Pepper Spray and AK47’s in Uzbekistan

We haven’t really posted many written blogs, as we prefer to share films of our adventures, and there’s hundreds on our website, which we make whilst on the road, usually from the tent late at night! its just unbelievable how much film footage we have, and then there’s all the photo’s, we’ve literally thousands of them. The great thing about photo’s, is that the minute we look at one of them, its like being thrown back right in the moment, like it was only yesterday, the photo’s instantly reminds us of the amazing experiences and memories we are making, so thats why we’ve decided to start sharing some short stories as a blog, along with a few photos, as we know how many of you like to read about our life adventures on the road. 

So we thought we would start with our first short story, based on one of our many experiences back in the deserts of the Stan’s, and we’ll start with Uzbekistan, now I did say a short story, and only a few photo’s, but I’m afraid its a little longer than planned, and we just had to share a few more photo’s!

So here goes..

We’d never experienced life in the desert, well apart from a short holiday in Egypt and Morocco several years ago, where we rode camels, but that doesn’t really count, as we went back to the safety and comfort of a luxury hotel room later that night, so our only other experience of life in the desert, was watching a few David Attenborough documentaries! 

(Pictured below – fully loaded up ready for the elements)

Planning…

We often get asked, ‘how do you really begin to plan a 7 year world cycling tour?’

Well thats an easy answer, you don’t! there’s only so much planning you can do, as things can and will change on a daily basis, so in reality, planning anything more than the month ahead is simply a waste of time, the important things are, having the right equipment, knowing the routes terrain and rough direction you need to be heading, especially which border to head to, as not all borders allow foreigners through, can you imagine spending weeks cycling through mountains in difficult environments, to be turned away at the border, now thats another story! 

(Pictured below – Camels of the Stan’s)

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So apart from planning your equipment, which comprises of things like bike spares, camping kit, clothing, food and water, medical supplies, visas and a load of other items, thats about it, but thats the fun of adventure, the unknown, imagine if you planned everything throughout your entire journey down to the smallest of detail, wouldn’t that be boring? and it couldn’t happen anyway,
being spontaneous is much more fun!

(Pictured below – Some of the shepherd families we met)

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So back to the desert..

We’d been on the road for almost one year, and had made it to our 16th country Georgia, where we had been resting for just over 3 months. We were now back on our bikes and cycling across Armenia and Azerbaijan, making our way to the hot and dusty deserts of Kazakhstan, but the only way we could get there was by sailing across the Caspian Sea, as both the neighbouring countries of Iran and Russia wouldn’t let us Brits in due to the usual political reasons, so a boat was the only option.

(Pictured below – Waiting to board the Ship ‘Professor Gul’ at the Port in Azerbaijan)

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The boat, was actually a cargo ship, it doesn’t run to any type of schedule, so you’ve no idea when it will arrive, and it will only leave once its full, which can takes days, sometimes weeks!

When we arrived at the port we had to camp outside the customs border control office, as the ship hadn’t arrived yet, they won’t even sell you a ticket until it’s arrived, so it’s a waiting game.
We asked how long the crossing would take, and were told it should be about 25 – 30 hours,
but if the weather is bad they sometimes drop anchor in the middle of the Caspian Sea, which means that the ship could sit there for days until the storm passes!

5 days later we had crossed the Caspian Sea and arrived in Kazakhstan, the ship docked in the middle of the night, it was pitch black, you couldn’t see anything, apart from the darkness of the desert ahead of us.

It was around 2am in the morning, and after a very painful ordeal of checking visas, and having our bikes and bags searched, we eventually left the ship, we cycled off the ship straight into the darkness of desert, and as soon as we could no longer see the port, we stopped and put up our tent and went to bed, we had no idea where we where. 

(Pictured below – Our first night camping in the desert of Kazakhstan)

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The great thing about the desert, is that there’s no light pollution, so the view of the sky was truly amazing, there’s so many stars, it was like you could almost reach up and touch them, we could also see many shooting stars, I believe there’s also many meteorites which finish their journey in the deserts of the Stan’s. 

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(Pictured below – Some of our camping areas at sunset, and a typical Yurt Tent)

Our route was to follow the famous Silk Road through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, over the Pamir Highway in Tajikistan following the border of Afghanistan, then into Kyrgrstan and finally into China to the city of Xi’an where the great Silk Road originated, Xi’an is also home to the terracotta warriors. 

