Packed it, booked it, f**ked off!

On Saturday I walked into a travel agent’s in Leeds and spunked £1,600 of my hard-earned savings on a rather long holiday. Then to my annoyance I had to follow it up with another £150 on Monday to seal the deal.

My trip next year is no longer the hollow pipe-dream that it has been for so long. It’s no longer a vague platitude spooled out to friends, family and bemused onlookers ad infinitum: ‘I’m going travelling’. I went out and sorted it all on my lonesome. It’s happening for real! It’s going ahead!

The plane tickets are booked; the dates set in stone. I am excited and elated. I've handed over a large chunk of my savings to make this happen, and I would go as far as to declare that one is veritably buzzing one’s tits off with excitement. Like JFK handling the Cuban missile crisis, I told those bloody Russians where to get off and no mistake, and now the world is my oyster.

Now my itinerary is set (to a degree), this is a very good time to outline where I am going, what I plan to do and what my expectations of my trip are. Even though I am both a spunky young whipper-snapper and a well-read ‘man of the world’, I would be the first to admit I know next to bugger all about most of the cities, places and countries I am set to visit.

I don’t want to come across like some pompous eco-warrior shouting “we in the West are ignorant, man!” but I have a burning desire to learn about other places in the world. Recently I was greatly inspired when I went on a volunteer training weekend in Cardiff with UNAexchange. They were very nice but I think they might have brain-washed me a bit. Now I plan to work on three of their international volunteer camps in India and south-east Asia. This will give more structure to my travels, give them some sort of purpose other than globe-trotting for the sake of it, and help me to meet people and delve into local cultures.

I want to record my travels on here to better understand them, and I want to share as much with my friends and family of what promises to be a varied and utterly amazing experience. And anyone else who’s bothered is welcome to join us for the ride! Perhaps you are dreaming of doing something similar yourself? In which case draw wisdom and inspiration from my cultural learnings!

I'm no Bill Bryson but I dream that one day my travel writings will be published and collected in leather-bound anthologies, and pored over by academics at Oxford University (or Oxford Polytechnic at least) who consider them such culturally significant, top-quality pieces of literature it frankly gives them the horn. But if not, this blog will still be here on the t’interweb as a monument to my journey. Unless it gets deleted for gross obscenity and/or libel.

Well the days and weeks are ticking away. On 10th January next year I fly from Heathrow to Delhi with Virgin Atlantic. (I hope someone remembers to tell the pilot he’s not flying to America!) I will be spending a month in India and I’m hoping to:

1. See some of what old and new Delhi has to offer. I don’t know an awful lot about the city yet, apart from that it is bloody big and in India. Confusingly it is called ‘New Delhi’ on all the maps, but really ‘New Delhi’ is just the modern name for the ‘traditional’ Delhi, and it encompasses a place called ‘Old Delhi’. I think. We’ll see. If I turn up in the wrong place it will make for a hilarious (and profanity-filled) entry!
2. Work on a volunteer project with disadvantaged schoolkids in New Delhi. I have always been pretty awkward around kids, and I have tried my best to avoid them throughout my life, but I sense that one day I will be forced to spawn and raise offspring (possibly to save the future of the human race). So, I figure that on a personal development level, I need some sort of once-in-a-lifetime baptism of fire to traumatise me into liking children. Hopefully it will do the children (and me) some lasting good! I aim to occupy the ‘kindly uncle’ role of Chef on South Park and am considering bringing a chef’s hat, black face paint and a ladle to dish out food.
3. Travel further south to explore the city of Mumbai, where my dad was born.
4. Travel even further south to explore the beaches of Goa and get hallucinogens slipped in my drink by hippies. Spend the night at a beach party raving my tits off to pulsating trance music, convinced I can ‘see’ time as waves of colour. Wake up in a bamboo pit with a bandaged stump where my left leg once was. Time to dust off those travel insurance documents!
5. Realise that waking up in the pit minus a leg was just one in a long chain of freakish hallucinations. Journey back to Delhi by train, convinced my shoes are out to get me.

Hopefully no bad things will actually happen and it will be proper good.

