Can you imagine traveling for a year, finding local festivals, history, and things and places you've always wanted to see?  One of the joys of publishing Wandering Educators is finding really cool people, doing interesting things. Our new Transglobal Editor, Jonathan Blake and his friend Edward Wilson are working hard on planning an incredible, life-changing journey around the world. Their website details their planning, itinerary, and goals. I am so impressed with this trip! We were lucky enough to sit down and chat with Jonathan and Edward about planning, paring down, and getting ready for a once-in-a-lifetime experience such as this. Here's what they had to say...

WE: Please tell us about your upcoming expedition and site: transglobal:
Expedition One - from Crete to Cambodia...

Jonathan: At the end of August 2009, myself and my co-traveller Edward Wilson will be setting off on a trip to the island of Crete, and to the kingdom and jungles of Cambodia - hence the name. The central premise of the trip is to use as little air-based travel as possible, although at some point this is
unavoidable (the situations in Iraq and Myanmar, for example). Other than this, we plan to head across the continents by land. They say that it is the journey - not the destination - and I'm inclined to agree. Our site will follow our progress as we attempt to get all the way from Crete, to Cambodia, and the inspiring, curious, and downright crazy things that happen to us over the 9-12 months that we're on the road. We're anticipating that the current route will take us from Crete, to Turkey, south into Syria, Lebanon, Jordan then across the water to Egypt. From here we'll depart to India, Nepal, back into India, and then Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.

WE: What led you to start on this journey of discovery and travel?

Jonathan: Luck and timing, primarily. A sequence of events took place that
allowed both of us to realistically consider this trip as a possibility. For myself, it was the breakdown of a relationship, and the lease expiring on my apartment. I've been in Vancouver for over 4 years now, so the travel itch has become increasingly strong and hard to ignore. Some times you just have to throw caution to the wind, throw your hands in the air, and go. In my
experience, the 'right time' to do something is more or less the same as 'tomorrow' - you can talk about it every day, but it'll never be 'tomorrow'.

Edward: Well I've always loved travel and wanted to undertake a journey of this magnitude for years. Prior to this journey all of my travelling has been in the Americas. The economic situation ended a job that I was enjoying but left me in a fairly good financial condition personally. There was simply no better time to start a trip like this, and there was very little to hold me to this location any more.

WE: How are you preparing for a journey of this magnitude?

Jonathan: There are many components to planning a trip like this. When we first started discussing the trip, the word 'expedition' was thrown about as a casual joke about our ambitions. As we started to think more about how we were going to get from point A to point B, we came to realise that this was less of an anecdote and more of a testament to the amount of work we'd have to do in order to actually pull it off. Aside from the standard considerations such as getting all the required shots, and sorting out visas, we also discovered we'd have to make some fairly tight logistical plans around our methods of travel, and accomodation plans, and how they would relate to the tourist and climate seasons, world political climate, and obviously - cash. We've also had to make some carefully considered decisions over our gear  - when you're a few thousands kilometers down the road, what you decided take can make or break the success of the trip. With this in mind we opted to spend a little extra on our gear in the hopes by doing so, we'll not only make our adventures more comfortable, but also save unnecessary costs as we travel. Aside from the apartment now being littered with world and regional maps, notebooks, and of course the aforementioned gear, we've also invested a great deal of time using Google and Microsoft's map systems in order to route-plan, which is something I can't recommend highly enough. In many respects, I've taken on the role of researching the logistics and legalities of the trip, whereas Edward has become something of a cultural advisor - he has a stack of lonely planet phrasebooks about as tall as a your average pineapple.

Edward: There were certain hard points, places and things we absolutely had to see and experience. My personal example is the dance parties during the Christmas period in the Indian State of Goa. Once we had these hard points down the necessities of travel and our goal of travelling over land as much as possible filled in the softer details. This lead to fortuitous arrangements like landing in Izmir, Turkey and skipping mainland Greece altogether. We are now greatly looking forward to Izmir as we've since read up about it.

WE: Your itinerary is incredible - what led to those places being chosen?

