Oh what a lovely trip

Origin City	Destination City	Date
Gillingham	London	Mon-01-Sep
London	Madrid	Mon-01-Sep
Madrid	Alcala De Henares	Mon-01-Sep
Alcala De Henares	Madrid	Thu-04-Sep
Madrid	Salvadore	Thu-04-Sep
Salvadore	Rio De Janeiro	Sun-07-Sep
Rio De Janeiro	Lima	Wed-10-Sep
Lima	Cuzco	Sat-13-Sep
Cuzco	Ollantaytambo	Sat-13-Sep
Ollantaytambo	Manchu Pichu	Sun-14-Sep
Ollantaytambo	Cuzco	Fri-19-Sep
Cuzco	Arequipa	Mon-22-Sep
Arequipa	Cuzco	Thu-25-Sep
Cuzco	Lima	Sat-27-Sep
Lima	Piura	Mon-29-Sep
Piura	Guayaquil	Thu-02-Oct
Guayaquil	Quito	Sun-05-Oct
Quito	Cali	Tue-07-Oct
Cali	Menezales	Thu-09-Oct
Menezales	Bogota	Sat-11-Oct
Bogota	Panama City	Thu-16-Oct
Panama City	Cancun	Sun-19-Oct
Cancun	Chitzen Itsa	Mon-20-Oct
Cancun	Mexico City	Thu-23-Oct
Mexico City	Morelia	Fri-24-Oct
Mexico City	Teotihuacan	Tue-28-Oct
Mexico City	New York	Thu-30-Oct
New York	Niagra Falls	Fri-31-Oct
New York	Santo Domingo	Sat-01-Nov
Santo Domingo	Puerto Plata	Sun-02-Nov
Puerto Plata	Santo Domingo	Fri-07-Nov
Santo Domingo	New York	Sat-08-Nov
New York	Las Vegas	Sun-09-Nov
Las Vegas	Grand Canyon	Mon-10-Nov
Las Vegas	Honolulu	Wed-12-Nov
Honolulu	Nadi	Tue-18-Nov
Nadi	Auckland	Sun-23-Nov
Auckland	Sydney	Sun-30-Nov
Sydney	Brisbane	Fri-05-Dec
Brisbane	Cairns	Sun-07-Dec
Cairns	Darwin	Thu-11-Dec
Darwin	Singapore	Thu-11-Dec
Singapore	Jakarta	Sat-13-Dec
Jakarta	Singapore	Tue-16-Dec
Singapore	Kuala Lumpur	Fri-19-Dec
Kuala Lumpur	Penang	Mon-22-Dec
Penang	Phuket	Sat-27-Dec
Phuket	Bangkok	Wed-31-Dec
Bangkok	Pattaya	Fri-09-Jan
Pattaya	Bangkok	Mon-12-Jan
Bangkok	Siem Reap	Wed-14-Jan
Siem Reap	Saigon	Mon-19-Jan
Saigon	Hanoi	Thu-22-Jan
Hanoi	Nanning	Sun-25-Jan
Nanning	Guilin	Fri-30-Jan
Guilin	Hong Kong	Mon-02-Feb
Hong Kong	Manila	Thu-05-Feb
Manila	Cebu	Mon-09-Feb
Cebu	Manila	Fri-13-Feb
Manila	Hong Kong	Sat-14-Feb
Hong Kong	Shanghai	Tue-17-Feb
Shanghai	Osaka	Fri-20-Feb
Osaka	Hiroshima	Tue-24-Feb
Hiroshima	Hakata	Thu-26-Feb
Hakata	Puson	Sat-28-Feb
Puson	Seoul	Tue-03-Mar
Seoul	Qingdao	Sun-08-Mar
Qingdao	Beijing	Tue-10-Mar
Beijing	Moscow	Fri-13-Mar
Moscow	Minsk	Fri-20-Mar
Minsk	Warwaw	Mon-23-Mar
Warwaw	Prague	Thu-26-Mar
Prague	Berlin	Sun-29-Mar
Berlin	Dusseldorf	Wed-01-Apr
Dusseldorf	Amsterdam	Sat-04-Apr
Amsterdam	London	Tue-07-Apr
London	Gillingham	Tue-07-Apr

DWW Day draws ever closer.

"Dickon Wandering the World" Day is drawing ever closer.

