Friends:
There is a restaurant in China that serves only penis – although if you exposed yourself during dinner you’d probably serve 5-7 years in a gulag.
In Bulgaria you shake your head for yes and nod for no – a cultural oddity which has doubtlessly disappointed various aspiring Lotharios trying to get lucky in the dimly lit bars of Sofia.
In Cuba, there is (to my delight) a system of State-organised hitchhiking, with officials in neat yellow tunics who flag down cars for your freeloading convenience. Although the cars are all from the fifties and the roads have worrying potholes - so it might be safer to put on roller skates and grab onto the bumpers of passing trucks.
There are usually at least 7 classes on an Indian train, who inherited a love of all things bureaucratic from their colonial masters, and (by all accounts) approach every administrative hurdle nowadays with the question, “What would the British do?” – always coming to the conclusion that the British would add another queue, desk, or pretty triplicate form.
When you cross the Pacific eastwards by boat, the clocks go forward one hour every night, and then back by 24 at the half-way point, before continuing with 23-hour days for the remainder of the voyage.
And in many parts of south-east Asia, people have 3G video mobile phones, but most have never even seen, let alone used, a land-line.
I mention these miscellaneous factoids because they remind me that the world is a diverse, beguiling, scary, and at times laughably weird place – and as breathable planets go, one probably well worth exploring.
And so…
It’s taken me weeks to get to this point – sitting down and taking a moment from a maelstrom of stress, preparation, anxiety and list-ticking (my god, the lists, the lists, damn near endless!!) – but here we are – the first blog entry of many to come. I’m two days from my nocturnal ferry departure (planes have no romance and are to be avoided at all costs), and at last I feel in a mood sufficiently calm and reflective to pen a few thoughts to you all on what’s in store for the year ahead.
By now, almost all of you know what I’m up to: a world tour, over roughly a year, crossing Europe, the subcontinent, Indochina, Australia, China, down the Americas, and up West and across North Africa to finish – I anticipate – in Beirut or Tehran sometime late next July.
By really any measure, this is the most frighteningly over-reaching thing I’ve ever put my hand to – and I’m not aware of any other plan by anyone I know which is quite so self-consciously ambitious and liable to cause a nervous breakdown both for me and my oft-worrying mother.
The trip itself is primarily journalistic – and some of you will have already have had to endure late night skype calls and stream-of-consciousness emails as I piece together the remit for my book – huffing and puffing, desperately trying to squeeze every knot of creative boatspeed from a gifted and inspired bunch of people.
But this right here, what you’re reading now, is just my blog – and will exist independently of the research for my book. To be sure, there’ll be anecdotes that slip easily into both, and I comfortably assume there’ll be low times as well as high; periods of frustration and doubt which’ll need the gilt catharsis of a helpless rant. These may very well end up in my book too – if I can just solve the ‘segue dilemma’: How to include a professional journalistic examination of real social and philosophical problems with personal and heartfelt impressions of what it’s like to leave your life behind and go on the road - without trivialising the former and pretentiously aggrandising the latter?
So this blog will be a chance for my friends to keep tabs on what I’m doing, and the myriad, dizzying thoughts which always come from solo travel. I don’t want to write a Lonely Planet Lite – so don’t check in for advice on where to stay in Nepal or whether travellers’ cheques are really necessary in south America. I can only hope that once outside the vacuum of London and the pacing, the waiting to get started – a real story can be told, one which catalogues a year in which I dropped everything to undertake a once-in-lifetime voyage. For better or worse (and God only knows what various things will happen along the way)- this is the story of my attempt to produce a qualitative study of People, and in turn gain some of the sophistication, happiness and composure which the people on E!News and Big Brother come by so annoyingly easily.
If a year of interviewing people around the world on what’s important to them can give me anything – surely it can give me that.
I will write from Germany or Switzerland in a week or so. Until then, wish me bon voyage – and keep in touch!
Best,
Sam
