About

Nilgun and Mark left London on 1 November 2011 and came home on 2012-06-27. In between they crossed 16 countries and wrote 75 dispatches, illustrated with2,914 photographs.

It was blogged at the time on WordPress. That site went offline years ago. This is the same writing and the same photographs, rebuilt as a static archive with no database, no plugins and nothing that needs maintaining — the point is that it still works in ten years.

What is here

• All 75 dispatches, from 2011-11-03 to 2012-06-27
• All 2,914 photographs, including 97 that were never published the first time
• 109 waypoints from the trip log

What is not

Nine posts were automatic imports of tweets rather than dispatches, and they are not here. Comments are gone; the database held one, and it was a WordPress sample. The Facebook comments and likes lived on Facebook and are unrecoverable.

How it was rebuilt

The content came out of a 2012 MySQL dump. WordPress stored the posts as plain text and wrapped them into paragraphs at render time, so that had to be rebuilt, along with the shortcodes that linked each post to its photographs — there was no relational link between them, only the shortcode text in the body.

Photographs are served at whatever resolution survives. The originals were downsized to 900px in 2011 for the bandwidth of the day; where the full-resolution file has been recovered from an old iPhoto library, it is used instead.