 

Upon further investigation I have come to the realisation that through exorbitant prices, lack of a local friend when I get there and the desire to be home before I go completely grey have meant that i have to curtain my original route, now missing out all of Africa, Easter Island and my childhood beloved Galapagos Islands.

 

Plotting the new route on my wipe clean map of the world, it appears much more like a classic round the world trip and less like an old soak meandering old soak his way home after leaving the pub from the rear exit and staggering off in the opposite direction.

 

As I have been reliably informed, the South American countries are still fairly isolated from each other train wise, and so the best way, though far from cheap, is to fly from city to city, and for this reason I am using my various local contacts to try and have a travel agent form out there to get in touch with me and book them at local prices in advance.

 

Once I reach Singapore then my wings will be clipped for the duration and from then on I plan to keep both feet firmly on terra firma, excluding the two ferry trips to get to and from Japan.

 

The upside of this is that I get to see how the general working and middle class populace of Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and the Republic of Southern Korea go from place to place and at a price that is dwarfed by a single flight in South America.

 

The downside is that I will have to time my journey times carefully so that I do not miss too many days stuck on a train, hopefully I will be able to make plenty of overnight journeys and cut down on bed in hostels at the same time.

 

I think at least once a week I will try to grab a nights sleep in a cheap hotel that washed laundry, so that I can keep my rucksack light and not worry about taking more than the minimum clothing required.

 

Meanwhile ... back in good old blightly, my leaving preparations are in full flow.

 

The letting agents have been and viewed the property and took pleasure in saying that my house was in fine shape and only needed a hand rail to the cellar and a gas certificate before they could start moving tenants straight in.

 

The insurance people have stated that the outside repairs works to my property are minimal but not covered as they are wear & tear instead of storm damage, so I have also got an appointment for a builder / roofer to come and quote for the works this Friday.

 

With friends and family coming up trumps in the storage department, I now have enough boxes to store all my stuff and enough industrial rolls of bubble wrap to cover the statue of liberty, so its all hands to their stations and I am packing as much as I have time for during the evenings.

 

My amazon book and dvd sale is off and running, with over 25 purchases in less than two weeks, so I am confident that this month at least I will smash the minimum number of sales in order to benefit from the economies of scale one off payment for their fees.

 

For some reason, I cant see why, but none of the London women have taken up my offer of a quality relaxing reflexology foot massage ( for a very modest fee ), though I am happy to report that my advert for travel buddies did much better as I am now in regular correspondence with a few potentials candidates.

 

Next month I am having a trial run of getting to Dusseldorf, both to see my good friends there and also to try and make sure that when I do go I at least get to the first check point before I am completely in the dark and pinning all my hopes on my gut instincts to get me all the way without unnecessary hassle.

A word from the wise

Well having looked at a myriad websites about trains, planes and automobiles, oh and ferries, it would appear that trying to go "Around the world in 80 days" is not only very possible, but been done so many times by so many people from all over the world, and starting from just about anywhere you care to mention, that in fact it's almost becoming a bit old hat.

Also the cost isn't as much as you might expect either.

Nope, the real trick is to decide how long you can afford to go for, exactly which route you wish to take and how much of the locations en route you want to pause in enough to warrant a separate ticket or stop over.

Using public transport railways for instance :-

In 3 days you can reach Moscow from London, via Warsaw, for around £150.

In another 7 days you can reach Beijing from Moscow for around £300, or less if you speak fluent Russian or are well verses in using foreign phrase books.

And finally a further 2 days journey can get you to Hanoi from Beijing for around £71.

So you can see, in under 2 weeks you can go from London to the bottom corner of South East Asia and all for around £500, sound good?

Well maybe surprisingly no, as other than getting your passport stamped at the border, and not to forget having to buy all the relevant visas in advance, this is travel in its purest and simplest form, just getting from A to B.

It is not really visiting any of these places and you get no chance to be a tourist. This is not allowing for any stop overs, sight seeing, clothes shopping, photo opportunities ( unless you like blurred photos or those of far away mountain ranges through a pane of glass ), meeting / mingling with the locals, sampling native cuisine or haggling in market stalls for souvenirs to take back home.

In fact, in a way it is no better that flying from airport to airport with as soon as you land from your inbound flight being escorted directly to the departure lounge for your connecting outbound flight out again soon afterwards.

