It’s now mid October 1990, and time to start telling people about a crazy spur-of-the-moment trip that I have been concocting over the last week, since life took an unexpected turn…

How did I get to this point? Early last month I had a home, a girlfriend, and a job. As of 2 weeks ago, I have none of these. My home base has suddenly become a spare bedroom in my sister’s house in Bedfordshire, England, where this trip has been created from little more than a desperate need to escape the emotional turmoil in which I’m suddenly embroiled, and a desire to somehow take advantage of my newly unattached and unemployed status.

I have some savings which I hope will see me through at least 7 months of budget travel, and more importantly make up the difference between the rental income from my house, and the ever increasing mortgage payments I have to make.

If I’m ever going to go for a big trip, this is the time, regardless of how miserable I feel right now…

In the end it took less than 48 hours from the birth of the idea of a round-the-world trip, until I had suddenly committed £1800 to a set of air tickets. This happened a week ago at the end of a 20 minute phone call to Trailfinders travel agent (which I had visited in London the day before, to get some general information about one way tickets). During the subsequent call I had an atlas open with the whole world in one view, which was all I actually needed! After judicious guesswork regarding the likely time for overland crossings of continents I have never visited, I somehow pinned down some reasonable-sounding dates, for flying over the oceans and the war zones (“wet and dangerous bits”). I know that my plans may subsequently change, but I feel the need to carry with me a set of air tickets that will eventually get me home.

It looks deceptively simple in the atlas in terms of the flights: London to Houston, Buenos Aires to Auckland, Auckland to Sydney, Perth to Bali, Bali to Singapore, Bangkok to Calcutta, Bombay to London… The devil is in the details – especially the overland section from Houston to Buenos Aires which is the big challenge that I almost chickened out of – the once-weekly flight from Argentina to New Zealand is the key to the whole itinerary, and is half its entire cost! I have allowed myself four months to traverse Latin America, which sounds enough, but nobody I know has done anything similar, so it’s just a guess…. Is it even possible to get from Panama to Colombia overland? My newly purchased South America on a Shoestring makes crossing the Darien Gap sound like a major challenge involving small boats…

Then again, working in Nigeria until last month, was a mixture of excitement and challenge involving small boats – as some recent photos of working on the Benin River are reminding me:

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