Istanbul

Now it's nearly the end of the trip for me. Yesterday we tried to sell my bike in Lattakia but it
did not go so very well. I thinkh Per and Iwan gave it to a nice guy after I left. There was no
busses from Lattakia to Istanbul as I thought so I got on a servicetaxi to the turkish boarder and
walked over it. There were no taxis or anything there so I started to walk those five kilometers
to the nearest village. After a while I got a ride and then I met some helpful people on the taxi to
Antakia. They helped me book a bus to Istanbul (with discount) and I also had time to look at a
showroom that one of them had. After 14 hours on a bus
I'm now in Istanbul and it's raining a lot.
Picture one: Outside the furnitureshowroom in Antakia
Picture two and three: My first sight of Turkey. Not so crowded...

Thursday

Hi. We are now in Lattakia 90 kilometers north from Tartous. It's been a sunny nice day for cycling. We met the police in a little village and they asked for passports and stuf like that but when they find out we were tourists there was no problem. There was no vegetarian food along the road today so I only had breakfast (croisant with cheese) and now 30 minutes ago pizza at the Italian Corner here in Lattakia. Tomorrow I'm going to try and sell my Gasoline-Bike and then take a bus to Istanbul. Per and Iwan is going to continue a couple of days.

It seems like I'm blocked to put up pictures today as well.

Day 4 of the cycling tour (today)

I felt better this morning and we were about to go when we realized Iwan had a flat tire. When we got that fixed the rain was all over us again. We waited for 1,5 hours and then we drove away even if it still was raining. Today we have seen some really nice landscaped and we just arrived the sea again in a town called Tartousa. We are sleeping at Grand Hotel.
(pictures will be posted later on)

Day 3 (Tuesday)

View from the Castle.

We looked at the castle early in the morning and said goodbye to our friend and then we took off. After some nice driving down the hills it started to go upwards again and the rain started to come down on us. I got really sick and we had to find a hotel close nearby. We wrented a room on the roof of the restaurant were we had lunch. This they we traveled about 2 kilometers and then I just layed in a bed watching tv.

Day 2 (Monday)

Dinner in the Kiosk.

Coffebreak on the highway.

Transportation of the injuered bike.

We started to climb a big mountain even before breakfast but we turned around pretty soon because Per had a flat tire. We tryed to fix it in Manulolo but after a while we asked someone to drive us to the next town called Homs. From Homs we went on the highway with all the heavy traffic and then on some small roads until we came to Craq des Cheavaliers. We found a new friend there and we had dinner at his little shop and got to bed early.

Day 1 (sunday)

We had dinner with everybody else at this fancy reataurant.

Iwan is having a rest at the top of a mountain.

There were at least some kids that were happy to see us. They lived in Malouolo. Maloulolo is the only place in the world where they still speak the old language spoken by Jesus Christ.

The weather were okay so we decided to leave Damascus. After about 1 hour we started to have some problems. One of them was that one of Pers pedals (pedaler pa svenska) fell off. That was the first sign of the quality of our bikes.
We managed to go over some pretty high mountains and the kids in the small villages threw snowballs at us. They were proaberly just playing with us but they threw pretty hard. We ended up sleeping in a christian convent in a village called Manilulo.
(pictures will be posted)

Message

I was going to write all the details of our first 4 days cycling tour but there is a problem with access to blogger.com here in Syria. The other internetcafes I've been to were able to get around that somehow but this place is more strict. That means I can't post any pictures at the moment (and not log in to facebook).

Rain

We were about to leave Damascus today but we had to cancel because of the bad weather. We got up early this morning to get some supplies such as rainclothes, rainboots and helmets. We found some really nice helmets and also (in my opinion) rainboots but then we realized that the rainclothes were quite bad so we couldn't really leave today. It has to stop raining.

We have decided to not go through Lebanon because in the north of Lebanon it's not safe at the moment. We will travel the coast of Syria instead and then to Turkey.

Motor-bike

I was about to loose all hope about getting us some bikes because of all the troubles with registrations and such stuf but at last we found some bikes with engines classified as bicycles. The first picture is showing Per and Iwan asking someone in a shop where we could get one of those. yesterday we bought them and tomorrow early we will ride them. We are trying to get up as early as possible to get out of town before everyone else. The traffic here is not that easy to handle. Nu kor vi!

Fotograf Per

1. The mercedes we were about to buy

2. Some nature between Aqaba and Amman

3. When we had coffe on the roof with the the man (and his sons and a friend of him)that owned the mercedes

4. The youngest in the family

5. Just another nice mercedes for sale (expensive)

Damascus

Here we go. We tried one last time in Jordan to get some vespas or something like that but we failed. We found out about that freezone and it was possible to buy some bikes there for a good price. We went to the swedish embassy to fix some documents saying we could bring the bikes with us to turkey or sweden or any country, as long as we could sell them when we arrived. The embassy was closed but Iwan made some phonecalls and it turned out it was impossible. We didnt want to stay any longer in Jordanien so we took a taxi to Damascus. I must say I was surprised how easy and smooth it was to get through the boarder into Syria. I felt very welcome. So here we are. It feels good. One of the oldest citys in the world that still is a city. Tomorrow we are continuing our searching.