I remember one of the first times I went to London with my mother, it was such a big occasion, we went to the Imperial War Museum, I was rubber necking myself the whole time and the noise / pollution combined gave me a massive headache. These days I commute into London daily, often falling asleep on the train and listening to my Walkman all the way from the station to my office, only looking around enough to wait for clear ways through the road traffic and to avoid slower moving pedestrians.

Imagine a huge circular commute journey where you do nothing but catch 40 winks every few hours, grab an overpriced sandwich and mineral water when your peckish, and work your way through a novel or sudoku puzzle book, all the while trying to avoid the eyes of your fellow commuters. It would be the most pointless and needless waste of time imaginable.

Upon arriving home again would you be any more worldly wise? ... Would you have gained memories you will cherish for the rest of your life? ... Would you have enough photos to stick into 3 albums with which to bore your in-laws to tears? ... Would you have become firm friends with someone from the other side of the world with whom you have promised to keep in touch? ... Would you be eager to save up enough money and vacation time and do it all again if you could?

Probably not, no!

So as these days much of the chore has been taken out of travelling, this gives you more opportunity to enjoy it at your leisure and at your own pace, so I suggest you don't be in such a hurry, after all now more than ever it would be wise to keep in mind the age old saying "life is a journey, not a destination".

And thus if your planning a travelling trip, whether it be just around a single country or big enough to make it to the next continent, first off make a list of all the places/people/things you want to see, then decide how long you want to stay in each place before you even think about how to get from one place to the next or in what order you plan to do them all, and doing it this way afterwards you will be glad that you did.

A Whole Lot Of Shroving

If my childhood memories server me correctly, in days of Yore when knights were bold and peasants were poor there was a day called Shrove Tuesday where it was customary to eat up all the last scraps of the best goodies in the larder and then go on a fasting period called lent where you hardly ate anything at all, which kinda sucked.

 

I'm not sure who came up with the idea, probably those trippy Pagan druids or Christian clerics supping on too much communal wine, but it ended with another big day called Easter when you go hunting a super fast bunny rabbit who hid yummy chocolate eggs all over the place and afterwards you can watch films like Footloose and Xanadu, which didn't suck at all.

 

Anyway, Shrove Tuesday soon became a day better known as pancake day, cos the best goodies in days or Yor turned out to be pretty crummy stuff like flower, milk and eggs which alone you can't really do much with ...  until you add some lemon juice, bananas, strawberries, dark demerera sugar, galaxy chocolate ( grated ) a pinch of salt, maybe some maple syrup, cos then you whisk up the main ingredients into a pancake mix, and after frying / flipping it in duck fat you get super scrummy pancakes with a variety of toppings.

 

{ However I've half a mind to try and chop up the main ingredients as when I eat them a lot of the time the toppings try to escape out the ends!  Hmmm, I must try that next time, I guess it will work as long as the mixture is still runny and doesn't stick to the pan! }

 

But the thing is, I really dig those hoopy pancakes and I think it really bites that I have to wait a whole year between snacking them, so when Shrove Tuesday comes I have made it a Springate houserule that it is not longer Shrove Tuesday, but Shrove Tuewedthursday as this way I get to pig out three days in a row.

 

Yet however long they tried to stretch out the shroving, the fasting part was always a bummer, til a few years ago when someone decided that it wasn't worth starving yourself any more and so they shifted it to a time when you just had to give something up. But it couldn't be something you hated or never did, so you couldn't say you would give up running the marathon or eating sprouts { everyone hates sprouts } but it could be eating sweets or jelly and ice cream.

 

So this year I have decided that for lend I will give up chocolate { once I have finished the pack of minstrels left over form the cinema trip last weekend that is } , give up cocoa cola, give up burgers, give up alcohol and finally give up sex { though my friend say that this last one is too easy as I'm not getting any at the moment anyway ... curse them - grrrrrr }.

Amazon

I had a great idea to save up some money for my trip.

 

Instead of paying someone to store all my old stuff I would sell as many of my old books, cd's and dvd's as possible ( except a few very rare tomes ) and then make a packet.

 

Sadly I had no idea what the costing of packaging was like and I made the mistake of not forward buying some dirty cheap jiffy bags.

 

After spending most of a weekend listing literally hundreds of books and dvd's I had already a small collection of items to post before I headed off to work this morning.

