Formulating a travel plan

From September 2005 until September 2006, My partner Sheila and I went on one of those extended holidays for adults that have become known as the “Grown-ups’ Gap Year”. In our case, it was return to my hometown of Sydney, that I had left 20 years earlier. The bulk of our stay, 7 months, was spent driving around the continent, including Tasmania, in a campervan. As you can imagine, it was a challenging adventure in which we experienced monsoon rains, a cyclone, outback floods, searing heat, and ultimately, a catastrophic breakdown in the desert. Despite the hardships and the scary moments, it was a great trip, an adventure we’ll never forget. In fact, you can read all about it right here in Hubpages (or just read the odd bit if the thought of wading through 55 chapters of someone else's holiday is a bit overwhelming).

But driving around Oz in a dodgy truck wasn’t enough of a challenge (or lesson learned) for us. Before we eventually returned to England, we flew to Bangkok and ended our Gap Year with 7 weeks of make it up as you go backpacking around four South East Asian countries – Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Our Asian travels were fabulous but they had a curious effect on us. They exposed us to the Travel Bug, and consequently we have spent the past five years scratching the itch of our next big adventure. In fact, it was during our last two lazy weeks on a beach on Ko Phangan in the Gulf of Thailand, that we were asking ourselves the question - “what can we do next time?“

Under the swaying palms, with the aroma of massaman curry and Thai seafood barbeque wafting through our overloaded senses, we came up with an idea based on something we experienced earlier in the South East Asia trip, during the 10 days we spent in Vietnam...

...We had travelled south by sleeper train from the Imperial City of Hue, in the middle of the country, to Ho Chi Minh City in the south. “The Night Train to Saigon” was a memorable experience in many ways, none more so than by the idea it inspired. “Wouldn’t it be cool if next time, we could to travel back to Australia by train.”

Now, obviously there are no train lines between Australia and the rest of the world, so some of the journey would have to be by plane… or boat. But fundamentally, the idea of travelling from England to Australia, in this day and age, without flying is a pretty interesting plan I reckon, if not a little ambitious…

...So, five years later, after much talk, procrastination, research and planning, that’s what we are about to do – Sydney is our goal, and trains, boats and buses will be our primary methods of transport. We will try not to fly, though of course we will if we have to, without feeling like we've let ourselves down. After all, it's only a plan.

Last year we bought a large world map to plot our route and we have scoured the internet for information and ideas. Most importantly, we have worked and saved to finance the journey. It is the sort of trip that wouldn’t be possible for everyone, but our kids are grown up; we are renting our house in Norwich and as we are, for all intents and purposes, semi-retired, our time-limit to achieve this goal is not really a problem. Plus, I have the added advantage of Australian citizenship which means we have a “home” at either end of the journey.

I don’t think we would have even contemplated this tour if we hadn’t made that trip around South East Asia in 2006. That was the training run, where we learned to live in countries foreign to us; where we gained some skills in the art of backpacking and budget travelling, and where we realised that this kind of travel was something we wanted to do a lot more of.

Now, our trip is looming large before us. Our departure date is Thursday 11th August at 10.30am. At that time, our train will leave Norwich Station and clatter south through Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex to Liverpool Street in East London. That will be the first of many train journeys we will make over the coming year. Our itinerary for the first month away will be: London – Brussels – Cologne – Warsaw – Moscow – Tomsk – Irkutsk – Ulan Bataar – Beijing. From there, we will more or less make it up as we go.

Looking at it from here, it’s one hell of a plan and we can’t quite believe that we are about to put it into action.

1st August 2011

The tension is ratcheting up in the strangest of ways. The approaching journey is now dominating all our thoughts, even when we're asleep. It's understandable, but nevertheless a 24hr adrenalin rush. Our world map has been trodden and creased. The Lonely Planets and Rough Guides are dog-earred and tired. And our old iBook is smokin'. Our VirginMedia High Speed Broadband has paid for itself a hundredfold, mainly in savings made on the many return trips to London that we would have had to make to secure visas to four exotic countries, not to mention all the bespoke train bookings we have made...how did we do this sort of thing before email?

The tension comes not just from thinking about and planning for the actual trip, but also from the thought that we are leaving our cosy, secure nest, our friends, family and total comfort zone. This generates strong emotions. For Sheila it is hardest as she has also retired from her long term job. For the last Gap Year she took a leave of absence. This time there is no job to come back to. Likewise, I have had to wind up my income streams. My band which has enjoyed local success for the past five years played its final public gig last Friday night and my other musical associations have also been ended. My erratic day job as a self employed graphic designer has faded away and even our old car is about to be signed off the road and parked up on a remote farm (so we can at least have transport when we return). This is the price you must pay to do something like this. The old familiar, bourgeoise routine is gone, long live the travelling life.

This is the place to go if you like trains and want to travel on them
http://www.seat61.com/

The Experts at Trans-Siberian/Trans-Mongolian Train Travel
http://www.realrussia.com

A great resource for finding and pre-booking budget accommodation
http://hostelbookers.com

This Hub is a basic account of how we went about setting up the first part of this adventure - the UK to Beijing. The real test of our organisational skills will become evident as the journey progresses. Until then, it looks good on paper to me. Now, the hardest part of the whole experience... packing!