Neil heads off tomorrow (30th of May) from Auckland and will overnight in Seoul before flying on to Urumqi. Poor bastard will arrive at 1.30 am on the 1st of June. I leave Saturday morning (31st) and overnight in Hong Kong before flying on to Urumqi. I also arrive on the 1st but at a much more respectable 6.45 pm. Neil will have the fun of finding the hostel we will be staying at briefly in the wee hours of Sunday morning and sorting everything out before I swan in later that day.
Mie and Yuuki (my wife and nearly 4 year old son) will be flying out with me on Saturday but from Hong Kong they will continue on to Japan where they will spend the next 2 months at Mie's mum's place. Neil's wife, Naoko, will be waiting patiently for nearly 6 weeks back home in New Zealand while she looks after their 3 kids Wakana, Gen and Kaze. (Yeah, I guess we'll both be paying for this holiday long after our Visa card balances are back on zero....!).
Thursday, 29 May 2008
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
At it again
If you are 20 something and between school and a job it is hardly remarkable these days to be seen somewhere out in the world with a backpack on getting your taste of adventure travel. It is pretty much a right of passage for many. What is a little more unusual perhaps is to be out there doing it when you are a family man with a career and in your mid-40s. Enter me (Dylan) and Neil, 2 ex-backpackers staring down the barrel of middle age and unable to let go of the past.
In our day we had worn out shoe leather and bicycle tires on some of the more out of the way backpacker trails the developing world had to offer and in some cases may have even pioneered the odd new one. Twenty years on and that hunger for adventure that drove us then, the dreams and the pure pleasure of living in the moment are luring us back once more.
As I write this it is 20 years and 1 month to the day since we set off from Urumqi in China's far north-western province of Xinjiang on a bicycle trip that would take us west for 2000 kilometres. It would take us across searing desert and frozen mountain ranges along the Silk Road to Pakistan via the lung busting Khunjerab pass (opened to foreigners just 2 years earlier). In doing so Neil and I became, if not the first, one of the very first sets of foreign tourists to cycle what has since become one of the classic adventure cycling routes of the world.
For 2 months we scarcely saw another western face, had almost no contact with friends or family back home and no access to news of the outside world - it was perfect! Hardly surpising then that 20 years on we find ourselves heading back there with the idea of doing it all again (well, all except the Pakistan bit.....).
In our day we had worn out shoe leather and bicycle tires on some of the more out of the way backpacker trails the developing world had to offer and in some cases may have even pioneered the odd new one. Twenty years on and that hunger for adventure that drove us then, the dreams and the pure pleasure of living in the moment are luring us back once more.
As I write this it is 20 years and 1 month to the day since we set off from Urumqi in China's far north-western province of Xinjiang on a bicycle trip that would take us west for 2000 kilometres. It would take us across searing desert and frozen mountain ranges along the Silk Road to Pakistan via the lung busting Khunjerab pass (opened to foreigners just 2 years earlier). In doing so Neil and I became, if not the first, one of the very first sets of foreign tourists to cycle what has since become one of the classic adventure cycling routes of the world.
For 2 months we scarcely saw another western face, had almost no contact with friends or family back home and no access to news of the outside world - it was perfect! Hardly surpising then that 20 years on we find ourselves heading back there with the idea of doing it all again (well, all except the Pakistan bit.....).
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