(Pictured below – Terracotta Warriors in China)

When cycling thousands of kilometres across such remote and harsh environments of the desert, theres no way of knowing how it would actually work out, its very difficult to plan a journey in a country that is so remote, especially when you are self supported on a bicycle, there’s only so much you can carry, we had plot a route by using paper maps, but the maps are pretty useless, as they don’t really show you anything, as most of the time you are following make shift trails that aren’t on the map, and the few towns and villages that exist, are small sort of pop up places that the nomads have erected themselves over the years, these can also be moved for whatever reason. We also had our route backed up with GPS digital offline routes, which were on saved on my laptop and other GPS devices like my Garmin and even my phone.
Theres not many satellites above the desert, especially the closer you get to China, so it was important that everything worked off line, just incase we lost or damaged our paper maps, but in the end we relied on our compass, the sun in the sky and as always, trusted our instincts.

(Pictured below – LEFT – the only smooth bit of road we found in the desert)

At night finding a camping spot is very easy in the desert, as you can’t be too choosy, there’s no way of hiding amongst trees, or in the shade of a mountain, as there aren’t any! So when you’ve had enough of cycling for the day, you just stop and put your tent up, most of the time this was in the middle of nowhere, in fact, everywhere we went was in the middle of nowhere! the only way to explain it is, just imagine camping on the moon, well then you get the idea. 

Sometimes we would make it to a small village, it’s noting exciting, and only consists of about 20 tin huts just sat there in the dust of the desert, sometimes the houses are made from mud, but in these little villages we always managed to get watermelons!

In the Stan’s, you can cycle for days and see no one, but when you do see someone, they will always have a load of watermelons, its one of the only things that grows there, to be honest, I don’t really like them, but when you’re living off a diet of stale bread and rancid horse meat, watermelon suddenly seems very appealing, its also full of vitamin C and great for the thirst, which is all the time in the desert, so knowing that you’re able to find watermelon can be very comforting, given the fact you can travel for days with no source of water.

Staying healthy in the desert is difficult, and the longer you are there, the more prone you can be to illness, this is not only due to the immense heat and general poor living conditions, but also due to not being able to get the right nutrition, especially high energy food for cycling.
We find its always best to make your own food, for instance when we cycled across Tajikistan, one week we had run out of food, we came across a small wooden hut in the mountains where a shepherd family lived, they gave us some rice with raw horse meat covered in flies, we had no choice other than to eat it, we picked out the raw meat and ate the rice, not long after I spent 5 days in my tent with food poisoning (Gabs was OK) what made it worse was the fact that we were at an altitude of 15,000 ft, which made me feel even worse due to dehydration from losing fluids, this in turn caused mild altitude sickness, I was going nowhere, I led in the tent for 5 days trying to get well and build up enough strength to continue on the tough journey ahead, I have never felt so ill in all my life, and the nearest village with medical facilities was over 600km a way on the other side of the Pamir Mountains, but thankfully we were able to filter water from a nearby river in the mountains.

Whenever we camped near a village late at night, and due to the fact that there was no way of hiding, many people would see us erecting our tent, as we had our head torches on, so for this reason we would camp about 3km away.
Every evening Gabs would put the tent up, whilst I prepare the food, as soon as we’d eaten we would both have a shower, which is done by using a small plastic bottle of water, the water was still hot from the daytimes sun, we also place our pots and pans at our feet, and then pour the water over our head, trying our best to wash the days dust from our dry skin, this in turn would also wash the pots and pans at our feet, well as good as could be. 

By the time you’re done with the shower and cleaned the pots and pans, you’re shattered, but too tired to sleep.
Many times we would see a cars headlights coming towards us from the nearby village, some of the locals come to say hello, and offer us many gifts, can you guess what they give us? yes watermelons, not the sort you see back home in the supermarkets, some of these are 3 times the size of a football and weigh over 10kg, this sometimes went on throughout the night, even when we’d fallen asleep, people would leave watermelons outside the tent door, one morning there was that many outside the tent I couldn’t get out, there must have been up to 10 piled high, and due to the weight of them we could only carry one each, so we always had to leave them behind, we’d often try and hide them, which was difficult, reason being so not to seem ungrateful, or maybe even disrespectful to the people that had left them in the night, it was the same throughout the day, trucks would pull up in front of us, and the driver would insist on giving us watermelons.

