We are sitting in our guesthouse in Bukhara after a beautiful day. We have been wandering through mosques and medrassas and up and down minarets with our mouths open, gaping at the ancient architecture, the extraordinary stone and tilework and picturing the history, fair and foul, that has passed through this silk road town. All of the usual suspects were here – Marco Polo, Genghis Khan etc. – as well as the famous Stoddart & Conolly, two English army officers whose handlebar mustaches and Victorian stiff upper lips didn’t prevent them from being inventively and lengthily tortured then straightforwardly killed for breaches of local etiquette. It’s pretty stirring stuff.

Our guesthouse – an atmospheric old Emir’s palace, with heavy wood-beamed rooms surrounding a shady central courtyard and a jewel-like breakfast room complete with carved plasterwork, lavishly painted ceilings and tiny plates of brightly coloured jams – is unfortunately full of retired French and German tour groups. So far so standard: many of the people we meet on the road are retirees, Lufthansa has good connections to this part of the world from Eastern Bloc days, and Central Asia seems to have a special allure to those who did their original travel dreaming back when the Iron Curtain prevented them from imagining they would ever actually get here. That said, the tour groups don’t bother us much, until…

My spoken French is pretty rusty at the best of times, but this IS the best of times – for some random reason many of the guest house owners and taxi drivers in Uzbekistan speak French not English. Given that French is also the lingua franca (ha ha) of half of Vanuatu, I have been speaking more French recently than I have in years. As such, I understood the elderly French lady perfectly as she walked past, and even picked up on the heavy note of disdain.

“Poor thing. He’s having to sew up his shoes!”

That’s right lady. I’m sewing up my shoes. Running repairs are a necessity on the road when you have a limited set of clothes – so far I have handily put a stitch or two in one jumper, one wooly hat with a llama on it, one set of thermals, two t-shirts and one busted rucksack flap. In a moment of train-journey-inspired boredom I even darned one solitary sock. I have also had an Oswald Boateng shirt rehemmed by a little old lady in Port Vila with an even older Singer sewing machine.

I imagine in retired-French-lady-land one would simply buy another pair of shoes. And in my-partners-and-I-sold-an-investment-bank-last-year-land I normally would too. But these are New Balance barefoot running shoes. Not at all expensive, but very, very carefully chosen, and perfect – they are extremely lightweight, offer surprisingly good support and (critically) pack down to the size of a flip flop. In New York I swapped out the laces for black replacements and delicately trimmed off all the lime green decals, so they can just as easily be used as coral reef shoes in the morning and get you past the doorman of a cocktail bar that night. They are dark red, and hence go with every outfit I currently possess. They are, as I said, perfect travel shoes.

But … replacements are not available within a thousand miles of Uzbekistan, and after four months of swimming, walking on coral reefs, hiking and dancing they have a hole in the canvas upper.

So yes, lady, I am sewing up my shoes, whether you think I look like a tramp or not. And a damn good job I am doing of it too.

The mild diversion of finding ourselves a safe, secure, half reasonably priced hotel aside, we were in Wewak for a reason. This is the launch point for pretty much all of the trips down the Sepik river, a place renowned both for its beauty and for its isolation from the outside world. If you want to see this and you don’t want to actually paddle your own canoe, Wewak is the place to arrange for someone else to do so (well, to chuck a 40 HP motor on the back – same principle).

We had in Madang had a very brief introduction to logistics in PNG. The internet rarely works, so email is out, and people typically don’t answer their phones. This presents certain impediments to establishing contact with the middlemen to whom you wish to pay vast quantities of money such that they can find you your canoe. Fortunately, having been dropped by the Good Samaritans in the only good hotel in town we had a massive advantage here in that most of the middlemen swing by during the course of any given morning. With the exception that is of the middleman we’d come here expecting to speak to (he’s the only one mentioned in the Lonely Planet so our hopes were rather hanging on him), who was upriver and out of contact. [As an aside, we later heard – scurrilous gossip – from a tour guide in Kumul that the guy has now become fairly intolerable after years of being top dog and now can’t be bothered to sort out the small stuff for you. Like food. Close escape?]

