London :: UK
In which, I muse on beginning the *big trip*
I'd say that before we start, a little background is in order. I'm a Sydney native who, at the tender age of 23, decided to get an internal transfer with his job and come and work in London. After three years, three jobs, five houses and upteen pints of lager, I've decided to throw the whole thing away and go traveling until mid December. This trip was supposed to start in May, however a trip to Morocco for a couple of weeks and then a week in Ireland to see a mate of mine after that made coming back to work for a week seem a bit pointless. So the entire thing has stretched into an 8 month extravaganza starting next weekend.
When people decide to uproot everything to do the whole "traveling" thing the reasons generally revolve around finding themselves and nonsense like that. My reasons tend to be a bit less high and mighty:
- I'm a bit sick of London - I've loved living in London, some of the best times in my life have been spent here over the last 36 months, but at the end of the day, I always knew I'd return to Sydney one day. I miss the sun. I could stay here another year, but I think I'd be closer to hating it than I am now. I'm going to leave on a good note.
- I've seen about 8% of what I want to see - No matter how much traveling you expect to do around Europe when you come here, you get to the end and think you've seen nothing. I've been to lots of Western Europe, but very little else. The more places you go, the more you want to see. My list is pretty big.
- I've got serious gap-year envy - I went from High School to Uni to Work without having that magical year off that many of my friends had. I want to take some serious time off. Not to find myself, mind you, just because it beats working.
- I've got enough money - He says now, touching everything wooden he can get his hands on. I'm a computer geek by trade, so that helps alot.
So, what's to come then? Well I'm working on both a very loose timeframe and generous (in backpacker terms) budget. After the mini-trip of three weeks coming up, my plan is to enter Europe on the 3rd of May and fly from London to Sydney on the 9th of December. The only fixed date I have in between is I've booked a 2 week Beetroot tour of Russia (and it must be said, it wasn't cheap. Russia, I've decided, is a bit of a scam) in mid-June. The rest of the trip is more working on general guidelines. I'm going to go to Russia via Scandinavia, then overland to from Russia to Berlin. Then meander across Central and Eastern Europe towards Greece. My original plan was to go overland to Egypt through Turkey (which I have been to before and thoroughly rate), Syria & Jordan. That appears to have fallen apart due to Gulf War II. I'll review the situation when I get to Greece, but I'm not optimistic. I hope to do some winding down in Egypt and then think about going back to London.
I'm mostly keeping this so I have some record of where I've been and what I was thinking at the time. Well, at least in those places that have cheap internet access.
Right now, I'm wavering somewhere between doubt and excitement. This will be the longest trip I've been on by several orders of magnitude (my current record is 5 weeks in Turkey and Greece a couple of years back) and I'm hoping I can keep my excitement about the whole thing up for all those months. I'd like to think I'm a pretty level-headed bloke, and I've never wanted to come back from a trip before, so hopefully that extends over the duration. The whole thing's become a bit more real now that I won't have a job, anywhere to live or a valid work permit after next Friday. That kind of bridge burning kind of forces you to focus on the task at hand. Still, I feel prepared for this.
So the next couple of weeks involves mundane things like renting out rooms, packing and shipping stuff and generally consuming alot of beer with people I won't see again soon/ever. I am sad to be leaving London, but I know the next bit will be far, far better.