Jonathan: The first thing we did when we conceived of the idea was to spend an evening hidden away in a castle of books and maps at the main branch of the Vancouver Library. We knew we'd end up in South East Asia, so that became point B. Having previously done Europe, and taking into account the kinds of expenses that one incurs on that particular leg of the journey, we opted to skip it altogether. Doing so, we believe, will allow us to spend more time in places we haven't been, exploring the world in a slightly different light. In many cases it was a matter of picking countries that were the highest priority (Syria and India for example), and then figuring out the most appropriate route between them. Additionally there are all the examples of human achievement and natural wonders to see, like the Pyramids, Everest and the Dead Sea. With all of these criteria in mind, we had to shift our mindset from thinking about what we want to see, to what we'd like to see on *this* trip. The most recent change to our plan was to skip mainland Greece altogether, and travel directly from the islands into Turkey, up to Istanbul, and then take the train down into Syria. Sometimes the best routes come from making concessions.

Technically speaking, though, we'll actually be travelling from Vancouver, Canada, to Sydney, Australia, bouncing through the UK before we get to Crete. We've left this off the itinerary though, since Crete to Cambodia has
a better ring to it, and as I have a parent in each of these countries, I don't consider it part of the trip.

WE: Obviously, you are both intercultural learners. How are you preparing
for cultural differences, intercultural adjustment, and the like?

Jonathan: Personally, very little. Keeping an open mind, understanding that your culture is just as peculiar to them as theirs may be to you, and being tolerant of other people's beliefs are all good rules to live by generally, even if you're not travelling. I'm a firm believer that travelling by land will ease this process, though. There's nothing like hopping from an airport in London to an airport in Mumbai to give you a culture shock, and by sticking to the ground you can experience the subtle cultural and social transitions in all of their natural brilliance. I think if I were to be brutally honest, my biggest concern right now is the toilets!

Edward: I have done some reading about what to expect in the various countries and I've been working on Levantine Arabic Language tapes. I am actually eagerly looking forward to those overwhelming experiences of culture shock that we will surely face. I think they are some of  the greatest learning experiences you can get in this life. We've also purchased a number of Lonely Planet regional phrasebooks. Each covers a number of languages in a very small form factor so they are  relatively painless to bring along. Those should help at least for purchasing of necessities.

WE: Nuts and bolts - how are you paying for this trip? It is probably the goal of every reader on wandering educators, to travel like this. Please share!!

Jonathan: Once my lease expired at the beginning of the year, I opted to move into Edward's living room, which has now become my "bedroom" and office space. Sorry about that, Ed. In doing so I had an opportunity to sell
virtually all of my possessions, with the moderate exceptions of my sofabed,
laptop, and my siamese fighting/Betta fish, Rasputin (who lives on my desk).
In doing so my rent has more than halved, which allows me to save that
extra needed cash every month. According to our estimates, the trip will cost
between $8,000 and $9,000, depending on how things go on the road. I'm
planning and mostly hoping to have that saved by the time I go. You could
theoretically do it for about $5,000, if you were seriously hardcore. The major expense is actually accomodation and food. If you were to discount this, I think we worked out that you can travel from one side of the world to the other for a little under $3,000 over a period of about 60 days. Much of the cost of travelling is directly proportional to the distance you care to remove yourself from your comfort zone.

Edward:  Having Jon move in has also halved my rent and is allowing me to sell off my possessions, though I still have more to sell. So the short answer is we are affording this trip by selling off our old lives piece by piece and adjusting our comfort levels to be more congruent with life on the road. That and Jon is putting a lot of work into researching the cheapest ways to travel from place to place and we have had to make adjustments to our plans to accommodate cost considerations.

WE: Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?

Edward: One of the things that has fascinated me again and again in preparing for this trip is how even just learning the place names tricks you into learning a great deal about the cultural history of a location. Most of the cities have two or more names, each with alternate spellings. The names we started out knowing for cities in Inda were usually the British colonial names which were occasionally significantly different then their names on the map, like Bombay and Mumbai, for example. In Turkey and the Middle East we were more familiar with Roman era names than the modern Turkish and Arabic place names. But then, you can't go back to Constantinople.

Jonathan: I think preparing and taking a trip like this is one of the most valuable events that an opportunistic person can undertake within their life. I've already met a lot of incredibly interesting and inspiring people, and we haven't even left yet! Also Couchsurfing.com is an incredible resource, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's on the road!

WE: Thanks so much, Jonathan and Edward. I know you'll post excerpts of your journey on out site - We'll be eagerly awaiting to hear of your adventures on the road.