OK. This is a short update. We are still looking for our mopeds. We are now in Amman on our way to Damascus. We have been swimming in the Red Sea and the Dead Sea. We climbed around in the ruins pf Petra two days ago.

In Aqaba in the south of Jordan we discovered that you cant buy scooter as a foreigner and not even a car. That was too bad because we found a cheap old mercedes 200 (1970) that we were about to buy. A friend that we met at the boat from Egypt just asked an old man in that car for us. It helpes to know someone who can speak arabic. Instead of buying it we were invited for coffe. I have now realized that we have had a really interesting time during our research for mopeds. We have a last glimp of hope here in Amman. We again heard a rumour af a free zone. Wonder what that is?

Otherwise we hope that the rules are different in Syria.

The pictures:

1. Per and Iwan floating around in the water of the Dead Sea. The sea is under the sealevel and the water was about 25 degrees anf the salt was 80 percent

2. Petra. I took about 50 pictures at that place. There was so much to see. Per took about 200 pictures if not even more.

3. Inside one of the rooms in the city Petra.

Now we are in Aqaba. We couldnt find any vespas in Cairo for a reasonable price so we just had to leave. On the way to the busstation we heard a rumour about a mar4ket in Port Said so we went there. Port Said was a taxfree zone until 2001, so we came there a bit too late. We slept there one night and took the bus to Suez and then to Nuweiba. And next day we went to Aqaba in JordanThat was yesterday and we started to look for vespas in the evening. We realized that it is against the law here in Jordan to hace a motorbike with gears, but scooters are aloud. We are continuing our searching but we have a plan b now and that is to buy a car instead.

art space

Day fiwe

Now we are a bit sad. Probably we have to skip the mopeds for now because we cant really find any in Cairo. I think we will go threw Sinai with local transportations and then try again when we are in Aqaba Jordan. This picture was from last nite and I must say we have met a lot of people through our searching.

Hi everybody. Today we had some luck with our searching for mopeds. A friend of a friend that we met here repairs russian mopeds and are maybe able to fix a couple of em for us in some days. We also visted artelewa today and it was incredible. A gallery in a place you never thought you were gonna find one. The owner has become a really good friend of us and maybe he is coming with us on the trip since he really likes the idea. This is the moped he is gonna fix for us...

Yeah

Dag 3

Hej. Nu ska jag ga till sangs den tredje dagen i kairo. Vi har inte riktigt kommit sa langt maste jag saga. Vi har glidit omkring och letat vespor mest hela tiden och funderar pa att ta ledigt i morgon pa dagen for att kolla in pyramiderna. Pa kvallen ska vi ut utanfor Kairo for att kolla in ett open art space som han som har startat det sager. En mycket trevlig man som haller pa med okommersiell konst i fororten. Han har aven en van som saljer ryska motorcyklar sa vi far se vad det kan ge. Om det ar nagon som sett tv-programmet Big in Japan sa kan jag saga att det kanns lite som det. Manga forsok som inte har gett nagat hitills. Jag ska forsoka uppdatera er snart igen med lite bilder oxa men datorn jag sitter vid are langsam och usb-porten verkar inte fungera. Hall till godo

Hej alla mina läsare. Nu har jag snart packat klart. Olle och astrid är här och hjälper mig. Jag har med mig alvedon och solskyddsfaktor och allt ni kan tänka er. Här bredvid ser nu en ungefärlig plan på hur vi tänkte åka...

Trailer

Inte särskilt bra kvalité men för dem som ändå vill se en snutt från våran förr resa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NIh9FfxzU

Tre dagar kvar

Eftersom jag nu märkte att jag redan hade en person som följde denna blogg (tomtariminskalle) så tänkte jag det var lika bra att skriva första inlägget. Jag hade inte riktigt helt bestämt mig för om resan skulle dokumenteras på det här sättet överhuvudtaget, men nu får vi se hur det blir. Jag har ingen aning hur ofta man kan få tillgång till internet under resan. Jag håller just på att krångla med olika videoformat för att lägga upp en liten trailer för filmen från resan Kiruna - Helsingfors. Vi får se om ni kan få se den snart.
Vi åker alltså på fredag morgon så det är inte lång tid kvar. I morgon bitti ska jag till Danderyd för ett besök på syriska ambassaden för att ordna med visum.
Jag träffade faktiskt en bekant alldeles nyss som skulle resa runt lite i Jordanien tio dagar i början av mars. Ett helt sjukt sammanträffande. Då kanske man kan möta upp honom på något sätt.