountain in Javanese, the most active volcano in Indonesia. Merapi just keeps on erupting. On my third night in Yogyakarta I was thrown around in my bed at 3 AM as an earthquake caused by the volcano shook the city. Ash and pumice was thrown from the cone at the same time.

I need to choose a book cover, which should it be? A or B. As you may or may not know, I have a travel guide being published in the near future on the rather extraordinary country of Turkmenistan. It will be a mixture of a guidebook/ travelogue, which will be entertaining to the armchair traveller, or inspire a new wave of intrepid tourists to visit the country (if they can navigate the complex visa requirements!).

Borobudur is one of the most visited sites in Java. Justifiably so, as the 9th century Buddhist temple is a beautiful and inspiring site to visit. It had been on my bucket list for years, and after having my fill of volcanoes, it was time get my history fix.

The volcano Mt Kelud had exploded a week earlier. Flights across Indonesia and Northern Australia were disrupted, 76,000 people were evacuated, Yogyakarta and Malang had been blanketed in ash, and the temples in Borobudur were closed (and due to risk of acid rain from the ash remained closed for a further two weeks). One small volcano in Java did all this? I wanted to see it.

Climbing into the Kawah Ijen volcano, as described in this blog, was an unforgettable chance to get smothered in sulphur gases, see the unusual 'Blue Lava', and be constantly forced off the tiny, rocky and dangerous path by miners carrying huge bamboo baskets of sulphur, that they had just mined while dodging the poisonous gases at the bottom of the volcano. It is incredibly hard work in one of the most severe and dangerous environments on earth. To quote Booker T Washington, who visited a similar volcanic mine in Sicily in the nineteenth century "I am not prepared just now to say to what extent I believe in a physical hell in the next world, but a sulphur mine is about the nearest thing to hell that I expect to see in this life.".

Heading back to Kunanurra from Halls Creek, I stopped at Turkey Creek (also known as Warmun). Great for refueling, getting a snack or even sleeping in a cabin at the Roadhouse. It is also where you can drive in the Bungle Bungle range in the Purnulu National park. Just saying 'The Bungle Bungles' out loud is fun, natural alliteration, and throws up fond childhood memories for me of rotund furry Wombles picking up litter and sashaying across Wimbledon common.

The road to the crater was shocking. It had been flattened by a bulldozer but the recent rains meant it was like driving over corrugated cardboard, with lots of little channels formed from the rain water. The whole car would vibrate terribly at slow speeds, which meant I had to drive at a fast 80 Km an hour, reducing the vibrations considerably. The Tanami track is one of the great 4WD journeys in Australia, going down from the Kimberley to Alice Springs, but it is seldom used. I only passed one car in the journey down to the turn off to the crater, but you do have to pay attention the whole time, as going out of control and flipping the car over is a real possibility. Sadly it is the road on which Eugene Shoemaker died on the way to Wolfe Creek.

I heard about Wolfe Creek Crater on a holiday in Perth. I visited the exceptionally interesting Western Australian Museum and saw amongst the bits of crashed Skylab, gold nuggets and dinosaurs,  a display about the first expedition to Wolfe Creek crater in 1949, where a meteorite had crashed into the northern Tanami desert 300,000 years ago. It is the biggest and most recognisable crater in Australia, and was only discovered in an aerial survey in 1947. It is rarely visited as it is, well, remote. On the edge of the Kimberly region, almost as far away from a major city as you can get in Australia. Definitely fitting into my requirements for a Far Flung Place.

I needed a long walk. The beach walk from Nhulunbuy to Yirrkala is about 12 km. Some of it requires clambering up small rocky cliffs, but mostly it is on the fine white sand. I popped into the Police station first, just to tell them where I was going in case I got into difficulties and did not make it back on time. They were totally nonplussed as to why anyone would want to do such a walk when there was a perfectly serviceable road connecting the towns, but they duly noted my details in their log book and reminded me to confirm when I returned. The officer on the desk shouted out to me as I left to "tell them if there is anything worth seeing".