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.”