During our time in Uzbekistan, we cycled through the 3 ancient temple cities in the desert, they are called Khiva, Bhukara and Samarkand, which are truly amazing and magical places, its like going back in time, hence all the photos!

The history of these ancient cities dates back thousands of years ago, and to the times of the famous nomads making their long journey by camel following the great Silk Road.

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(Above) In the ancient city of Khiva, we were invited to a special birthday party, where locals from all over the city attended, we spent the evening learning about the Uzbek culture and history or their Nomadic Ancestors.

In the Ancient City of Samarkand we were invited to attend their international music festival, where countries from all over the world performed, this was a very special privilege for us, as the night we attended it was only available to a selection of Uzbek people, they thought we were special as they had heard how we’d cycled to their Ancient City all the way from England, but we’ll talk about that another time.

In each of the Ancient cities theres always markets selling all types of produce, I’m not too sure where they grow it all, as we only ever saw watermelons growing, but the cities were the only place we could get some healthy food, pictured below is the market in the Ancient City of Samarkand.

These ancient cities are truly remarkable, all the areas in between the cities consist of nothing but desert and camels, but they are without a doubt some of the toughest environments on the planet, well they were until we cycled over the Pamir mountains in Tajikistan …but again, thats another story. 

One morning, as we were cycling across the desert looking at the same view, which is sand and camels, we could see something white shimmering in the distance, it looked like an aeroplane, its always difficult to know how far away something is in the desert, things can appear very close, but they never are, and its hard to see clearly, as the air is hot and dusty, and forms a mirage like effect.

After about 30 minutes it was clear that it was an old abandoned aeroplane, it must have crash landed there.
The temperature was rising and it soon reached 50 degrees, finding somewhere to shade in the desert is impossible, most of the time we tie our tent ground sheet between the bikes to make a shaded area and rest for a while, but it was starting to get very windy, and a sandstorm was on its way, so we decided to head to the aeroplane to shelter from the midday sun and the big sandstorm which was heading our way, we just made it to the plane just in time and weathered the storm.

A couple of hours later the sandstorm had passed, there was sand and dust everywhere, it was still poor visibility outside, so we decided to stay in the plane for a while longer.
Shortly after, I looked out of the planes cockpit window to see if the dust had settled, and in the distance could see a few vehicles heading directly towards us, at a very fast speed, they soon got closer, and  I realised that it was 3 heavily armed military jeeps, turns out the plane was on military land, lets just say that the soldiers looked very confused when 2 very dirty cyclists climbed out of the plane, they couldn’t understand how we had got there, just as we couldn’t understand how the place had got there!
Once we had tried to explain, they were very friendly, and the soldier who seemed to be the big boss, asked for a selfie with us. 

The road conditions in the Stan’s are terrible, they are either a very thin layer of broken concrete or a crushed gravel if you’re lucky, other than that is just hard sandy soil, and theres very deep cracks and holes everywhere, so cycling is extremely slow, and dangerous. 

Finding water is difficult, but something you need to plan, you can’t always rely on finding watermelons everyday, and they are very heavy and too big to carry anyway.

Some villages can be 300km apart, and we were drinking 20 litres of water each per day! which is 20kg in weight each, on an already very heavy bike.

Theres no water supply in the villages, so they rely on a truck to deliver water to them each week, which is a small truck with a giant water container on the back, all the village children queue up and fill their plastic bottles and buckets.

We cary water in a few insulated metal drinks bottles, which are great as they do stop the water from getting boiling hot throughout the day, we also use standard plastic water bottles wrapped in tin foil, the water in these gets warm very fast, but not too hot to drink.

The biggest danger cycling in the desert is dehydration, and heat stroke, there’s no medical facilities for days, so if you get into difficulties you’re on your own, to be honest, if you suffer severe heat stroke out there its game over, as simple as that 

We’d been cycling for over 10 hours against a constant headwind, there always seems to be a headwind no matter which direction you are travelling in the desert.
The plan was to get to the next village before sundown so we could get water, from our map we estimated that the village should have been about 180km away, but its always difficult to know your exact location when there’s no reference points or landmarks, and you can’t rely on GPS,
as I mentioned earlier, in order to have GPS you need a number of satellites above you, and there never tends be so many over head in Uzbekistan, after all, its the desert! 

