Author Archives: James

Travelling Light

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We are carrying too much luggage. And by that, I don’t mean that we have one too many pairs of oatmeal trekking trousers in our backpacks and we are worried about the carbon footprint of flying them around the world (although we do, and we are).

We are not people to refuse to carry deodorant for weight-saving purposes. We have sensible, if ostentatiously heavy backpacks, and they aren’t the problem. By “too much luggage” I mean that we have taken advantage of the fact that the first leg of our trip involves driving a large car boot across the States to thoughtfully, pointedly and deliberately carry a bunch of RIDICULOUS crap that we don’t really need. We are considering it one month’s worth of soft start to long periods of being butch and rugged in deserts and on islands (and on desert islands).

Our “America-only” box contains the following highly critical travel accessories:

  • Hard copy guidebooks of all the places we are going to. To be read, and then replaced with Kindle versions for the main trip
  • A tent (so far, so sensible, although ours is yellow and has flowers all over it)
  • A double air mattress (which will already get you frowned at in most semi-serious hiking campsites)
  • A fluffy duvet, two sets of clean, white sheets and some soft pillows (erm…)
  • A bulging bag of heavy toiletries including big bottles of shampoo and conditioner, a heavy glass bottle of aftershave, the world’s second largest bottle of vitamin pills etc.
  • Two bottles of excellent champagne (but of course! One white, one pink, donations left over from our leaving parties)
  • Four bottles of good sauvignon blanc
  • One bottle of 18 year old Bunnahabhain single malt (for those long winter evenings. In the USA, in May)
  • Two huge bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (thanks Mum! Thanks Dad!). Also, one bag of fluffy white marshmallows for toasting over campfires
  • A big container of home made muesli for breakfasts (obviously plus china plates, bowls etc.)
  • And, la piece de resistance, a full-sized, mains-powered Nespresso coffee machine and four weeks of capsules (and a milk frother – seriously, what use is coffee without frothy milk?)
Nespresso

Essential backpacking kit. Essential.

Having carried the box back and forth down a couple of long hotel corridors, I also discovered a three litre, three kilogram bottle of ginger ale that had previously been lurking in our fridge at home that Lucy couldn’t bear to part with. We have some serious drinking to do!

Short runs in strange places – Washington DC

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We have NEVER been running together. Not once. I am quite used to heaving myself up and down the West Side Highway. Lucy, on the other hand, “runs like a gazelle” but “finds it really dull” and therefore doesn’t tend to trouble herself with such things.

This evening, therefore, was a first for both of us: a five mile run up and down the National Mall in Washington DC, past all the museums that we have spent the day happily visiting (more on that later) and around the Washington Monument. James and Lucy jogging together – who knew?

Our last night at 83 Mercer

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Six men worked all day yesterday to pack all of our lives – sorry, all of our belongings – into a 20 foot crate for shipping to England. So what do you do on the last night in your home, when all the things that made it your home have gone?

Well, you camp.

The tent

Camping in our apartment

Camping

Under canvas at 83 Mercer

Goodbye to … everybody

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Our last drinks party at 83 Mercer. We’re going to miss you guys.

We'll meet again. Johnny Cash, American IV

 

We’d like to thank…

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There are a number of our friends who have managed to fit long adventures into highly successful careers. Thanks for the encouragement, guys!

Dan & Melora – the original travel blog

D&M

Crabs on the honeymoon - unfortunate

Tom & Eden – global ambassadors for packing cubes. Don’t laugh until you have tried them!

T&M

Visiting us in New York. TRUMP!

Ben & Jo – luckiest, most size-mismatched couple in the world

B&J

Ben - he's tiny!

Nick & Phoebe – loved it so much they did it twice

N&P

You lucky b....

Tracey & Mike – Lucy’s sister and broinlaw. The original six month honeymooners.

Tracey and Mike

Here deer here.

Cabe & Caroline – not because of their travel (although they do) but because they exemplify the ability to have fascinating cultural experiences without ever leaving home.

Short Runs in Strange Places

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The first in an occasional series, whereby I try not get myself mugged while vainly trying to keep fit on the road and simultaneously confuse my iphone satnav. File this first post under future nostalgia – a reminder of runs at home, where there were shops selling ice-cold mineral water and chocolate bars every two hundred yards.

London: my favorite run – across the river from our old office. Running East down the South Bank of the Thames is like running back in time, as you slowly peel back the successive layers of gentrification spreading out from the City. I once ran a half marathon along this route by accident, but that is another story.

St Paul's

St Paul's across the Millenium Bridge

New York: West from our apartment to the Hudson River, then down the West Side Highway to Battery Park. An hour of trying not to appear too competitive among the crowds of hyper-fit New Yorkers, rewarded by a distant but wonderful view of Lady Liberty at half time.

