The Journey Begins

It’s all starting to come together. After a year of spinning a globe, pointing at a place and saying, “lets go here”, we’ve finally settled and booked our epic voyage! Well… almost. The main skeleton is there. George hasn’t decided whether or not to return to these humble British shores yet. Tom and Dom are booking their flights very soon, and both Gabs and myself are left to purchase the connection flight from Hanoi to Bangkok before our flight back to the UK.

The final pieces of the travelling jigsaw are yet to be added, but you can still see the big picture… Now it's mostly booked the excitement's crept in! We're going!!!

Here’s our itinerary:

31^st August 2011

London to Colombo, Sri Lanka

Ewan and George hop on their 11 and a half hour flight (with an hour change-over in Doha, Qatar), to Sri Lanka. We spend a week here before moving on to Mumbai, India.

9^th September 2011

Mumbai, India

Ewan and George fly into Mumbai airport from Colombo to rendezvous with the fresh-blooded Tom and Dom, who make their voyage from the UK. Party Time! The plan is to explore Mumbai for a few days, and then train hop our way over the next two weeks to the Nepalese border.

29^th September 2011

Kathmandu, Nepal

The Himalayas beckon with the promise of local festivals and snow topped mountain ranges. We’re here for a week. Holding camp in the bustling streets of Kathmandu, we’ll voyage out to the numerous surrounding locations of immense interest and beauty.

6^th October 2011

Bangkok, Thailand

GABY enter stage left! In the thriving and humid urban jungle that is Bangkok, the four lads finally get some female company in the form of miss Gabriella. Our South East Asian adventure begins.

After attempting to settle in the Thai capital, we set off by overnight train heading for the famed islands of Koh Samui and Koh Phangan; home of the legendary Full Moon Party. Covered in Day Glo Paint, we’ll party till the sun comes back up on one of the world’s most stunning beaches.

A train ride and crippling hangover later, we have the emotional departure of our weatherman and flyboy (Dom and Tom) from Bangkok airport, destination UK. Rubbing the tears aside, George, Ewan and Gaby head for the Cambodian border alone…

15^th October 2011

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Well… not strictly speaking. At this point, a dozen other budding travellers will join us. This section of the journey is on a guided tour (called Roam Cambodia and Vietnam, courtesy of STA travel). With Tom and Dom now a distant tearstained memory, we go arm in arm with our new companions to such sights as Angkor Wat, the largest religious temple in the world.

22^nd October 2011

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Katy Melua sung about ‘a Million Bicycles in Beijing’… Well if she visited Vietnam, she’d be singing ‘a Million Motorbikes in Ho Chi Minh’. Formerly Saigon, Vietnam’s most frenetic city welcomes us to the spectacular country of Vietnam! From here, we travel up the coast through Hoi An, Hue, Halong Bay to our final tour destination, Hanoi.

4^th November

Hanoi, Vietnam

For Ewan and Gaby, the dream ends. They re-pack their bags a final time and jump onto a flight to Bangkok, and then another back to the UK, via Doha. But what happens to George I hear you ask? Only he knows the answer to that question! Some say he’ll head north into the dark depths of China, some say west to Laos… All we know is, he’s called the GEB!!!

Ewan.

To live at what cost?

Most new travellers know that visiting exotic parts of the world means protecting yourself from some impressive yet deadly diseases. Most new travellers also know that you need to get a concoction of immunizations and other such drugs before you leave. What most new travellers often don’t know for sure, is how much this will all cost?

I just left my local village doctors surgery with not only a sore arm, but promise of a sore bank account!

The NHS provides certain jabs for free, which is great!

·       Typhoid,

·       Hepatitis A,

·       Meningitis C, and

·       Tetanus, diphtheria, and polio (which are combined in one vaccine) are free of charge.

Wonderful!

However, the following jabs are NOT free. Here are the current NHS prices for the other jabs that we may need…

·       Cholera - £50 per dose with 2 doses required,

·       Japanese B encephalitis - £90 per dose with 3 doses required,

·       Hepatitis B - £35 per dose with 3 doses needed and,

·       Rabies - £48 per dose with 3 doses required.

This amounts to a whopping £620!!! I can’t say I’m surprised, but I had my fingers crossed that it would be less. And just to rub salt in the metaphorical wound, there’s the matter of malaria medication to take into account as well.

·       Malarone £12 + 2.25 per tablet, of which you have to take 2 days prior to the exposure zone and for 7 days after (1 tablet per day),

·       Chloroquine - £2.20 for 20 tablets, of which you take two a week (on the same day) for one week before you enter the zone, for the weeks of your stay, and for 4 weeks after you leave the malarial zone.

·       Paludrine - £15.40 for 98 tablets, doses are 2 tablets daily for 1 week before, during, and 4 weeks after travel.