Earlier that day a truck carrying watermelons pulled over, and of course gave us the biggest watermelon we’d ever seen, it could have won first prize for being the worlds biggest watermelon. We asked the driver how far it was to the next village, and he wrote some numbers in the sand with his machete, so we were confident with its approximate location.
As the hours passed by the road was getting steeper, its hard to explain, the terrain looked flat, but it obviously wasn’t, a vast section of the desert became an uphill climb for hours, I remember at one point earlier on seeing a sign which said ‘500ft below sea level’ its not often you see signs like this.

We eventually made it to the approximate location, but there was nothing there, the only thing we found were a few old stone foundations with wooden poles sticking out of the rocks, turned out that the village had moved, there were clear signs that the village was once there, these are common sights, I’m told they were the old watering stations for the camels of the Silk Road way back when. 

Now the question was, how far away was the village, this was so demoralising, and it was starting to get late, and we were shattered, we’d almost run out of food and water too, so we decided it would be best to continue cycling into the night, after we’d had a rest for a couple of hours, so we put up the tent and tried to get some sleep before making our final attempt to find the village ahead. 

We’d only been in the tent for 10 minutes and could hear a vehicle coming towards us in the distance, it was getting closer, we hadn’t seen a vehicle for hours, in fact the last person was the watermelon man earlier that day, so this was our only chance of trying to get some water, and possibly food.

We stood by the side of the dusty road waving our arms in the air hoping the vehicle would see us and stop, as it got closer we could see that it was a 4×4 jeep with European plates, in fact it had Swiss plates! The jeep pulled up and an elderly couple got out, they looked very surprised to see us, they were from Switzerland, from the city of Basel, we had actually cycled through their hometown the year previous, what’s the chances of that! They had been on the road for 9 months, and were heading to Siberia for winter, they asked if they could park their jeep next to our tent and spend the night with us, their jeep was full of supplies, they even had a few cold beers in their fridge, they couldn’t have arrived at a better time! 

That evening they made us a meal of pasta and some strange dried meat they had picked up in a previous village, in fact the village we had been heading to, they informed us later, that the village was another 200km away!

We spent the rest of night sat under the stars somewhere in the middle of the desert drinking some strong liquor, whilst sharing stories. 

A couple of weeks later, we had made it close to the border of Tajikistan, but we were 5 days too early, so couldn’t enter, so we looked for a suitable place to camp.
We found ourselves surrounded by tobacco fields, for as far as the eye could see, endless fields full of tobacco plants, with what appeared to be colourful young children harvesting the crops.

We found a patch of grassland next to an old building made from mud, the building was housing many sheep and goats, so we thought this would be a good location as there must be a farmer nearby, and would be able to buy some food from him.

Gabs walked over to some of the children in the nearby field to ask them if we could put our tent up, we often go for months without being able to communicate with anyone in English, so use hand gestures and sketches to communicate, which tends to work really well, it can be very funny at times, especially with some of Gabs sketches, you’d be amazed what people have given us, like the time Gabs asked to buy a chicken from a farmer, she drew what she thought looked like a chicken, she even did the sound effects and moved her arms like a chicken flapping its wings, to much of the amusement of the farmer, he went away and soon came back with a pig. 

I could see Gabs in the distance talking to the children in the field, she was obviously drawing a picture of a tent and making many hand signals, now I don’t think people in Uzbekistan had ever seen the shape of tent that we use, as they live in either big round Yurt tents or mud and tin huts, and our tent is a typical triangular shaped one. 

Gabs soon came running back with many children, they seemed to understand, and helped us put the tent up

The children worked in the tobacco fields with their families, from 7am in the morning till late at night, their age ranged from 7 to 12 years of age, and where ever so polite, they were all dressed in beautiful colourful clothes, all hand made by their mothers.
The children would come to visit us early in the morning just before they started work in the fields at 7am, we could always hear them coming towards the tent, as they would be singing and dancing as they walked, they would come to the door of the tent with a very sharp metal ‘scythe’ in one hand which they used for cutting the tobacco, and in the other hand they would be holding some sort of green vegetable, which was their breakfast. 

They would sit with us and play games before heading off to work, every couple of hours they would come back to see us and play on our bikes, they were interested in all of our kit, especially our maps, we gave them all the paper maps from previous countries that we no longer needed. 