Lady Liberty

Lady Liberty (freedom through a long lens)

Goodbye to NYC Cocktails

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Tonight we decided to start our extended goodbye to New York by revisiting a couple of our favourite cocktail bars, one uptown and one downtown, with the obligatory white knuckle taxi ride between the two.

Salon de Ning

Perched on top of the Peninsula Hotel on 55th Street, the Salon de Ning comes complete with Shanghai madam portraits hung flat on the ceiling, a mid-level view through the forest of skyscrapers down to Central Park and a semi-serious cocktail list. There are occasional traces of cigar-chomping-mid-town-macho, however, so try to go off peak (and try not to order a single malt on the rocks with a cocktail straw). If you ever find yourself living as happy expats in New York and trying to impress out of towners, this is the place; we are thoroughly looking forward to bookending our trip as out of towners in Felix’s at the top of the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong (hi Kean!). The Passion Martini is short, sweet and deceptively fierce. They also do beautiful things with cucumbers and orchids, although fortunately not at the same time.

Soho Grand

We have history at the Soho Grand. Although I like to think that I eventually got the hang of business New York-style, my first serious attempt at hard-ball negotiation in the USA got Lucy and me thrown out of our first – admittedly temporary – apartment on Bleecker Street. We took our suitcases and the remnants of our dignity and checked into the Soho Grand. We had stayed here while we were apartment hunting, and with our second visit added to a growing number of difficult life decisions that were rendered surprisingly simple by the addition of a “Grand Margarita” (think a normal margarita but three times the size and with a healthy slug of Grand Marnier).

New York, we’re going to miss you.

Itinerererary

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If you put our dream destinations into a very large spreadsheet then cross reference: the ideal seasons in the various parts of the world; interesting festivals; major air routes; the (surprisingly strict) constraints of a OneWorld Explorer air ticket; the availability of group tours on three separate continents; and the price of sushi you come up with the following.
RTW flight

Our main round the world ticket covering about half of our flights. Blank planners can be found at http://oneworldrtw.innosked.com/ for those interested...

Soundtrack: well, we had to include this at some point! Live version, remixed with Better Harder Faster Stronger, amazing.
  • End of May to 23 June – road trip across the USA from NYC to LA via the deep South
  • 24 June to 1 July – sailing round the Galapagos
  • 2 July to 21 July – Peru & Bolivia (including the Inca trail and the Bolivian salt flats)
  • 22 July to 28 July – Easter Island for the stone heads
  • 28 July to 2 August – Sydney and Cairns, great barrier reef in passing
  • 2 August to 21 August – Papua new Guinea for the Mount Hagen show
  • 22 August to 6 Sep – Vanuatu, a quintessential Pacific island, complete with hopefully not too active volcanoes and a hopefully not too active culture of cannibalism
  • Fly Sydney-Hong Kong, then on to Beijing
  • 8 Sep to 14 Sep – tour of North Korea including the Arirang mass games
  • 16 Sep to 11 Oct – East down the Silk Road, including Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan
  • 12 Oct to 22 Oct – western China (en route from Kyrgyzstan to Tibet), train to Lhasa
  • 23 Oct to 6 Nov – trekking in Tibet, then driving over the Himalaya to Kathmandu
  • Back to civilisation for a lost weekend in Hong Kong
  • 10 Nov to 21 Nov – Japan for the maple leaf season
  • 21 Nov – 23 Dec Thailand, Cambodia (Angkor Wat) and Burma (Pagan, Mandalay etc.)
  • Home for Christmas and some serious comfort food
  • 3 Jan – fly to Buenos Aires en route to Antartica
  • February – back to the UK to start the rest of our lives
  • travel flights v4

    The master schedule. I have deliberately reduced the font size and resolution to replicate the full eye-bleeding impact of the original.

We would be delighted if anyone were to be passing through any of these areas when we were there and wanted to meet up.

Goodbye to skydiving … for now

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The category “heavy things I want to carry around the world” includes:

  1. My rucksack: clothes, boots, medical kit, laptop, clean linen handkerchiefs etc.
  2. My parachute
  3. Er, that’s it

Unless we come across a particularly fine drop zone that is (i) somewhere utterly spectacular, (ii) happy to lend me a 170 sq. ft. piece of ripstop nylon and (iii) accept a scanned copy of my log book, I probably won’t be jumping over the next eight months. Sniff.

I am desperately going to miss the camaraderie, the speed, the views, the sunshine, the hanging off the outside of planes, the playing with hi-tech kit, the exercise and the drop zone food (OK, maybe not the food). Fortunately, before we headed off Mirko had the sense to have the world’s best bachelor party down at the drop zone at Cross Keys.

Guys, I’m going to miss you. See you when we get back.