Edwin Harrison called in from the road last week. He was somewhere in northwest China, eight hours into a driving day, the SatNav interrupting every thirty seconds to announce speed cameras and rest stops. He had news.
Thailand had looked at photographs of the van and spotted a sink.
Edwin and Magda Harrison are the family behind Artisan Coffee on Upper Richmond Road (five Putney cafes in total), and since February they have been driving a bag of coffee from East Putney to Perth, Australia, in a converted people carrier named Daisy. The journey is a world record attempt: the longest coffee delivery by hand, no flights. The bag is a kilogram of Barn Door Blend. The recipient is Magda’s mother. The route goes overland through Europe, Central Asia, China, Southeast Asia and then by sea to Western Australia.
That sink, fitted in the back to give the children safe drinking water through remote stretches using a reverse osmosis filter, has caused the Thai authorities to classify Daisy as a motorhome. Motorhomes need a special vehicle permit. The permit has been refused.
“They won’t grant permission for us to go through,” Edwin told us, somewhere between checkpoint announcements.
And since their backup route through Cambodia is blocked by an actual military conflict (all seven Thailand-Cambodia land borders have been closed since June 2025 with no sign of reopening), the family are now working on Plan C: finding a flat-bed truck in Laos, loading Daisy onto it, and transiting Thailand with the van technically never touching Thai soil.
“The Chinese are absolutely insane with their announcements and their rules,” Edwin added, somewhere in the background.
Since Istanbul
We first wrote about the Harrisons in March, when they had just reached Istanbul with roughly 20,000 kilometres still ahead. Since then they have covered around 10,000 of them, through Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and into China.
It has not been straightforward.
In Istanbul, a police officer knocked on the car window while Edwin was bundling a screaming Joey (the youngest Harrison) into a taxi. Passers-by had reported a child being abducted on the street. The officer asked Joey directly whether Edwin was her father. “Very slowly, she nodded yes,” Edwin said, “and we were allowed to proceed on our way.”
The Russian border took an hour and a half. Edwin was taken to one interview room, marched to a second, and questioned by four officials. When had his father last visited Russia? Had he ever worked for the UK government? Eventually they were waved through, and that evening Edwin posted: “Here we are, in Russia. Now we’ve checked into a hotel, given up on van life for a night, and enjoying a bottle of wine.”
Kazakhstan added its own drama. The direct route south into Uzbekistan was closed, adding several days and a desert detour. At a different border crossing, they were told they were missing a document; the drive back to get it would have been six days. With some help from a coffee lover they had chatted with a few days earlier, the paper materialised and they crossed. Tajikistan refused them visas. They drove around. Kyrgyzstan offered mountains with no roads on them. Over two days the family made roughly fifty miles of progress and slept in a yurt.
There was also, somewhere in Uzbekistan, a football match against their hosts that finished 36-36, which they describe as a friendly.
Through all of it, the bag of Barn Door Blend has remained on the dashboard.
Plan C
China is a thirty-day traverse, already the longest single-country leg of the journey before Thailand added itself to the complications.
The flat-bed truck idea was something Edwin had learned about thirty minutes before he called. “We’ve been trying desperately to convince them,” he said of the Thai authorities, “that it’s just literally a van with six seats in it. But they saw a sink.” The Cambodia border closure, he acknowledged, had “slightly put a spanner in the works.”
Whether Plan C is workable remains to be seen. The Harrisons are still in northwest China, SatNav and all, with the bag of Barn Door Blend on the dashboard where it has been since February.
“It’s our little constant,” Magda said in March. “As everything else changes.”
Follow the journey at @curiousroocoffeeroasters on Instagram. Artisan Coffee is at 203 Upper Richmond Road, SW15.