In the evening they would bring their sisters, mothers and aunties to see us, and they would dance with Gabs in the field to traditional Uzbek music until midnight.
The following morning the children came to visit us, they had brought us some vegetables for breakfast, a couple of the girls where very interested in Gabs pannier bags in the tent, as one of them had a small teddy bear tied to it, little to our knowledge, one of the girls, ‘the little 7 year old’ continued to route through the bags, and found what she thought was a small bottle of perfume,
so she sprayed it on her sisters neck, but it wasn’t perfume, it was pepper spray!
The spray came out in such a force, it went all over her sisters face and she was in lots of pain and was finding it difficult to keep her eyes open, we all felt our skin burning as the pepper was in the air, I hate to think the pain that the young girl was in, she was only 10 years old, but she was very brave, she didn’t cry.
We kept washing her face and eyes with water, but the pain was getting worse, there was nothing we could do apart from keep applying fresh water to her eyes and skin, with pepper spray, its just a matter of time, and it will eventually wear off, but its not something you ever want to experience.
Thankfully about 30 minutes later she was feeling much better, although her face and eyes were very red, but she was ok. 

Across the field we could see a man riding a very big horse, he was galloping fast over to our tent, when he arrived he obviously knew the children, but he looked angry with them, he thought they were bothering us, and could see that one of the girls was upset, I think he thought we had told her off, she explained what had happened, but she was frightened of getting in to trouble for going through our bags. 

The man was still sat on his horse, he looked so big, and was perched so high above us, its the biggest horse we’ve ever seen, he waved over to us to hand him the bottle of pepper spray, he had no idea what it was, he tried to read the label on the bottle, but then sprayed it in the air, right in the direction of the horses face! this was not good, the horse started to jump around and kick its legs into the air and made loud noises, it was clearly in distress, we were very concerned, we thought it was going to trample on our tent and bikes, and of course us too!
He eventually rode away into the distance, we thought he might come back with more men on horse back, we had read about the bandits on horse back in these parts that ride around and chop peoples heads off and use it as a football. 

After all the commotion the young girl was soon feeling much better, and enjoyed riding Gabs bicycle, we walked around the fields to meet the girls families and help harvest the tobacco, lets just say it had been an eventful day, but also a very fun and memorable one, and luckily no men on horses waving machetes returned that day, so we kept our heads for another day. 

We had been camping in the tobacco fields for 2 days, and although we did enjoy the company of the children, it was very difficult to get the much needed rest, as throughout the day, we started to get more and more visitors, it started first with some more children, which were the girls sisters, then came the cousins, then the aunties and mothers, grandmothers, I could go on.. so we decided to move our camp into the nearby forrest.
We only had 3 days left before we were to cross the border into Tajikistan, where we would cycle across one of the most toughest and remotest countries in the world, we were also to cycle over the Pamir Highway, the worlds second highest road at an altitude of over 15,300 ft, so getting rest and maintaining the bikes was very important.

We packed up camp, loaded up the bikes and followed a rough stone trail along the side of a fast flowing river which led to the boundary of a huge forrest, it was perfect, this was to be our new home for the next 3 days, and the place we could get some rest. 
It was around 3pm, we had just put the tent up, Gabs was led in the tent with her ear phones in watching the Walt Disney film, Enchanted on her iPad, I was outside collecting some firewood and preparing a meal.
I left the food to slowly boil in the pan and went inside the tent to start editing a film I was working on, there was a few local people walking around the forrest collecting fallen tree branches for firewood, this is quite common, people don’t always tend to be a problem, sometimes they come for a closer look, and some will bring food, like the watermelons! but most of the time they are interested in the tent and our bikes, as we are a rare sight in these parts. 

So I’m led in the tent working on my laptop, Gabs is next to me watching her film, when I suddenly hear loud voices, again this is fairly common, but the voices were getting much louder, it sounded like men shouting at each other, this continued for a few minutes until the shouting was right outside our tent, men were shouting really loud, I shouted back with a firm ‘hello’ but then heard what I can only explain as the noise you would expect the sound of a gun being loaded would make, I slowly unzipped the tent door and waved my hand out, then slowly put my head out, I must say it was pretty shocking what came next, we were surrounded by about 30 soldiers heavily armed with machine guns which were pointing right at me, yes 30 AK47 machine guns pointing at my head, then more soldiers appeared out of the bushes, I lost count, by this time Gabs had paused her Walt Disney film, and was also with me outside the tent, it was like being in a film, we were on our knees with our hands on our head, with a very angry soldier shouting at us whilst some of the soldiers were going through our kit, they found the pepper spray and my 3 foot long machete, also my telescopic police baton…thankfully they hadn’t seen my drone, drones are forbidden in the Stan’s and can carry a very long prison sentence, so you can imagine what was going through my mind as they searched my bags.

