I went shopping

Kathmandu was having a *gasp* SALE!!! 50% off OMG! So of course I went craaazy and got a pack.

Oooh isn't it pretty?
I shall love it and squeeze it and call it George.
See how the harness has a special cover thinggy
that protects it from catching when travelling as cargo.

Ergonomic harness, niiice.
And look at it's little detachable "mini me", cute!

Mum got one too, in red (so we can tell them apart at a glance). The design is a little thinner than a normal pack, which should help make situations less frustrating, like getting in and out of trains etc.

The plan is to have to practice hiking with them on the hill near our house when I go down to Canberra for Christmas. You know, so they don't look so new when we travel and are therefore less likely to be targets for unlawful behaviour. Plus, we might need some practice hauling them around.

Oh yeah, I got this stuff too.

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I have to do what?!?!

One of my friends, who shall remain nameless (you know who you are) decided to point out to me recently all the injections I will need to have, in order to go to some of the countries we have on our itinerary. Now, I'm what you'd call terrified of injections, which might explain why my mind has never dwelt on this fact before.

The particular thing that is freaking me out is that I haven't had the TB vaccination. We are going to Africa and South America, so I'm pretty much going to need one. The TB vaccination apparently always comes up in a boil and scars... great.

Maybe it can be another souvenir?

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Our Final Itinerary

Well, final as in up to today it is accurate. Below, the Jauntlet map shows the major places we will be going to. Of course exactly what we will do is likely to change. Slide the bar along the bottom to view our destinations and the dates we should be at them.

Below I've gone into a brief outline of the trip plan and some main tourist sights we would like to see. Of course, the plan may change at any time!

We fly out of Sydney to Beijing on the 29th of February, 2008. From there, we join a 10 day tour which takes us from Beijing (Great Wall) through Xian (terracotta warriors), rural Yangshuo and finally to Hong Kong. We will spend a few days in Hong Kong before travelling on to Delhi.

In India we also plan to do a 6 day tour through the Golden Triangle - Delhi, Agra (Taj Mahal) and Jaipur (Amber Fort). The tour takes us back to Delhi where we fly back through Hong Kong in order to get to...

Johannesburg, South Africa. From here we will take an awesome 11 day Safari, hopefully getting to see lots of wildlife. The tour takes us to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe (the world's largest sheet of falling water). We then fly down to Cape Town, South Africa to relax for a couple of days.

Our next destination is Cairo (Giza) where we plan to do an 8 day tour to Aswan and Luxor (Valley of the Kings). A couple of final days in Cairo finish our Egyptian section before we head to London. If you are counting the days, we are up to April 19th.

This marks the beginning of our 10 week UK/ Europe craziness. We plan to hire a car to drive through the UK, taking us through England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Following our roadtrip, we shall take the train to Paris, France. A handy Eurrail Pass will be of great use to help us travel to places such as Madrid, Spain, Marseilles, France, Rome, Italy, Bucharest, Romania, Zagreb, Croatia, Bern, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany. At some point we hope to hire a villa in Tuscany, Italy.

Once our Western European travel is complete we will head to Moscow on the 28th of June and catch the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway to Pskov and St Petersburg.

Nine days later it is on to Santiago, Chile and Easter Island, before Lima, Peru and Machu Picchu. Lots of time is planned to be spent around Cuzco, so as to ensure minimal chance of altitude sickness. On this leg of the trip Dad is planning to come over and join us. Then when we fly to Toronto (Niagra falls) on the 24th of July, Dad will fly home.

Of course we have to go to New York again, as well as travelling to Baltimore so we can visit everyone in Annapolis.

Then finally, we head to Vancouver for a week before coming home to Brisbane, which, all going well, has us arriving home on the 19th of August at six in the morning. (Why do I suddenly have Mr Collins' voice in my head?)

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The Structure of Planning

Quite honestly I didn't think it would take this long to plan our trip. I mean how hard could it be to just put down everything in my head onto paper in a coherent, cohesive form? Apparently, quite hard. We have spent at least 3 weeks planning and there seems to be a very definite process to the whole thing.

It seems the very first thing you do is plan any tours and flights. Forget accommodation or insurance or any other stuff you'll have to worry about. That will all come later.

I like to think about it like drawing or painting (because the more I plan this trip, the more I feel it is like creating a work of art). Lets work with the metaphoric example of drawing a landscape.

So first of all you need a basic structure to your drawing, an outline (the flights). The outline shows you how everything connects in the drawing, just like flights connect destinations. You might fiddle around with this outline a bit, the shape of the hills might be a bit too large (staying too long in a place) or there might be tree that has to go (Nepal *sob*) because it might ruin the drawing as a whole. Sometimes a new sheet of paper may be needed(thank goodness we didn't need that!).

Once you have this basic outline, then comes filling in the background colours - the stuff that gives the drawing depth and dimension, (tours). Again this might change some of the outline structure as you might want more of a certain colour on the drawing than you originally planned.

Then I guess all the picture detail will be like our visas and accommodation and the final adjustments like highligts and lowlights correspond packing and vaccinations.

Wow still a lot to do!

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Are we insane?

So everyone going on major trips usually start their blogs when they go right? Well, I thought this one would start in the planning stage... just so we can share the whole experience.

The reason I've chosen this blogger site is because Google seems pretty robust, and while I know there are a lot of really good travel related sites out there to blog on, with tons of funky travel related application you can add to your blog, I think the blog might start to get a bit complicated. Keep it simple right? I'm sure I'll be able to upload pictures to here and who knows, I might even be able to do a map tracker thing...

So, getting to the plan huh?

My Mum and I are in the middle of planning a world trip, that shall last 6 months. We have both achieved major milestones in our life, so thought a major reward was due. The trip is absolutely being planned with the help of a licensed professional, and when I am not in a cynical mood I think he is actually doing a really good job. We have been through about 4 drafts of the trip now and I think there will probably be at least 2 more.

You see, half the problem is I am a little bit of a perfectionist and I want to have the trip planned quite well... but I know that life in not like that and we are going to have major stresses in the 6 months we are away. Still, there is no harm in wanting to minimise those moments.

The frustrating part with a world trip ticket is there are all these restrictions you need to abide to. For example, 20 total flight limit and within those flights, "sector" limits. It basically means you have to cut things out or pay more. We have already had to cut out some really good places in the revision of the plan. My heart is breaking that we have to cut out Nepal, but it just seems to be one of those places that you need to plan to go to just by itself.

But with all the restrictions and culling, we still have a 6 month trip. And I'm not sure whether I'm panicked or excited.

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