What the Hell is "Vlogpackers"?

Anyone who knows me or Callum will know that we've both had our own blogs for quite some time now. I started my blog, www.emmieleey.com two years ago and have written pretty regularly for it ever since and Callum started his blog a year or so ago. 

He didn't want me to link to it because, in his words, "it looks shit". 

It isn't shit - his writing never fails to make me laugh (especially this one), which is one of the reasons I thought it would be a nice idea to set up our own blog together for when we go travelling in March.

I guess we could have just posted the posts from our travels on our own blogs, but we really wanted something our friends and family could check up on while we're away and also something for us to look back on when we return - the result: Vlogpackers.

The name was all Callum's idea and the first few times he said it, all I could think of was the phrase "fudgepackers" - a phrase I do not recommend Googling, especially if you are at work.

In the end, we decided on Vlogpackers; mainly because we're going to be vlogging our travels as well as blogging and as cringe as that sounds, I really don't care. It's only once in your life you get to go on a year long trip around the world, so I plan on preserving every memory I can. 

The last few times we've been away together things have gone wrong, terribly wrong. Here are a few of my personal favourites:

• We went to Brussels for three days and on our way back, the migrants stormed the channel tunnel and we were delayed for so long that by the time we finally got back to London all the trains had stopped for the night and we missed work the next day. Lovely.
• Callum got his phone stolen by a taxi driver in Corfu.
• I accidentally threw an anchor overboard from our rental boat in Corfu. We got fined €100. Not ideal.
• The hotel in Corfu we stayed at promised a sea view. We got a view of the communal bins. 
• We managed to book a whale watching tour in Iceland during the most unlikely time of the year to see whales. If you didn't see anything though, you got your money back. Great, right? The woman running the tour saw 10% of a porpoise for all of 0.3 seconds and that meant, you guessed it: we didn't get our money back. 
• My personal favourite: 5 days after booking our round-the-world, our country voted to leave the EU and the pound fell to its lowest since 1985. Fab. 

So, based on our history of disaster following us wherever we go, we thought that having a blog/vlog running while we're away might make a pretty amusing read/watch for our families and friends back home. 

Travelling isn't always going to be like looking through an Instagram filter, is it?

The Route

Now our route comprises of 5 continents, 19 countries and a gazillion things to consider, all of which needs to be completed within our 12 month time frame.

So as you can imagine it took us a long LONG time to plan; in fact, we first started planning this in February and now here we are in June a week on from booking our flights.

First things first, here is our route, which kicks off March 12th 2017:

• To start out we fly from London to Boston, via a layover in Reykjavik

• We then make our own way using the Greyhound coach system from Boston, to New York, then to Philadelphia and finally onto Washington DC

• We then fly from Washington on the East coast to Los Angeles on to the West coast

• From LA we will again use the Greyhound coach system to travel in a loop to Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego and then back to LA

• A flight from LA will take us to Lima in Peru, via a layover in Panama City

• From there we will make our own way from Peru, through Bolivia to Buenos Aires in Argentina and then up and around to Rio De Janerio in Brazil

• From Brazil we fly to Cape Town in South Africa, via a very odd route which includes a layover in Dubai, which you'll see from looking at a map, is in the complete opposite direction.

• Using the Bazbus service we will overland from Cape Town to Johannesburg

• After that we head down under, Johannesburg to Melbourne gets us half way around the world

• Then we fly from Australia to New Zealand

• We then head for a beach break when we fly from New Zealand to Fiji

• After this we have a bit of island hopping from Fiji to Bali

• Flight from Bali to Jakarta

• Flight from Jakarta to Singapore

• From Singapore we make our own way to Kuala Lumpar, then onto Bangkok and onward from there into Burma and towards its capital city Naypitaw.

• Delhi is the next destination after a direct flight from Naypitaw.

• More over-landing as we travel from Delhi to Nepal and back again

• We then fly out of Delhi to return to Bangkok once more

• We then make our own way by train and bus from Bangkok through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos finally ending in China.

• The penultimate flight takes from Beijing to Tokyo

• Tokyo is the last stop, from there it is a flight back to ye old London town.

I would love to tell you that this trip was planned in an Instagram filter of happiness in a montage of us pointing at beautiful pictures in travel books and staring lovingly into each other eyes.