First up then: a guy called Chris Karis. Young and pretty presentable (teeth weren’t betel stained, clothes were whole-ish and clean-ish, but exhausted and expensive. Couldn’t really be bothered to give us any detail on what we’d do and where we’d go, but happy to tell us that it would cost us about $3,000 for 3 days upriver. Cue enormous gulp from James and I. We sought other alternatives.

This appeared in the form of one gentleman called Seby. Not quite so presentable this time (dirty clothes and filthy teeth), but willing to give us both a detailed itinerary and a cheaper price – down to about $2,200 for 4 days upriver through both slightly cheaper prices all round and the removal from the quote of the transfer back from the river at $400 one way. [You’ll hear more about that later…..]. We were sold – albeit with further big gulps – we were just a tiny bit over budget here…. And not at all nervous when we ran into Chris Karis again later, told him who we were headed upriver with, and he nearly choked….

Payment, of course, is in cash. Half as soon as we agreed terms (they very kindly dropped us at the bank to pick it up) and the remainder the following morning as they picked up food and we prepared to set off. Frankly at this point, we were so delighted not to have been proven to be the unwitting victims of a total scam that we maybe didn’t notice tiny little pointers that Seby might not have been quite so well organized as he could have been. Maybe our $400 ride up, in a knackered old minibus that gasped up every hill should have warned us…

Still, we were on our way!

[We finally make it to the river – James helping pump our US$500 drum of fuel into the boat]

Or: how we eventually found a hotel in Wewak (and no, neither of us is pregnant).

It has never taken me two days to find a hotel before. We turned up in Wewak with our trusty Lonely Planet in hand, hoping to find not only a hotel at short notice, but also a tour guide to take us up the Sepik river (of which more later). It was a relatively tall order, but one of the best known Sepik guides actually runs his own hotel, so we walked confidently past all the hotel taxis at the airport and strolled the short distance to the Surfside Hotel. Which was a series of portakabins sheltering under a three story building site (OK…), and which had nobody at reception (less OK…). So we waited, and waited, and tried the hotel next door (ugh), and waited, and it got dark. And you really don’t want to be caught out after dark. And here begins an epic story to rival that of the holy parents themselves. Laying it all out longhand would turn into a long list of and-then-we-did-this. So, a few selected and compressed highlights:

• Our initial rescue by a pair of scruffy good Samaritans with a Land Cruiser (one of whom turned out to work at Deloitte PNG, of all places) and driven to the best hotel in the country “where the white people stay”(!). The Inn Wewak Boutique Hotel is actually reasonable value at US$200+ per night but was deemed a little too expensive so we resolved to try again the next morning
• Discovering that the hotel we had targeted as a cheaper alternative was – how shall I put this? – a brothel full of drunks. Complete with complementary condoms in the rooms. Nice! And great value at US$175 a night
• Not being let past security at our next choice of hotel – we clearly looked undesirable (perhaps they thought I was a drunk, and Lucy was, erm, also a drunk)
• Eventually finding Francis – our saviour and the owner of the Eden Blooms Transit Inn. Deaf as a post, deeply eccentric (i.e. he had a fully equipped kitchen, missing only an oven or stove of any kind) but good to us. There was no hot water, and you had to be careful not to fall through the floor in places, but it was cheap at the price ($US60 a night). We didn’t have the heart to tell him that in the UK a transit house was a place where ex-convicts were rehabilitated, and that this was perhaps impacting the tourist trade just a little…
• Shocking the staff at the posh hotel so much by our exploits that when we returned a few days later – stumbling out of the jungle, hungry and unshaven with armfuls of native carvings and desperately in need of a shower that didn’t come out of the river – they automatically gave us a 20% pity discount. But that is another story.