On 14th February I fly out of Delhi with Singapore Airlines, to – funnily enough – Singapore! Which brings us on to the far eastern leg of my journey. The itinerary I have planned is thus:

1. Spend 2-3 days exploring Singapore, going on a tour round the (City? Country? What the hell is it?), followed by the amazing experience of a night-time safari round the state zoo! Expect me to post loads of pitch black photos that supposedly portray various amazing events and creatures. I’m not sure what effect flash photography would have on all the wild beasts and I don’t want to risk sending hordes of animals stampeding through Malaysia by turning my flash on!
2. Fly to Bangkok (via budget local flight, not yet booked). Spend a few days sightseeing and inspecting the temples and shit. I will be mortally afraid of looking any woman in the eye in case they are a ladyboy. (“Well you just can’t tell with some of them can you?”) Best case scenario: I will shatter my negative stereotypes (i.e. ladyboys, Thai prisons) and fall in love with the country. Worst case scenario: I will get locked up in a Thai prison on trumped-up drugs charges and lose a leg. Then discover it was all a hallucination, brought on by a ladyboy spiking my drink, and wake up in bed next to the ladyboy. With a sore rectum.
3. Depending on funds I will briefly journey around Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. All of these territories promise remarkable unspoilt scenery and much exotic cultural wonderment. But there is so much to see in this region and I have so little time in which to see it. I am working to a tight schedule and have to keep my itinerary as uncluttered as possible. Dammit!
4. Travel to the Chiang Mai area of northern Thailand, to take part in a five-day cooking school which will teach me Everything You Need To Know about cooking Thai cuisine. This sounds absolutely fascinating, and the brochure tells me I can “take time to explore the vibrant night bazaar and many temples or just laze by the pool”. Well bollocks to lazing quite frankly, I can do that at home! I’ll be scooting off on a borrowed push-bike, as it informs the reader “Chiang Mai is small enough to get round by bicycle and this is a great way to see this happening city”! I really hope I’m not laid up with the shits or something. It would do my head in to miss this chance to learn something about authentic eastern food, as “the chef will reveal the secrets of Thai cooking in the relaxed atmosphere of his family home”. I hope it really is relaxed and he’s not an unhinged psychotic Gordon Ramsay sort of chef. No more super noodles for me after this jaunt!
5. Work on my second volunteer project, doing cultural understanding work with the inhabitants of a remote village in the Golden Triangle area near Chiang Mai (it is also near the border with Laos). I will be living in a hut beside a beautiful lake (which sounds fantastic, assuming the volunteer organisation is being more honest than your average estate agent). I imagine this could really broaden my horizons about issues affecting local people. And I can put my newly-acquired cookery skills to use! Expect to hear of a spate of poisoning-related deaths in Thailand in the news.
6. Travel into Laos/Cambodia briefly if I didn’t get time to earlier. I’m still on a tight schedule though as I have seven days to…
7. Fly to Osaka or Tokyo (again via local budget airline), see a bit of rural Japan and then arrive to work on my third and final volunteer project, helping a school in the Fukuoka (pardon my French) area of southern Japan organise an arts and crafts festival.
8. Do some sightseeing in Tokyo, then fly on to Hong Kong to chill out for several days and enjoy the night-time light displays that bathe the entire cityscape in swathes of breathtaking colour.

Of course when you tot it all up, this is all likely to cost oodles and oodles of money. In this respect my savings are like a lump of delicious Edam. We all love Edam don't we? There's not enough Edam in the world for everyone. And I have to take care not to use a blunt knife to carve my Edam up. I know from past experience that when you’re abroad, luxuriating in a country with prices much cheaper than your own, you end up spending just as much in a month as you would back home. Before I know it, I'll have really buggered up slicing that Edam. So a sharp cheese knife is essential at all times.

I have completely lost my thread now. Erm... the basic gist is, I need to seriously economise on my journey. I will have to descend back into my hereditary Yorkshireman mindset and employ a coin purse to keep track of my cash. It will be a challenge after years of wasteful spending. I really have wasted my money on some crap in my time!

Anyway - the next part of my trip affords me a much-needed chance to earn back some travel funds. That’s right folks, armed with a working visa I am going to the kingdom of the dusty outback, the kooky kookaburra and Rolf Harris’s ethnically-inspired hyperventilation and wobble-board combo (not to mention Rolf himself) – good old Australia!

I fly into Sydney on 14th April and I have four and a half months to work, party and travel my way round Australia. I have no specific plans apart from spending a few weeks in Sydney, a few in Adelaide and a few in Melbourne (which I am told has a good music scene).

