The why’s, how’s & who’s. June 15th

Why?

I had to go home, my term was at an end. The normal mode de transport would be fly to Paris & then on to Iceland. But I wanted something else.
The idea came, I think, from the Man in seat 61. He explains the possibility to travel by train from London to India. Frankly its not recommended, because of the Iran/Pakistan border, but it can be done. The difficulty is that at the Quetta border you can be stuck for no reason for a week. “No train today, maybe tomorrow”. I am not that patient. The second option is through Afghanistan and all though I am as adventurous as the next guy, the Kyber Pass during the time of the Taliban is not my idea of fun. And it is by bus. The possibility to take a train/bus to Kathmandu and from there to Lhasa was not appealing. I don’t like buses. India's relations with their neighbours are thus that trains are few and far between to Pakistan, quasi nonexistent to Bangladesh & nonexistent to Burma. I have always wanted to travel by train through East Asia, from Singapore, through Malaysia to Chang Mai and on to Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam. Research proved that there are few or no trains in Laos and few in Cambodia. But I could take a boat down the Mekong! Not so easy. Border crossing on the great river is not without problems. But it would be possible to go from Delhi to Paris by land, with a slight detour eastwards.
As it turned out the slight detour will take us through Thailand, Cambodia, Viet Nam, China, North –Korea, back to China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and from Turkey to France. It wasn’t really planned like that, it just turned out to be logical. Nearly all can be done by train. Originally I wanted to do the whole trip by train, from Istanbul through Europe to Paris, as I had originally wanted to start at the Raffles in Singapore and work my way up to Laos, but time was not unlimited, so I cut of Singapore, Malaysia & Laos and the whole of Europe.
So we end up doing Delhi-Paris via parts of East & Central Asia.

How.

I hate flying. It is not dislike, has nothing to do with fear, it is pure undiluted hatred. I like traveling. Traveling you can not do by plane, or bus for that matter. It is not traveling when you sit on your arse in a confined space and wait for time to pass. Traveling can only be done by train or ship. Traveling is an occupation. “What do you do?” “I travel”. You have to be willing to sacrifice time in order to travel. If you don’t, you fly. But that has got nothing to do with traveling.
So by train it was. And it is not that difficult to organize. You have the Man in seat 61, the Tomas Cook timetable, a few guides, Le Guide des Routards & Lonely Planet and Google. Probably the most difficult part is taking the decision, after it is taken it’s piece of cake.
There has to be a sensible ratio on/off train, stops frequent enough to allow you to enjoy life, see things and have a decent meal. Two nights, three days on a train max, then a hotel, bath, meal . We have a few one to two nighters. Saigon-Hanoi, Hanoi-Beijing, Pyongyang-Beijing, Beijing-Urumqi, Urumqi-Almaty, Almaty-Shymkent, Turkmenabad-Ashgabat, Mashhad-Yazd and Tehran-Istanbul. About 25% of the time is spent on trains, two out of eight weeks.
Where do you want to stop. You plan your stops according to degree of weariness, 40 hours without a shower is quite enough. So every 40 hours, at least, you stop, check into a hotel, have a bath, a cold drink and a meal at a table.
Traveling is easy.

Who.

The organization was done by us. It is really not complicated. With the Tomas Cook Timetable and the Man in seat 61 + Wikitravel for maps. Of course there was a degree of incertitude, we do e.g. not have any pre-booked means of transportation from Thailand to Kazakhstan, except for N-Korea which was of course not left to improvisation. But we know there are trains to most of the places we have scheduled, when there are non, we take taxis or buses. For four a taxi is not that much more expensive then a bus. Most of the time we have hotels booked. In Iran we encountered certain difficulties as, for instance, train schedules can be found on the net, but booking is not possible. So there we planned and then put the plan into the hands of an Iranian tour operator to book, hotels, trains, taxis.
Of course there were problems. How do you get 100$ from India to Almaty to pay for tickets to Tashkent. You don’t. India and a lot of the turd world countries don’t allow money transfers out. How do you transfer money from Paris to Iran, with a tightened UN economic embargo in place. In Saigon we bought the tickets for Hanoi, in Hanoi for Beijing. We still havn’t experienced trains being sold out. If that happens, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. This is not the kind of travel you can leave to someone else to plan, unless you go on an organized tour, which is the second most disgusting thing to do after flying.

Why the oppressed world.

When I was in high school, half of the world was ruled by thugs, dictators, one party regimes, colonels, military juntas, presidents for life and sometimes lunatics. We even had some in the western part of Europe, in Spain, Portugal, Greece & Turkey regularly, not to mention the eastern part, all under paranoid communist rule. My sons don’t know this, they missed No mans land, Checkpoint Charley, the Iron curtain, the drab colours and the underlying fear when someone whispered “police”.
I want them to experience this, I am not sure we will succeed, but we are looking for oppression. I conclude with this.Non of us are Free.