Roadtrip on the Silk Road — Hardcover Photo Book

Twelve countries. 14,000 kilometres. Thirty days. One 1,800-euro Volkswagen Touareg with the suspension of a shopping cart.

What could possibly go wrong? This is the photographic evidence that it mostly did — gloriously — all the way from Germany to the roof of the world.

Some people plan their road trips. We bought an 1,800-euro Touareg with no functioning suspension and pointed it vaguely east. Thirty days, twelve countries and 14,000 kilometres later, we had bounced across the Balkans, been headbutted by our own car roof somewhere in Turkey, queued six hours at a Tajik border, and driven onto the Pamir Highway — the “Roof of the World” — in a vehicle that would struggle to be the roof of a garden shed.

Along the way, camels judged our life choices, goats staged roadblocks, and at 4,000 metres the altitude sickness got so enthusiastic that one of us started seeing tigers. (There were no tigers.) We were rescued, fed and grinned at by some of the warmest people on earth — all while proudly displaying German licence plates in places Google Maps refuses to acknowledge exist.

A travel photo book about doing something spectacularly ill-advised, surviving it, and immediately wanting to do it again — this time via Tibet, obviously.

A journey to the edge of the possible — and, against all mechanical odds, back again.

• Hardcover, portrait A4
• English edition