Alright fellow followers. Update time.

We have revisited the first draft of our route which we planned out during Session #1 – the one we’ve been parading around on our website for the past while. Doing the calcs, this route would have seen us journey 21,151kms of roads and questionable terrain. This means we would need to average 503kms of travel per day and use a whopping 1692 litres of fuel, worth $3367 at NZ prices.

The implications of the planned 21,000+ kilometre route meant that if we broke down and lost a day, which is inevitable by the way, we would need to spend a whole day or night in the car to catch up. We also had no contingency days planned.

After much deliberation and anguish, it was wholly agreed to bump a few of Europe destinations off the hoon-path. Our reasoning was that we are much more likely to return to this part of the world later in life.

So! Out go Italy and Croatia which reduced our path to an average of 473kms per day, totalling 19,851kms.

Another significant change we made was to deviate from travelling across Afghanistan. Our source of advisory for this change was information gleamed from Afghan taxi drivers during work trips. Warnings of Taliban and bandits, roads that range from very bad to non-existent, and unexploded land mines left over from the Soviet-Afghan War were more than enough to elicit a resounding “nope” from The Kiwis.

This gives us the opportunity to journey north though the Ahal Province of Turkmenistan. 260km north of Ashgabat in the middle of the Karakum Desert is the site of a natural gas fire that has been burning since it was lit by Soviet petroleum engineers in 1971. The photos really show why the locals call it the “Door to Hell”, and I bet it’ll be just as impressive in person!

Signing off for now, I’ll leave you with the updated hoon-path. Keen to hear your comments!

~Scotty