Road trip travel writers launch Black Sea Circuit

A career in overland adventure travel was launched when Simon Raven and Chris Raven drove across Siberia from the UK to Vladivostok at the dawn of a new millennium. A decade on sees the release of their fourth book BLACK SEA CIRCUIT, which follows the brothers on a quest to drive full circle around this large inland sea at the birthplace of civilisation.

Chris Raven at the cave fortress of Mangup Kale, Crimea.

Simon and Chris were first introduced to the freedom of the open road at a young age with a series of camping trips to France and Italy with their family throughout the 1980s. Following a career in London, Simon as an internet journalist and Chris as a fashion photographer and picture editor, the brothers quit their jobs in the pursuit of a life of adventure. Over the past fifteen years the travel duo have traversed the Trans-oceanic highway from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast of South America, travelled the road to Damascus and have documented and photographed off the beaten track destinations across the globe including China’s deep south, tribal India and the Balkan peninsula.

The Monument to the Defenders of Adzhimushkay Quarry. Kerch, Crimea.

The inspiration for their latest book came from the realisation that the legends of Jason and Argonauts, Noah’s Ark and a tribe of fierce female warriors known as the Amazons all originate from the Black Sea. Gripped by curiosity, Simon and Chris fired up their twenty year old Volvo which looked, “As rustic and weather-beaten as a Cold War tank” and headed east. In the shadow of rising tension in Ukraine, the brothers got up close and personal with the fascinating people who inhabit the six nations that surround these colourful shores. Living on the road like the nomadic horse bowmen who once ruled the steppe grasslands, they explored Crimea, the Caucasus region of southern Russia’s “Wild West”, the Georgian kingdom of Colchis, Turkey’s Pontic coast, the megacity of Istanbul and ended their journey in Romania at the outfall of the mighty River Danube.

Priding themselves in going it alone, Simon and Chris have been noted by Lonely Planet for their talent to portray an “accurate view of what to expect”.

BLACK SEA CIRCUIT
by The Raven Brothers

On Amazon >