Welcome to Mark and Jutta Brayne’s Psych-lo-therapists blog (yes, that’s not a misspelling) – covering tandem and solo bicycle trips to crazy places like New Zealand, Germany, Transylvania and the Baltics, and pulling together a LOT of old foreign-correspondent-related archives.

With help from Dan Williams of Tiger Finch, the website has now had a radical overhaul, with posts and headings clustered in much more accessible and user-friendly manner.

Hope you like the new blog logo – brains on wheels. Or Braynes on Daisy2.

This blog has posts going back several years now, to when Mark – at that time not yet remarried to Jutta, which came to pass in 2013 after a break of 14 years – cycled to Budapest and back in 2008, and then the length of New Zealand’s South Island in 2012.

In 2016, together again, we cycled the full length of New Zealand from top to bottom, the 3000-km Tour Aotearoa, and with various excursions between (Warsaw-Tallinn via Kaliningrad in 2017, Danube in 2018), we completed an amazing 5500 km all round Germany in 2023, and 4000 km all round France the following year. 

This year, we hope to “do” Hungary and Transylvania. 

There are extensive recordings from Mark’s time as BBC radio correspondent in Beijing and elsewhere in the 1980s, some in full feature form, some as packages ready to assemble.

I’ve also enabled access on OneDrive to every single raw cassette recording made between 1984 and 1992 when foreign corresponding came to end end – some 600 of them in all, each between 60 and 90 minutes. Treasure Trove??

For some crazier fun, enjoy our Barbershop quartet The Four Tones singing in Beijing in 1986, in which Mark was joined by American then-businessman Bill Zarrit, US Embassy then-charge Darryl Johnson and the British Council’s Jasper Utley.

Unrepeatable.

For a list of all the blogs in chronological backward order, click here.

All bilateral best, Mark and Jutta.