…we’re off!

Writing this in a stifling internet cafe in Cologne. This kind of establishment is hard to find nowadays as everyone has their own netbook or iPad or smart phone. We left our iBook at home at the last minute as it was too heavy to carry – a decision we are already semi-regretting.

Yesterday, Thursday the 11th of August. Sam and Bea drove us to Norwich Station and we were soon heading to London. Disaster almost struck at Stowmarket when the bloody train stopped for half hour due to a leaf on the track (or something). I mildly panicked as we only had two and a half hours to get from Liverpool St Station to St Pancras, but hey, this is British rail and anything could happen. Of course I blamed Sheila for insisting that there would be no problem. She responded by laughing at me and telling me I looked like an angry airedale (it’s the beard). Anyway, of course we made it in time but at Eurostar security check-in the scanner noted my old pocket knife in my pack and I was forced to empty the contents and pray that they didn’t arrest me for possession of an illegal weapon. I gave them the knife as a peace offering and they let us through, but boy did we both need a beer by then.

We met a Welsh bloke and his sexy daughter at the bar who were heading on a similar journey to us – Moscow, Beijing, and Vietnam, but instead of Oz, they are going to India and Sth Africa, all in four months, as opposed to our 12.

On the Eurostar, 14:34
We Travelled across Kent, under the Channel and across France at the fastest speed I’ve ever experienced on land. Very smooth, a real sense of travel and rubbish food from the snack bar, but who cares at this point. We arrived in Brussells and had an hour to kill until the ICE Train to Cologne. We were hot and frazzled by the time we lugged our sacks up to the next platform, but at least I wasn’t packing that heavy laptop. The ICE Train was crowded with no reserved seats so people seemed to wander through the aisle with their bags and back packs, desperately searching for non-existent seats. We were OK though – we shared a table with a Canadian girl and a German guy who, coincidentally, lives and works in Norwich. We said we’d look him up next year when we return.

Cologne, Germany, 21:00
The station is right next to the immense gothic cathedral so we felt like we had seen the sights as soon as we emerged from the concorse. A taxi took us to our digs – Th Bermuda Triangle B&B on Marselstein Strasse. This is a really nice little set-up on the third floor of a modernish building. Very clean, comfortable beds, widescreen telly, a compact and Germanically efficient kitchen and wi-fi access (wish we had the Mac at this point). After showering away the day’s stresses, we walked half a block and found a lovely Italian restaurant where we sat out in the balmy evening eating pasta and drinking one beer each before crawling back to the Bermuda Triangle for the first sleep of our journey. That night I dreamt of writing this blog on my own laptop.

Cologne, 12 August 2011
After breakfast we caught the metro back to the Cathedral platz, checked our heavy packs into a steel box that seemed to eat bags, then proceeded to wander about this large, friendly German city on the Rhine. Cologne is modern and attractive, but must have once been medieval and beautiful, but we bombed the bejesus out of it in the war and now there is little left of its former splendour (At least its cathedral survived, unlike that of Coventry).

We have spent the day wandering about, riding the tourist bus and writing this. However, one of the first things we did was find a computer shop to buy a lightweight PC netbook or something. Result, we found one and were even offered a discount only to discover that the operating system only comes in German. Bummer! Looks like we will have to wait until Beijing when I reckon we’ll be able to buy just about anything we want for less than we can imagine… will have to wait and see.

Our next train leaves tonight at 21:36 and we arrive in Warsaw tomorrow at 11:15. Until we board the sleeper train we are effectively homeless, a far more liberating feeling than you may imagine. However, We still feel like we are on a short city break rather than an epic journey across Euope and Asia. I think our arrival in Warsaw will herald a change of sense, and the ensuring trip across Belarus to Moscow with bring the immensity of our journey home. to us.

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.