I decided not to write one long post but several short ones of different topics. This is the second post.
So why the way I go?
Staring at the map for a while I realized that answering the question 'Where shall I travel from Hungary, cheap, let's say for a year?' is not that hard. Well, in the end I could find 3 answers which make sense:
- To the west until Spain, then to Morocco, down to Central Africa, and if you're crazy enough, all the way down to South Africa.
- Getting on the Transsiberia Express towards Ukraine and to Russia, through Siberia until Mongolia, meanwhile drop by in several ...istans, reach Korea, Japan, China and then some way back.
- The route we ended up with: Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, and if you really want to keep on going, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. I really want to keep on going.
Here is a map which shows our planned route:
(New Zealand didn't fit, the screen was too small.)
A little more into the details, now I plan the route as this:
- We leave on Wednesday morning. We reach Transylvania in one day. Transylvania is beautiful so we might stay one or two days if we feel like.
- Then we move on to Bucharest. I love Bucharest because it's big and there are many stray dogs. A couple of days there, or not.
- From there we go to the seaside to Vama Veche, which is my favorite place in the world. I hope it hasn't changed much. Facing reality, probably it did change a lot, but people say we'd find something similar in Bulgaria instead.
- If we feel like, we drop by the Danube delta, because it's close and beautiful in a different way than the beaches. And I was 16 when I was there the last (and only) time.
- We take our time to go all the way on the Bulgarian beaches enjoying our freedom. We both agreed to visit some nudist and hippie places if we bump into any. I'd like that for nostalgia to Vama Veche, and also it's generally a cool thing :)
- Istanbul, where I've never been, then all the way down by the Mediterrean coast of Turkey, almost to the Syrian border. We probably won't visit Syria this time.
- Then to the eastern part of Turkey, about which I don't have much idea, I've never been there, but Judit has so she's going to navigate :)
- In Iran I don't know what to expect apart from gays (http://danielfromhungary.
blogspot.com/2010/06/gay- bisexual-province-qazvin.html :) but they say people are very hospitable and considering it's a country with a size of half of Europe, it'd probably worth spending even a year there. Of yes, time. We'd spend 3 weeks in Romania and Bulgaria, 1 month in Turkey and 1 month in Iran. - Then Pakistan, which I'm a bit afraid of, but I'll tell more about this later. We're just going to rush through it in one week. Our visas are only valid for one week, and also they expire at the end of August.
- India, where we can stay until 11 November, according to our visas. If everything goes well, we will live with this opportunity so we plan to spend two months in the country. We want to go to Darjeeling to climb the Himalayas and to do some white water rafting. Also we plan to go to Delhi, Mumbai or anything, the way it turns out. To be honest, I have no idea about India. It's such a huge country that even if considering how different are the parts of Spain: Southern Spain from Catalunya, Galicia from the Basque Country etc. I can't even imagine how different could be one part of India from another.
- As it is impossible to cross Myanmar (I'm not exaggregating, it IS impossible: political situation, visas etc. - see this page, especially the framed article 'Unfunny money', it takes 3 minutes to read: http://wikitravel.org/en/Myanmar#Buy), so we fly from India to Thailand. Judit flies back from Bangkok and I continue...
- ... to Indonesia, where I'll learn diving and - having great plans - I'm even going to start teaching it. The whole course takes 3-4 months with practice. So let's say it's February when I'm finished with the course.
- Then I move on to Australia to instruct diving for a few months.
- When I'm done with that I'd go to New Zealand to pat the sheep whose wool my extraübercool pants are made of (which I got as a sponsoration from the Hungarian outdoors company called Mountex) and now being really happy I fly back home.
This is how pants are made from sheeps:
Well, this is how the journey looks like in my head, but to tell the truth I won't at all be surprised if I end up in China, this is meant to be some loose thread to follow.