(Note: Some malarial parasites are resistant to some forms of medication, Thailand, Cambodia and some of Vietnam inhabits these mosquitos. For these areas you require Malarone. My experience of Malarone is good; few symptoms and at 1 tablet per day is easy to remember to take. Always check with your doctor what areas have the resistant parasites. https://www.malariahotspots.co.uk/index.html).

All in all I’m looking at having to fork out £720 for medication. Ouch.

My travel nurse insists that I take malaria medication and the rabies jab, and I agree with her. Approximately 1,500 travellers return to the UK with malaria every year and in 2008, there were 1,370 cases of malaria reported and six deaths in the UK. Also Cambodia and Vietnam are known for stray dogs. Dogs aren’t the only animals which can carry rabies, as most mammals can, bats included, so it seems malaria and rabies prevention is mandatory.

As for the other three, no matter how rare, is it worth the risk of not having the jabs? In any case, most of these diseases are scary enough for you to run crying to your nearest travel clinic, pleading with them to prick you immediately whatever the cost…  so it probably isn’t.

To be fair, a lot of these diseases are avoidable if you’re vigilant, and you take the right precautions. The nurse didn’t look like she was going to mention the likes of Cholera, Jap B, and Hep B until I raised the question, and she said it’s up to me to decide what I have.

So we’re back to the prominent questions; ‘How much is the risk worth?’, ‘To pay or not to pay?’, ‘To die or not to die?’…. Hmmmmmm.

Ewan.

Bitten by the travel bug!

I spent yesterday afternoon scratching off countries I’d visited on my World Scratch Map, and it struck me how much of the globe I’d left uncovered. Now, this isn’t to suggest that I never get out of the house, I certainly do! I consider myself a bit of an explorer. I’ve always had a huge desire to visit new places and to see new things, and to a large extent I have. But whilst stepping back to admire the work I’d tentatively created, I realized how pathetic my adventurous endeavors looked. I’d spent consecutive holidays during my teenage years visiting the wonderful Mediterranean islands of Corfu, Crete, Majorca, Menorca, Cyprus and Malta with my family. Listing them here does fill me with a sense of pride, as at least it goes some way to proving that I’m not a housebound scaredy-cat. But it doesn’t change the fact that on my map, those islands represent merely a drop in the ocean. It was at this point that I also realized that I’ve only left the continent twice: a 5-day trip to New York, and a month in the South African bush. The majority of North America is left unexplored, along with the vast continents of Asia, South America, Australasia… So many places I’ve yet to grace with my presence (*cough*)…

So with a huge sigh of relief I turned my gaze to South East Asia. We will be touching down in September, and boy can’t we wait. Over the next 4 months we’ll bring you the tense yet exciting build up to our two-month adventure, and the adventure itself.

At this point I should probably deliberate into who ‘we’ are. I’ll start with myself…

My name is Ewan. I’m a filmmaker and I graduated from Staffordshire University 2 years ago. I live in the sunny town of Milton Keynes (at least sunny compared to Stoke-on-Trent), and have done all my life. I have many passions and hobbies from playing guitar to cooking, the list is endless. I believe in taking as many of life’s opportunities as you can and tend to favour a “never say never” attitude. I’m sure you’ll learn a lot more about me over the coming months… bring it on!

My travelling film companions are George and Gaby. I’ll summarize them for you in a bite size fashion so you can get a taste of their character:

George is a lifelong friend of mine. He took a geology degree in combination with media communication at the Royal Holloway. If there are any interesting rocks along the way (I doubt there will be), I’m sure he’ll blog about it. He also needs a haircut… He’s the James May of our trip.

Gaby’s fabulously vocal. She’ll never sit on the fence in a matter and will happily share her opinions on this blog. She’s of Italian decent so expect many Italian characteristics. Mix this with a London upbringing and you get a very exciting personality-cocktail. She’s got a great eye for fashion, film and food. Gabs attended the same Media Production course as myself and so far is the only girl on our trip.

I’m also delighted to announce that our good friends Dom and Tom are also joining us for half the trip.

Tom joined the RAF after his A-Levels and last year served in Afghanistan. He’s athletic, down to earth and also one of the best men I’ve ever met. Tom is the only singleton on our trip… more updates to follow.

Dom is constantly flirting with education and on paper is the brightest out of the lot of us (I’m sure this will cause debate). He’s currently on a Masters course in Meteorology and you can look forward to some cloud-formation themed blogs along the way. Dom is competing in the Amsterdam half marathon just a few days after he leaves South East Asia.

I’m sure everyone will introduce themselves personally at some point in the lead up to our travels.

We can’t wait to start our trip. Some of us have been bitten by the travel bug and can’t get enough; some of us are so far immune. Stay in touch as we bring you all the stories from our preparations and travels. If you’ve thinking of travelling in the future then walk it with us on here.

Also, as a final note, feel free to ask questions or set us mini tasks along the way. We want to promote travelling as much as we can,

Ewan.