However, it was not.

The biggest problem planning-wise was that we both wanted to go everywhere. For instance we Emma originally toyed with the idea of visiting all the 48 main land states in the USA - Hawaii and Alaska being the two we'd have to miss - but without applying for travel visas the British passport only gets us 90 days in America.

48 States in 90 days when you're travelling via bus on routes that on average take around 10 hours each is not really ideal.

I won't lie to you, I wasn't even that bothered about travelling in America. It's vast, with very poor public transport options, there is not what you would call a backpacking culture, everything is expensive, most meals contain meat, most homes contain guns and worst of all, there are people who support Donald Trump.

But as you can see from our route, I lost that argument.

I won't lie to you about this either, I really REALLY did not want to travel to Johannesburg, I have been to South Africa before and spent a night during a wait for a connecting flight wandering around Johannesburg airport trying desperately to get away from a guy who wanted me to come back with him to use his house as a hotel for the night. 

My friend who is currently living in South Africa said to me and I quote:

"Johannesburg is the only place I have ever driven with the doors locked"

But as you can see from our route, I lost that argument too.

I did win some things though, the main one being my case for spending as much time as we can in South East Asia. We are going to be making our own way on the fantastic and cheap railway systems of Thailand, Vietnam and China. This is something I have always wanted to do, I think South East Asia screams travel, it is so inherently different from the Western world and there is so much that is unexplored and beautifully unexploited. 

Also booze is well cheap.

Now I know that is a hell of a lot to digest. I still haven't quite finished digesting it myself. All my brain seems to compute whenever I think about the route is utter fear. I think the fact we are going to be relying heavily on our own common sense and wits for so much of the journey is what's scary.

But I feel like that is what travelling is, if we were just going to go on continuous city breaks using flights and pre-booked private taxis to get everywhere then what's the point.

The mantra I have been repeating to myself of late on those long sleepless nights is this quote from the man that The Adventure Journal have named the patron saint of dirt bags, Yvon Chouinard:

“Taking a trip for six months, you get in the rhythm of it. It feels like you can go on forever doing that. Climbing Everest is the ultimate and the opposite of that. Because you get these high-powered plastic surgeons and CEOs, and you know, they pay $80,000 and have Sherpas put the ladders in place and 8,000 feet of fixed ropes and you get to the camp and you don’t even have to lay out your sleeping bag. It’s already laid out with a chocolate mint on the top. The whole purpose of planning something like Everest is to effect some sort of spiritual and physical gain and if you compromise the process, you’re an asshole when you start out and you’re an asshole when you get back.”

We're Going Travelling for a Year!

Everyone should at some point in their lives should travel at length.

No, I don't believe that either. There are some people who most definitely should not do that. Those who are incapable of trying new things and experiences and those who have god awful luck.

I am of the latter group, and I am going anyway.

My name is Callum James Whitcombe I'm 21 and I am going to roll the dice and spend a year backpacking around the world with my girlfriend of 16 months Emma Frances Ansley or, The Diva, for short.

I have always been fascinated by the weird and wonderful corners of the world and have jumped at any chance to explore them. Most notably I spent 4 weeks in Kenya travelling around, working in community projects, climbing Mount Kenya, going on safari and 100 other things that has only cemented the idea of a world trip deeply in heart.

There is only one issue, actually the money is pretty big ball ache also.

There are only two issues:

1. The Money, for all the flights our trip will include the tickets are costing around £3,000 per person. Then there is the money you need to take, you need around £1000 a month, obviously some places will be more, some less but that's the generic average. Then there is everything else like travel insurance, injections, visa's and clothing. All in all you're looking at about £16,000 for the year.

2. Emma and I are possibly THE most unlucky people in the world. To sum this up I have borrowed a line from myself in a previous blog post:

"What I did not anticipate however was that the universe and every god from every civilization EVER had decided that Emma and I deserved to be bent over and fucked like the last whore on a Viking ship lost at sea."

Which is why really we are going to document our trip by video and blogging, purely because we  both know how badly this is going to go wrong and we hope that for you, our lovely readers and watchers this will be hilarious, so you're welcome, enjoy our inevitable misery.