Two go travelling

We’re going on an adventure. What a drama, deciding what size backpack to buy! Should we take hiking boots or trainers or both? These decisions are blowing our minds, and we haven’t even got a renter for our flat lined up...

For two people that are maybe a bit vain, we can openly admit that when it comes to downsizing our luggage, being ruthless about what we take, and working out what we can realistically do or see in a limited amount of time, we are crap. 

Last count, I had 5 pairs of shoes and Baby D was taking his beard dye.

One year to backpack round 20 countries. One of us can’t do without hair gel, the other can’t do without hair straighteners...I’m sure this will go swimmingly.

We own a flat in London, we both have good fulltime jobs in London, and we are giving it all up for a year. Well, almost. I have somehow managed to convince my boss to let me work part time from wherever I am in the world.

So, why are we leaving it all behind?

I am 37. Baby D is 32. We have no dependents and travelling the world is something both of us have always wanted to do but never had the money/time/bottle to do it. We actually travel really well together even though we fight like cat and dog at home. We have both got busy jobs, get up early and sometimes find it an effort to be nice after a slog of a day at work. We have had some personal crap going on and we made a decision to take a break from the status quo for a while and disappear while we are young enough to be able to.

We are lucky in that we bought our flat in London for a ‘song’ (relatively speaking in London terms) and it’s done well in value in the few years we’ve been homeowners. We have taken out a few grand as a buffer and with my income from work, we should be able to travel fairly well. If all else fails I have my TEFL. And what about Baby D? He’s gonna be a beach bum (lad of leisure?), take a year off and reassess his life.

1. 30 November: one way ticket to Delhi. 1^st to 5th December, travelling Air India from Heathrow. Overnight train to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, then overnight train to Varanasi. Think about how many pairs of shoes we need to be lugging around in Agra if we are not staying over! Kolkata, Chennai, Kerala then Goa to meet our pals for Christmas and New Year. They are driving to India from London, so a true pair of crazies. Onto Mumbai, Rajasthan before...
2. ...Nepal. We are not planning on climbing Everest and we don’t have the gear or the time (or let’s face it, the energy) to climb to base camp. So the spanky new hiking boots will be left at home. We will trek in Nepal, but we will do a middle aged, low, slow route, and take our chances with trainers. I’m down to 4 pairs of shoes!
3. Burma. I mean Myanmar.
4. Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam. Or another combination of the 4.
5. ...can we do it before the monsoon kicks in?
6. We visited Bali on holiday last year and found that it had year round sunshine. We fell in love with Bali but were disappointed that we didn’t see the quieter north of the island (fewer pissed up Aussies apparently) so we will be checking that out and taking the opportunity to see some other, less beaten track Indonesian islands.
7. This is where it gets difficult. Obviously we’re greedy and fancy Mexico and South America – Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil. No idea how we get there but hey ho, it’s an adventure. Someone has already suggested a trawler.

What have we got to think about?

I am sure we are forgetting something major, but...

Jabs. We’ve had diphtheria, typhoid, tetanus, yellow fever, hep A and B and rabies. Do you know how expensive vaccinations are?! Start early, not only do you need 2 or 3 lots of some of them with a certain amount of time in between, it helps you spread the cost! We were toying with the idea of Japanese encephalitis but will we really need it?!

Visas. Maybe I’m wrong, and I really hope I’m not but it looks like the only visa we need is for India. And that’s the first stop so we can do it all the paperwork from the comfort of home. Only needing a visa for India is not strictly true of course, but for the length of time we’ll be spending in each place, we will be able to get visas on arrival where we need them.

Bank cards! Make sure they aren’t going to run out halfway round the world.

Rent the flat. We need permission to let from the mortgage company but we can only get that after 6 months of being given the advance (the money we took out of the equity to help fund our travel). We need to empty the flat of our personal belongings, clean it properly, find tenants willing to leave after a year, get relevant insurance, deposit, tenancy agreement, gas and electric safety checks, arghh!

Fix the damp. We have lived with a small bit of penetrating damp in the bedroom. How ‘bout we leave it till we want to bugger off to get it fixed? Along with the broken doorbell, freehold issues that need to be resolved and a million and one other things?! Efficient as ever.

Work. Let’s not even go there. Everyone I work with needs to be brought up to speed and of course, everything starts going wrong as soon as it’s made public that I’m leaving. Or that’s what it feels like.

Mortgage. Our fixed rate runs out in March 2017, when we’re in Vietnam (or thereabouts).

What are going to take?! This is the hardest one! We need to think about the weather and what activities we are going to be doing. We are trying to follow the weather so we are taking summer clothes, with a pair of jeans, a fleece and a rain mac. The research we’ve done on this subject! I haven’t got any of it yet but we have those travel towels, sleeping bag inside bag, 4 pairs of shoes (1 of them is flipflops!), pack-a-mac, water purifying tablets, imodium coming out of our ears, the list goes on. I toyed with the idea of a chain over the backpack to deter thieves from slashing through the canvas, but Baby D vetoed that idea saying it would attract people as it might look like we had something valuable to protect.

Lots to do...stress levels are at crisis point! :D