In the beginning there is always a plan.

In 2005/06, Sheila and I went on our first “Grown-ups’ Gap Year”.  In our case, a return to my hometown of Sydney, a place I had left 20 years earlier. The bulk of our time, some 7 months, was spent driving around the continent in a campervan.  As it turned out, 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.

But driving around Oz in a dodgy truck wasn’t enough of a challenge for us. Before we eventually returned to England, we stopped off in 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.

Not only were our Asian travels fabulous, but they had a curious effect. They exposed us to the travel bug. Consequently, we have spent the past five years scratching the itch of our next big adventure. It was while we were lazing about on the final two weeks on a beach on Ko Phangan in the Gulf of Thailand, lamenting the end of our gap year, that we were asking 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 troppoed* brains, we talked-up a plan from an idea that had come earlier in the Asia trip, during the 10 days or so that we had 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.”  It 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 made 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…

Anyway, five years later, after much talking, 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 we will if we have to without any qualms.

Planning this trip has been both fun and a challenge. It really started in earnest only last year (2010) when we bought a large world map to plot our route and began scouring 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, the house in Norwich is being rented out and we are, for all intents and purposes, kind of semi-retired, so our time-limit to achieve this goal is not a restriction. Plus, I have the added advantage of Australian citizenship which means we have “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 experienced living in countries foreign to us and gained some skills in the art of backpacking and budget travelling. It was where we realised that this kind of travel was something we wanted to do 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.

 

*Troppo – if you spend a long time in the tropics, you go tend to slow down, chill out, and get lazy. The Longman English Dictionary defines it as “mentally deranged by the heat of the tropics“. You know the feeling.