For more years than I can count, I've wanted to "travel round the world". Over Christmas I came to feel very strongly that I should do it now. I don't have any money troubles and my CV at work is very solid. There's nothing going on in my family that means I have to be in the UK.
So it's time to go.
I had a similar situation the last time I changed my car. I felt I had a choice between an Audi A4 (as the best of the classy saloons that wasn't a BMW) and a Toyota MR2 (as mid-engined 2-seat sports car with a hard roof to match the British weather). I decided I wanted a sports car at some time, and would there ever be a better time than then? So I got the sports car and never regretted it.
In the spirit of blogging, I should probably have resumed posting earlier this year, to share my developing thinking. Never mind - work has been extremely hectic and now is good enough.
As I mentioned before, I've been very fortunate that work and play has taken me to a pretty reasonable number of countries already. In most cases that's been: fly in, dot about, fly out. I feel that to experience "travel round the world" I need to be more immersed than that. So flying needs to be the exception rather than the rule.
Next choice is the means of surface transport over land. I used trains for my Balkan tour, which takes some planning and tends to limit one to larger cities. Thinking of India, I read that "About 70% of the people live in more than 550,000 villages, and the remainder in more than 200 towns and cities" (Ref.). How much do I think I would see of those 700,000,000ish village-dwellers by train? Even the physical act of typing those zeros impresses the huge number on me.
Next (and perhaps most obvious) option would be buses. Trouble is, I've always HATED long-distance coach travel - and that on the heated, air-conditioned marvels we have in the UK. I don't think I'm up for "Dave suffers the buses of the world".
So that leaves private transport. Like many people, I watched Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman touring on motorbikes in "Long Way Round" and "Long Way Down". The latter being mainly a cautionary tale that running to a schedule can so overshadow the journey that it is impossible to savour a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I'll try so hard to avoid that. Anyway, as I don't have a motorbike licence (or associated experience) it seems a little rash to go by bike.
So here it is: "I want to drive round the world".
I have developed a draft route, shown in the following picture, which I'll explain in my next post.
