Since I’ve started thinking about driving around the world, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time poking around at Google Maps toying with ideas about where to visit. The first thing that is immediately apparent is that visiting everywhere I’d like to isn’t practical in a single trip, for two differing reasons: Water and War.

I want to limit the amount of time sitting on boats if I can, not least because it is likely to be expensive and I have no idea if some ocean links are even possible, so to keep things simple I’m going to avoid water crossings as much as makes sense.

War and unrest on the other hand is more wide spread then I really ever thought about, Iran, Libya, Iraq, Sudan and a many other places the Foreign Office tells you not to travel to block Europe from some of the places in Asia I’d like to visit and make moving through Africa tricky as well. The solution is to drive though Russia for a good portion of the journey.

Looking over the Foreign Office Travel Advice pages makes for some very gloomy reading at the best of times, and while it does provide some useful information as to areas that are particularly unsafe to travel too, I think you do need to read between the lines on many of the entries as it’s clearly written to ensure that you can’t come back and say you weren’t warned about a situation by the government. Just reading the entries for France and Spain – places people visit with out giving a second though to – you’d get a very uneasy feeling.

Then there is another hickup – If you haven’t been driving for more then two years, the speed limit in Russia is reduced from 60ish miles per hour to 40ish. One option might be to go West rather then East, which would mean starting in the US, heading down, then back up and across to russia that way, if I take long enough I’d be able to drive at full speed by the time I got there. An additional perk of going the wrong way would be meeting people going East and finding out good places they’ve just passed though.

Nothing here makes for a real solid assessment, it’s all just ideas and random thoughts still at this stage. I’m planning on picking up a good size world map to stick on my wall so I can pour over something a bit more tangible. And finding all these issues has made me look at the world a bit more closely, and give a lot more thought as to the more practical aspects of world travel.