The soldier doing all the shouting must have been the commanding officer, obviously there was no English spoken, but he asked for our papers, so we handed him our passports and visa’s, also a picture card which sort of explains what we are doing.
It turned out we were in a forbidden zone right next to the border of Tajikistan, we had no idea, we hadn’t crossed any fences or seen any signs, so there was nothing indicating we where in a forbidden zone, but explaining that was difficult. 

To pack up all of our kit normally takes about 30 minutes, even longer when you have food cooking on a fire, but the angry soldier wanted us gone in 60 seconds, and the longer we took the more frustrated he got, he kept talking to someone through his 2 way radio, and more soldiers would appear, in the end after about five minutes we had to collapse the tent with everything in it, and tie it to my bike and evacuate the area fast.

We were marched through the forrest with about 35 soldiers following us, it was very difficult pushing the bikes through the forrest, due to the way they were poorly loaded, and some of our kit would drag along the ground and catch on tree branches, every time we stopped the soldiers would get more annoyed, it felt like an eternity, until we finally made it out of the forrest, it was such a relief and we thought we could be on our way, but then 4 military jeeps came towards us, each jeep had a huge artillery gun on the top and were heavily loaded with soldiers, the jeeps pulled up in front of us and all the soldiers climbed out, there must have been about 8 young soldiers in each vehicle, so thats 4 jeeps with 8 soldiers in each, then the soldiers that marched us out of the forrest, so there was almost 70 soldiers surrounding us. 

One of the soldiers ordered us to put our bikes down and to come over to one of the jeeps, this was the point that we thought we were under arrest. Now, please don’t take this the wrong way, but after being on the road for so long, and the countries we’d cycled through, and especially given the way we live, nothing really bothers us anymore, yes we knew that we were in a difficult situation, but we kind of like these different experiences, at the end of the day, we hadn’t done anything wrong, or at least hadn’t intended to do anything wrong on purpose, plus there’s nothing you can do, so no point in worrying. 

We had already convinced ourselves that we would be spending some time in a prison cell, it wouldn’t be the first time, we once spent the night in a prison cell on the border of Myanmar, but thats another story…

So we are now stood at the back of one of the jeeps, the back door wide open, and the commanding officer shouted something, and the soldiers started to close in around us, we thought they wanted us to climb in the jeep, which we did, they all found this funny and started to laugh.

Turns out all they wanted was a photograph, they wheeled our bicycles over, made us hold the flag of Uzbekistan and around 70 soldiers all squeezed together, some of them on the roof of the jeep sat on the huge gun, this went on for 5 minutes as they took many photos, sadly they would not let us use our camera, they actually checked the photos on my camera to make sure we hadn’t photographed the area, and then that was it, they told us to leave and waved us goodbye! 

We spent the next 3 days camping back in the tobacco field with the children along with their families, before making our way into Tajikistan where we cycled along the border of Afghanistan towards the Pamir Highway, to say we were tired would be an understatement, but we were also very excited for the journey ahead. 

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After spending weeks cycling through Tajikistan, we finally made it over the Pamir Highway, which is the second highest road in the world. This is one of the most remotest places in the world, and we spent several weeks cycling without seeing a sole. Pictured below, we are camped at an altitude of over 15,000ft in sub zero temperatures, shortly after taking this photo, as we continued cycling the Pamir Highway, we met some local children of the Pamir, as we descended down to the country of Kyrgyzstan, and then crossing the border into China.

You’ll see a photo of something that looks like a shrine, it’s actually some of our kit we left behind for future travellers, in the bag there’s some bike spares and tooling, a thermal blanket and jacket, some dried and extra special tinned food, and a packet of boiled sweets, we also left a message for the lucky person who found them with our contact card.A few months ago we received a message from a young lady traveler all the way from Switzerland who had found them, she particularly enjoyed the tin of horse meat, it had been frozen for over 6 months, so took a while for her to defrost it!

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We hope you enjoyed our rather long story, if so here are a few films we made in the Stan’s, don’t forget you can watch more of our films on the films page on our website.