Our eventual hotel. The sign says “One person (given a mattress on the floor) – 60 Kina”. Class!

Our eventual hotel. The sign says “One person (given a mattress on the floor) – 60 Kina”. Class!

The time finally came when I could put it off no longer – I was starting to look like many of the travelers we saw about the place. You know the type: the guys where you can carbon date how long they have been travelling by the length of their scraggy hair and stupid unkempt beards. Despite a few rash boasts and not a little encouragement I have yet to either dye my hair blue, or to shave it all off (thanks AS). Instead, I decided that the little Peruvian town of Nazca would be where I broke my expensive habit of Keiko at John Allan’s in midtown and had a truly cheap haircut. Like, a really cheap haircut. Like, a ten Peruvian soles haircut.

I was surprisingly nervous. Lucy and I scoped out the various “pulquerias” and eventually settled on two, one of which we then eliminated because one of the salon chairs had been replaced by a ride-on toy racing car for kiddie haircuts. And I would have wanted to ride on it, and that wouldn’t have been cool. I negotiated with the lady in charge, who naturally spoke no English and seemingly didn’t understand my extremely descriptive international haircut semaphore. Eventually, the instruction (in Spanish) “like Ricky Martin, but straight” got her started. Lucy mercifully waited until later to inform me that I had actually asked for a haircut “like Ricky Martin, but a woman”.

Anyway, twenty sweaty minutes later I came out looking … well, you’ll have to wait and see.

Oh, we also took the opportunity to hire a light aircraft to fly at low level over the Nazca lines. Mysterious ancient civilization; huge prehistoric markings in the desert; unknown purpose; kilometer long geometric figures; massive glyphs of animals, birds, insects (and allegedly spacemen); discovered by accident earlier this century yadda yadda yadda.

We are carrying too much luggage. And by that, I don’t mean that we have one too many pairs of oatmeal trekking trousers in our backpacks and we are worried about the carbon footprint of flying them around the world (although we do, and we are).

We are not people to refuse to carry deodorant for weight-saving purposes. We have sensible, if ostentatiously heavy backpacks, and they aren’t the problem. By “too much luggage” I mean that we have taken advantage of the fact that the first leg of our trip involves driving a large car boot across the States to thoughtfully, pointedly and deliberately carry a bunch of RIDICULOUS crap that we don’t really need. We are considering it one month’s worth of soft start to long periods of being butch and rugged in deserts and on islands (and on desert islands).

Our “America-only” box contains the following highly critical travel accessories:

• Hard copy guidebooks of all the places we are going to. To be read, and then replaced with Kindle versions for the main trip
• A tent (so far, so sensible, although ours is yellow and has flowers all over it)
• A double air mattress (which will already get you frowned at in most semi-serious hiking campsites)
• A fluffy duvet, two sets of clean, white sheets and some soft pillows (erm…)
• A bulging bag of heavy toiletries including big bottles of shampoo and conditioner, a heavy glass bottle of aftershave, the world’s second largest bottle of vitamin pills etc.
• Two bottles of excellent champagne (but of course! One white, one pink, donations left over from our leaving parties)
• Four bottles of good sauvignon blanc
• One bottle of 18 year old Bunnahabhain single malt (for those long winter evenings. In the USA, in May)
• Two huge bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (thanks Mum! Thanks Dad!). Also, one bag of fluffy white marshmallows for toasting over campfires
• A big container of home made muesli for breakfasts (obviously plus china plates, bowls etc.)
• And, la piece de resistance, a full-sized, mains-powered Nespresso coffee machine and four weeks of capsules (and a milk frother – seriously, what use is coffee without frothy milk?)

Essential backpacking kit. Essential.

Having carried the box back and forth down a couple of long hotel corridors, I also discovered a three litre, three kilogram bottle of ginger ale that had previously been lurking in our fridge at home that Lucy couldn’t bear to part with. We have some serious drinking to do!