Hopefully by then I will have hooked up with some other travellers down at the hostel for company. In my imagination we’ll form into a tightly-knit gaggle of tie-died, generation X surfer dudes who enjoy nothing more than a cold tinnie, ‘flipping the bird’ at ‘the Man’, and tripping on peyote cactus if they have that in Australia. While lying wasted under the stars one night, we'll all resolve to travel the outback. We’ll spot a knackered old slaughterhouse truck with broken axles on sale for peanuts, and we’ll set off for some high jinks on the road, our death-trap vehicle careering all over the place in the dust clouds. Later I will come to regard these times as my happiest upon the Earth. How will it all end ... or begin?

Timewise, nothing after my arrival in Oz is set in stone really, apart from one condition of my air ticket being that I have to return within twelve months of my departure date, i.e. January 2009. Britain!? Fuck that, I hate the place.

Once I get to Australia I have to consider my budget for the rest of the trip. At the moment I have my stops in New Zealand and Fiji provisionally booked for September and my stops in LA and New York pencilled in for October. This is because the airline booking system cannot reserve plane seats more than eleven months in advance. The provisional flight dates are 1st September for Oz to New Zealand, 29th September for New Zealand to Fiji, 1st October for Fiji to Los Angeles, and lastly 4th October for New York to London. How I will get from LA to New York is also undecided.

Nearer the time, for a flat £35 fee I can re-arrange these dates to suit my itinerary (bearing in mind I have to keep within the cursed 12-month rule). I will need to make some big choices when I reach Australia. If my money is holding out I would like to spend some time travelling round Peru, Bolivia and Chile after reaching LA. If not I’ll have to postpone my trek round south America for another year (sob) and fly straight to New York, and from there, home (double sob) to enjoy a Christmas being broke (treble sob).

To be honest there’s no telling how tired and grumpy I will be when I get to America, after several months on the road. Will I be able to face more cheap domestic flights, more overnight bus rides and buying yet more visas off border guards using strange notes with lots of zeroes on? I suspect a direct plane journey home, a steaming hot British cup of tea and a good night’s sleep in my bed at home will probably seem more desirable to me than the most beautiful woman on Earth by that point.

Later in life, I will no doubt rue the missed opportunity in hindsight! Such is life.

If I am seriously hard-up I will stay and work in Australia until the end of October. Croupier, tree surgeon, fireman – name it, I will try it. My portmanteau case bulging with Australian dollars (yeah, right), I will spend four weeks in New Zealand, a week in LA, then fly straight to New Yoik to spend a week there just before Crimbo.

If I really am desperate for money on the road, there’s always cash to be made as a medical research subject, or donating various non-essential body organs. The human body is a walking cash-crop - though hopefully I won't have to cash in any of the rather valuable chips my maker has blessed me with! I will have to watch my own back out there in the world at large, and not stray over-budget or behind schedule. That’s a challenge if ever there was one.

If I am mega-flush I will leave Oz on 1st September, spend four weeks in New Zealand (hopefully meeting up with some friends from back home), two in Fiji, one in LA, up to six in south America, and one week in New Yoik. I will return home on a similar date, gasping for the aforementioned cup of tea and comfy bed.

Back to the present, I spent Sunday evening typing out most of this blog in a mood of great optimism. Then STA bloody Travel phoned me on Monday morning to tell me I'd have to stump up another £150 to guarantee the departure date to India I wanted! 10th January is so close to new year that it got flagged up by their billing department, but I could leave on 17th January without paying any extra. Though of course then I'd miss all the volunteer projects. Bastards! Out came the plastic.

And it is now time for even more spending: the framework of my journey in place, I have 3 volunteer projects (£360+) and the Thailand chef’s course (£200) to pay for – taking my spending well over the two grand mark! As I had only £4,400 savings to start with (and I now have a monstrous itinerary snaking its way through 2008’s calendar pages), it is imperative I find work as soon as I hit Oz!

Well I’ve been prattling on for long enough. Rest assured the next instalment won’t be too long in coming!

Congratulations! Now you’ve finished reading the full article, here’s the condensed ‘light read’ version for your convenience:

Have booked my ticket. Going to lots of places, leaving 10th Jan. Cost shitloads. I don’t care. Bye!