Voyage Of The Odd Essay » Travel Thoughts

Three Weeks Before Thailand

Paul Freeman — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:27:09 +0000

There’s just three weeks left now before I climb on board a plane on November 30th, take off at 9am, and 15 hours and 20 minutes later land in Bangkok to spend the next six months travelling around pretty much on a whim, visiting historic buildings and sites, sitting in hammocks on beaches, talking to strangers in bars, reading books and writing web sites.

People keep asking me if I’ve packed, and the answer is a resounding yes – Packing for Thailand isn’t hard and even with out my imaculatly planned packing list and collection of shiny new travel gadgets. You can land Bangkok and pick up anything you need within an hour of stepping of the bus at the end of Khaosan Road, so been ready isn’t really an issue. What is an issue however is getting rid of everything I’m leaving behind, the house is very slowly been sorted out, but there is a lot to do and it’s not like you can just drop a couch into the trash, so next weekend some work will need to be done just to get the bulk of everything sorted out since we are out of the house on the 22nd.

Right now all my posting to blogs and website work is still very sparodic, and it’s only when I get settled on the road I’ll figure out a better pattern to the various sites I keep running, while I’m here I’m too busy ignoring house work and hanging out with friends while I can, I keep justifying it by saying it’s because I only have a limited amount of time left in the country for a while, but actually when I come back I’m going to continue to be just as active, I don’t need an excuse to want to banter with Awesome people weather it’s just chilling at home to watch some movies or a marathon run of a TV show like How I Met Your Mother, or just go out on a whim to grab a couple of beers and go see a movie, it all falls into what makes a lifestyle I love, which actually makes heading off to far off lands all the harder, and while in the long run it’ll be worth it I a trying very hard not to think to much about what it’s going to be like leaving all the friends and family I love behind for such a length of time.

Follow-Up to: Initial Route Planning Thoughts and Problems

Paul Freeman — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:40:16 +0000

Yesterday, I might have made light of the fact half of the Middle East and Africa is torn up by war, and when you’re just looking at a map and crossing of places you can’t travel it’s quiet easy to gloss over that fact, but actually it’s pretty depressing in a way and the countries that are off limits have some amazing sights that would be amazing to see.

Still, I can’t do anything about war zones, but the other problem – not been able to drive though Russia at more then 43 miles per hour, I have a solution for.

After talking about it with friends last night, the solution as I sort of mulled over in my post is to travel west. This solves loads of problems in one go – Firstly, I can fly to over the Atlantic, and buy my camper van there. As a result, I get right hand drive which is a bonus considering most of the world drives on the right, and I’ll be able to drive all the way home without having a massive ocean crossing at the end.

This also means that if I travel around the US, Central and South America for a year or so, I should be able to hit Russia with the two years driving under my belt I need to drive at full speed.

It does seem to be the wrong way to travel, but I wonder if that’s just because as a European we tend to head over land towards the East, where as from the US, people would head naturally West as for them thats towards the biggest land mass. So that’s something that I should do a little bit of research into.

Initial Route Planning Thoughts and Problems

Paul Freeman — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:15:24 +0000

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.