In one sense, this trip began when I stepped though my front door on the way to Raleigh-Durham airport, but in another, equally meaningful sense, it began in the summer of 2002 when a sentence in "Vietnam by Rail" caught my imagination. You can now travel, it said, all the way from Seville to Saigon by rail. Great idea, I thought, but why start in Seville? Why not in Lisbon, on the Atlantic? Why not, now that trains run under the English Channel, in Scotland, as far north-east as possible?
For a long time, I planned to travel from Scotland to Saigon via Central Asia, but when I started checking into trains and visas that route got less and less appealing. South of the Caspian Sea there are rails but no passenger trains between Iran and Turkmenistan. North of the Caspian there are trains but also Chechnians. Forced north to Moscow I faced three and a half days on a slow train back south, a bus ride to and from Tashkent, a notoriously bad border crossing into China and four days retracing my previous trip across Xinjiang province. Clearly, this trip required some variant of the Trans-Siberian route instead. I settled on the Trans-Mongolian, which would let me explore the remains of Genghis Khan's capital after a leisurely visit to Lake Baikal in Siberia. With less than four months to go, I shifted into serious planning mode.
Combining part-time work and full-time planning took its toll, and with six weeks to go I came down with a virus. Lying on the couch, I started writing down everything I had left to do. I called the result the "Mother of All Lists" or M.O.A.L. -- pronounced "mole" it promptly burrowed into my brain and started generating worry. I enjoy planning, for me it's another way to enjoy a trip, but there was more of it than usual.
The main theme for this trip was train travel, all forward progress would be by train, although I allowed myself some side trips, and a saunter through Southeast Asia and Australia after the tracks ended in Saigon. I planned the train travel with the help of Thomas Cook's Rail Map of Europe and his European and Overseas Timetables, backed up by websites -- especially www.seat61.com, www.bahn.de, www.sncf.fr and www.renfe.es.
The map was invaluable, as it showed where I could and couldn't go by train, although sometimes "could" didn't mean "should". I could, theoretically, travel from Lisbon to Seville by train, but it meant at least three changes and took forever. It was easier and faster to take the night train to Madrid and then head south. Sometimes "could" meant "sometimes could", as some overnight trains only run every other day, or three days a week, and the Madrid-Ronda train I had planned to take was canceled for three days because of a religious holiday.
For crossing oceans I had almost enough frequent flyer miles with American for another One World award. I bought the 1,000 miles I was short and then traded 130,000 miles for RDU-Glasgow and Bangkok-Jakarta-Sydney-Hawaii-Dallas-RDU in business class. Sounds simple, but it took several hours on the phone. My first itinerary was sunk by the rule that only allowed one "open" overland segment: I would have to backtrack from Denpasar to Jakarta and Sydney to Darwin. Tickets are only good for 365 days after they're issued so I had to delete New Zealand and the South Pacific. Finally, since reservations can only be made 331 days in advance I started with an almost wholly fictitious itinerary. When I called to convert it to reality I was unable to get a business class seat from Sydney to Los Angeles (almost a year in advance!) and will have to overnight in Honolulu.
One rental car. Two days. So I can visit Hadrian's Wall. That's it. I had thought of renting a car for the Pyrenees, until I discovered it would cost $90 a day for an automatic (the last time I tried to drive a stick shift my knees complained. So did the gear box.) I hope I still remember how to drive when I get home, but I really appreciate being able to travel without a car.
It may now be a small world for some purposes, but if you're traveling at ground level it's as big as ever it was. A ten month-long trip may sound as if I could go anywhere I want, but I spent as much time deciding where to leave out as where to put in. The first criterion was the need to produce a reasonable train journey. The second theme was empires -- edges of empires and center of empires. That's why Hadrian's Wall (northern edge of the Roman Empire) is in, but Brittany is out. It's why Rome is in but Florence didn't make the list. I already have the dream for the next trip: Ukraine, Eastern Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, all places I had to leave out this time. Believe me, it's a big, big world.
I hate to shop. I especially hate to shop for clothes. Luckily, after two long trips I didn't need to do much shopping for this one. I knew which clothes worked and where to buy them. I had the packs, although I bought new money belts from Europe Through the Back Door. I had my usual problems with footwear. My feet only seem to like white Grid Sauconys, and apparently that model is going to be discontinued.
The biggest headache was buying a new camera. Although my Canon G1 had taken some good pictures, I wanted a lighter battery charger, a longer zoom and faster power-up. It took two weeks of research and indecision before I settled on a Minolta A1. The camera was bigger than I wanted and didn't have an optical viewfinder, but it met my other criteria.
Again, after two long trips to Asia I was pretty well covered here. I did get a pneumonia shot, but my main concern was anti-malaria tablets. I wound up with 100 tablets I wouldn't need for months. Most people ask me about intestinal problems, but my Achilles heel is literally my feet. I'm very careful about food and drink -- street food in China but not India, no ice in drinks in Asia -- and I carry Immodium and Cipro in case of disaster, but have rarely needed them, while I have had problems with my feet on both my previous trips. Right now a bigger worry is SARS, but there's not much I can do about that except stay up with the news and reroute if it seems prudent.
As I worked my way through the MOAL spring arrived. Overnight the temperature rose and the dogwoods and azaleas blazed into flower. Eating farewell meals with my friends, enjoying North Carolina at its best, I began to wonder why I was leaving. Then I remembered that spring would not last long and that I could always email my friends. It was time to find out how the planning held up on the ground.
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