Breadcrumbs

Encounter Overland ASIA 1978 - the breakdown

 

London to Kathmandu - Turkey; the breakdown

Autumn 1978

It was early morning. It was cold, very cold. We were in the Eastern Anatolia Region of Eastern Turkey, in the mountains. Everybody was keen to get going. We had been watchful during the night because, at the time, Eastern Turkey was known to have bandits, and westerners were rich pickings. Breakfast dealt with and packed up. Everyone was on board, in their thick coats, still shivering. The engine had warmed up, and we set off. We were on dirt roads that were a lot better than some. We were making reasonable progress. Then we came to an incline. We were in the mountains so that was not unexpected. What was unexpected was that a short while later we came upon a queue of tipper trucks and some roadworks.

Encounter Overland Asia 1978 - Wren Park

Encounter Overland's mechanical hub, Wren Park

1978/9

Encounter Overland’s workshop was located in rural Bedfordshire. The address was Wren Park Hitchin Road Shefford Bedfordshire SG17 5JD. Between trips this is where the trucks were stored, repaired and prepared for the next trip. There was a small permanent staff, headed up by Bill Wallace, managing the workshop, and the rest of the workforce was made up of drivers between trips.

Whilst looking for Encounter Overland’s Shefford address I found info on Working for an Adventure Travel Company.

It states;- What Will the Work Entail?

  • Long hours.
  • Mechanical knowledge required.
  • Low pay but travel formalities are taken care of.
  • Essential to get on with people in claustrophobic conditions.
  • Stamina and endurance a must.

Not a lot has changed since ‘78/79 then.

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News Flash

Repairs following hosting move

 

Spending some time this May repairing links and photos damaged in the move to the new website host. Particularly the articles transferred form the previous travelogue to this, the current Travel website. 

Change of host Sept 2023

 

Change of host Sept 2023

 

In the begining of August 2023 I transfered my ivanhurst.me.uk sites, including this one from 123-reg to IONOS. It was meant to be a simple task. However, that was to to be the case. The reason for the move was primarily the hugh increase in price that 123-reg was applying regarding email boxes. Previously, the upto 500 of the boxes were included in the various hosting packages I had. Now they were going to charge for each mailbox based on size, and as far as I could make out, this was going to cost me nearly £2,000. This was not acceptable, and I did not get satisfactory answers from support. So I turned off all the auto renews and stated to move sites and domains accross to IONOS.

Travel data problems

 

Travel data problems

This is where it starts to get a little technical.

The site is built on a content management system, CMS, using Joomla. Joomla is moving forward and version 3.10.?? is being discontinued. Future developments are for version 4.??

Similarly, PHP 7 is being replaced with PHP 8.

Part of the migration is relatively simple, I have already changed to a new template which works on the new platforms.

However, some of the helper applications, which work within Joomla are not yet ready.

Fabrik is one of those applications, if fact a significant 'Joomla Custom Website Application Builder'.

Refresh 2021

 

Site refresh Easter 2021

I decided to give the site a bit of a refresh over Easter 2021 and install a new template and some additional functions. One of the things I didn't like about the old site was the delay in text appearing which probably meant some people left before the content appeared. This has been disabled now.