Voyage Of The Odd Essay

Midsummer has been and gone, and it’s Glastonbury weekend and even though I won’t be there this year - mostly due to other Festival commitments, but in part due to Jay-Z headlining - I will be sitting at home watching it on the TV with friends, having some pear cider, cooking falafels for everyone, and of course wearing out Glastonbury Hats. Maybe I’ll go crazy and crack a couple of glow sticks!

While I’m still waiting for my festival season, I have booked my ticket to Thailand in December and will be leaving one way on November the 30th with Qatar Airways, to arrive in Bangkok on the 1st of December, so if anyone is in that neck of the woods and fancies a Singha on Khaosan Road let me know. It’s a day earlier then I planned, but means I don’t have a 8 hour stop over in Doha, so worth it.

Further to my travel plans I have decided to sell my Canon DSLR, since I’m focusing on writing a lot more these days, I figure the £400 or so I can get for the camera are much more useful then the camera would be. It’s a shame, but when I got the DSLR the plan was to learn to drive, and travel around locally to take shots, maybe getting a bicycle as well, but that’s all out the window now and I could last a month on that money.

First off, I’ve updated the blog a bit which means I can do a lot more with it, and changes on my other sites shouldn’t break things so easily. This may or may not cause duplicates to appear in the RSS feed, but if it does it’ll be the last time such madness happens.

With that out of the way, my travel plans for Summer and beyond are starting to really take form now as tickets are now purchased, as part of updating the blog I updated the count down to my new planed exit date of the 1st of December, to find that leaves me exactly 200 days before I fly off to Thailand and start on my adventure around South East Asia.

Travel Diary To Date:

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Looking ahead to the rest of the year (I’ll finish my Thailand updates later in the week) I have a pretty healthy set of destinations in the line up for the rest of 2008 and beyond:

July: Suffolk, England - For Latitude Festival
August: Amsterdam, Holland - For A Friend’s Stag Do
October/November: Helsinki, Finland - To Visit My Sister While She’s Studying There
December onwards: Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam etc. - Traveling South East Asia for Six Months

I’d really like to go to a music festival in Europe too, so there are too options on the cards currently:

July: Open’er Festial in Poland. (Friends are going)
August: Way Out West Festival in Gothenburg, Sweden. (Sigur Rós are playing)

Given that Sigur Rós are my all time favorite group it’s likely to come out on top, they are playing at Latitude as well, but I’d leap at the chance to see them twice.

I haven’t really had much new to write on this recently, while travel has never been far from my thoughts in some ways, I’ve also been trying not to think to much about it while I was trying (With difficulty) to get my passport application sorted out. However, yesterday when I got home it was finally sitting on the floor waiting for me when I stepped in the door.

So now I’m looking forward to my first ever step out of Great Britain, all the way around the world to Thailand in just 12 days time. I can not describe how stressful the days until my passport actually arrived were.  - Yes, I know booking flights to Thailand without a passport is not even remotely sensible, but it’s all resolved now and I don’t need to repeat such stupid paths.

It’s all a bit unreal at the moment, there is a group of us flying out to Thailand (Via Doha in Qatar), to meet a trio of friends who have been there for over two months, so we have very little in the way of planning, other then to meet up with them and follow their lead. All the while constantly hearing from them how amazing it is out there.

Given I normally plan everything with exacting detail, this is a very new way of traveling for me regardless of the additional distances, so I’m very much pushing my comfort zone.

With having friends out there already packing isn’t really a concern though, we have been given a whole lot of advice on what to bring, and what to leave behind, this weekend’s big job is to do a bit of shopping for essentials.

I have been pondering clothing, but I think I’ve settled mostly on the idea of buying stuff when I’m out there so I have some interesting things to wear when back home during the summer.

Over the course of the last week, three different people have mentioned music festivals around Europe they’ve been too, all of which make for great ideas to add to my list of must see destinations. After all, I love music festivals and spend my summers at various festivals in the UK either with a group of friends, or on occasion on my own just mixing with the crowd.

The idea of getting out to various festivals abroad is something I’ve been playing with for a while, so it fits neatly in with my long term travel plans.  So my map has been updated to reflect the new destinations. (more…)

Lots of people make comments along the lines of “I’ll come with you!” when you talk about world trips, with varying degrees of sincerity of course, but either way there isn’t anything stopping people hooking up with me for parts of the journey. I’m not planning on having a full time travel partner since I want to be free to randomly go where ever I want without compromising.

On the other hand, the more people come out to join me for shorter periods of time - say a couple of weeks to a month - the better. It’s easy enough to plan to be at a particular airport to pick them up, and drop them back either there, or another location down the road.
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When anyone dreams of traveling by road I’m certain the only thing people think  driving is a VW Camper Van, they are after all iconic and capture that carefree spirit you tend to want from your dreams.

However, when it comes to seriously planning a round the world trip and making it a reality, a Volkswagen from the 70’s isn’t quiet as attractive when you actually have to deal with unmaintained roads, mountain passes and extreme weather conditions.
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I love gadgets and as such part of the appeal of driving around the world as oppose to backpacking is not only can I carry all the gadgets I want, but the vehicle it’s self is essentially one big toy with loads of scope for tinkering.

Without really looking into the practicality of any of these, here are the first five gadgets that leap to my mind: (more…)