 

Fore noted to "Sold. Dispatch now" the items that had made a sale I was conscious that I did not want to get bad negative feedback as a seller right away so I went to the post office at lunchtime and grabbed the first enveloped that they would fit in and went up to the counter to post them on.

 

Afterwards I checked my receipt and I found that if you include the fee that amazon take, the cost of the bag ( almost 80p each ) and the actually postage cost as well that I had made a loss on all my first four items.

 

Not exactly the start of my promising savings drive that I had been hoping and so with over 200 other items that may go any minute I decided right away to order some inexpensive jiffy bags and have them sent right to my office to minimise the delay.

 

Next time that I sell anything I wont make the same mistake again, and this time I might actually make a bit of a profit .. well, who knows !!!

The itiniary changes yet again

I would have liked to see all of the ancient seven wonders of the world, sadly six have been lost to the sands of time and so the pyramids of Giza is all that was left for me to visit.

 

I would like to visit all of the seven natural wonders of the world, yet they are all spread out across the globe and to reach them all is no simple or cheap journey.

 

I would like to visit all my friends, but again they are spread out all around the world far and wide.

 

I would like to visit all the wondrous places of my childhood fantasies, from Timbutu to Xanadu and everywhere in between, but that would be a journey of such epic extravagance for a man of my age, wealth and current social standing that it would rule my life for years to come in order to achieve it.

 

I have dreams, and I long to make them realities, but one of the biggest dreams is to find a sweet loving wife and settle down, and that would be made all the harder if I chose to give up a house, a job and a career forever in order to go chasing the wondrous world of my youth.

 

With my family and friends around me, I could pretend to play the prodigal son, go gallivanting around the world and hope that they are all there waiting for me with open arms upon my return, but that would be asking and expecting too much of anyone, as well as being totally unfair.

 

With this trip I have to be both pragmatic and realistic, accept that what I would chose to do if I have unlimited time and money is not always in line with what I can actually achieve without losing everything I currently have worked so hard to accomplish.

 

I must come to terms with what is real, what is possible and what really matters, and right now some of these places I would really like to visit but maybe this time right here and now is not my time to view them.

 

I am still young, 31 is not old, frail and grey and as long as I do not cut all my ties to the past it may be possible to do many of the things I want now and the rest later on in life.

Why Travel

I had a nice long chat with my mother today about all sorts of things, and of course my trip was high up on the agenda for many reasons.

 

It was a nightmare to chose where and why for certain places and I had to agree that it would take a lifetime to visit everywhere, see everyone and do everything that I wanted.

 

The main dilemma is that humans being are, almost by habit, walking wish demanding machines. All our lives we think, if only I can do this, I'd love to do that, why cant something be possible and so the more we live the more we want.

 

It is true that the happiest people I have met have also been the poorest, with little vision for what life could offer and almost no understanding of the many possibilities that are open to us as human beings.

 

Now I'm not saying that it is possible for anyone to just leave their home, reach civilization, travel the world and find the perfect job with their ideal partner, but it is true that in some circumstances ignorance is bliss, and the facts and possibilities that we fill our heads with the more the agony of choice clouds our thinking and makes us unhappy with our current situation.

 

My mother and I were in complete agreement that If I was in a job that I liked and was settled down with a wife and kids that my desire to travel would me much muted, and I would not even seriously contemplate the dream of every truly travelling around the world, let alone set myself a timeframe and go about finding out the costing of various trips.

 

I do not deny that I have always wanted to travel and explore the world, but it is without doubt the fact that I am so un-contented with my current life that has lit the fire under my feet enough for me to make this massive sacrifice.

 

Right here, right now, this travel is something that I feel I am drawn towards but equally it is that I feel nothing substantial keeping me here that is what is allowing my otherwise rational and down to earth mentality to be seduced by the desire to see other places, meet other people, and do what so few actually get a chance to attempt.

 

At first I thought that the trip would be a success if I got to see everything, came back and then wrote a massive best seller from my experiences and lived forever on the proceeds.

 

Then I mellowed to the logic that it would be a success if I got to see most of the things, came back and wrote a frailly successful book enough to break into the writing world.

 

Now, with actually having to try and pay for this trip, and already seeing the effort that is going into it, and the many sacrifices that I am having to make, I have come to the conclusion that it would be a success if I came back in one piece undamaged, having seen enough of the things that I really had my heart set on enough to make the sacrifices I am making worth it and to have been able to keep my house.