Pilgrims’ Progress

(actually written on 21 January 2010, post-trip….but I’ve dated it to appear at the top of the blog forever-n-ever) 

When we set out we had *a long way to go*.
In particular, a pilgrimage from Singapore to London and beyond – overland all the way. The beyond bit was because we had time to fill, but no definite plans. As it turned out, we did not get to London, but we did get a lot further – as far north as Lindisfarne, as far south as Greece and as far east as Turkey.
And we did manage to go overland all the way – in trains, busses, tuktuks, elephants, bicycles, boats, motorhomes, taxis, oxcart, trams, tow trucks, motorbikes, horses, and on foot. We spent 568 hours in long haul travel in vehicles not our own (and then what must add up to a few more days in waiting time too!)…plus we covered over 15,000km in the motorhomes we bought (and later resold).
In the 449 days we were away (that’s fourteen months, three weeks and two days) we slept in 158 different places, passing through 33 different countries – staying anything from a day (and although you can drive the entire length of Serbia in one long day, we would NOT say we’ve really been there!) through to six weeks, occasionally stopping three weeks in one town.

newzealand australia singapore malaysia thailand laos
(thailand) cambodia  vietnam china hongkong (china) mongolia
russia estonia latvia lithuania poland germany austria switzerland (germany) thenetherlands belgium england france italy greece
bulgaria serbia hungary slovakia czechrepublic (germany) (poland)
(czech) (hungary) (bulgaria) romania turkey
unitedarabemirates (australia) (newzealand)

We experienced temperature extremes from well-below-zero to mid-forties; that is freezing cold to blazingly hot.
We visited castles, cathedrals, temples, museums and ruins.
We climbed mountains, rode bicycles and horses, and took long walks.
We ate everything we were offered, the least favourites being sheeps’ tail soup in Mongolia and green Mekong river sludge in Laos.
We filled forty-three journals.
We repaired our shoes more times than we can count.
And that’s about how many photos we took, too.
We stayed with people, who live in bamboo huts with pigs under the raised floor, felt gers without running water, highrise apartments in cities…and we visited people, who live on the rubbish dump, in orphanages, in old stone buildings that have been standing for hundreds of years.
We were awed by the scenery, enveloped in the history, and had our hearts touched by the people we met.

We thank those who have virtually travelled with us on this journey for the encouragement they have given. We thank those, who, sacrificially in many cases, opened their homes and lives to us. And we invite anyone who happens across this spot in cyberspace to take a wander with us – many of the places we went were timeless; a century from now they will still be the same, they will not date, or not quickly anyway.
Maybe you won’t make it to all the places we did – there are 634 posts on this blog, not to mention a fair few extra pages as well. There are over one and a half thousand comments (no wonder we didn’t end up replying to them all!) from some of the more than 26,000 people who have visited (over 185,000 hits to date).

We went a long way, but the adventure of our lives-in-the-future is not over and we still have a long way to go. We will always be pilgrims.

You can find us writing now at have pinny, will cook,
and Jgirl15 is launching a new blog for children, 
stemming from her own artistic passions and adventures 
and inspired by the world-creativity we have experienced.
~ made by a child ~

One last word:
We were privileged to spend time with the folks at Big Brother Mouse in Luang Prabang. If you get the opportunity to go there, you will not be disappointed.
If you go nowhere else on this blog, please take a look at this post.
As suggested by a reader, we set up a paypal account to collect donations,
but we are having trouble linking it to the blog,
so our ongoing fundraising efforts are
going to remain localised for now.

Now I’m off to do the very last blog-job – turn the order of posts around so we can read chronologically as we revist our trip over the next year! (I’m ignoring the enormous job of editting every post in order to be able to print a hard copy for the children to have for posterity)

In under a year we’ll be leaving.
So I thought it was no-longer-too-soon to start a blog.
We’ve already made plans, researched places, checked finances, tightened the proverbial belt, emailed faraway exotic locations, dropped hints at work that Time Off Will Be Applied For, got some sponsorship, had our seventeen year old packs mended, bought new packs for the Others Who Will Be Accompanying Us, drawn up itineraries, revised itineraries (as per the finances comment above), convinced Grandpa it’s for real and He Is Invited, improved our hiking endurance (and in the case of the baby, she’s learning to walk), trawled E-bay for vans and caravans in England (oh, the things you can do!), learnt Mandarin (well, the kids were doing that already….and the eldest has taken up Latin (not that we expect to meet any Ancient Romans), let word drop quietly amongst our friends and family that we are Seriously Doing This…oh yes, we are getting ready!

This is a post I wrote when I knew there would be a blog one day, but there wasn’t one yet! It was intended to be The First Post…as it turns out, it’s the second one……which, I suppose, means the one I entitle “Post Two” a few days later will end up Post The Third. But you’ll have to wait for that one.

Auckland, New Zealand
28 March 2007
By Rachael

We’re a family with a Dadda (Rob) and a Mama (that’s me) in their thirties. There are eight kiddos aged baby to twelve…and a grandpa in his seventies (Joe) tags along too!

Joe was born in England, grew up in India, was stationed with the airforce in Singapore, married a girl from Malaysia and moved to New Zealand.
Rob grew up in New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia and visited the Philippines in his late teens.
My parents took my sister and me on various trips (New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, China, Hawaii and Tokyo) before letting me join a high school trip to Europe. My travels continued with fruit picking summers in the South Island to fund university studies (what was the best? the train trip the length of the country? the new experiences? living in strange places? meeting new people? doing something *different*?)

It was inevitable that travel should feature when Rob met Rach!
The two got married on a Saturday and left the country on Monday.
After Disneyland fun, staggering around London and hitchhiking across Europe, we ended up living in Poland for a couple of years (that was back in the early nineties when you jumped on the end of a queue if you saw one, because it meant there was something good at the other end of it!). We fell into English language teaching and fell in love with it. We returned to NZ to get qualifications…. Rob has found himself with a linguistics masters after an engineering degree and has had a job that marries the two for over a decade now! We both picked up post-grad dips in ELT as well as the dime-a-dozen RSA Certificate A passes.
And we got those eight children too
Visiting family in Malaysia has been the only overseas jaunt we’ve done with kids – quite different to backpacking in Europe! But we’ve taken whatever local opportunities have arisen…..Rob speaking at a conference in Wellington was excuse enough for an extended weekend trip to see the sights….family celebrations in Christchurch called some of us down…..mountain weekends…..beach getaways in the middle of winter…..camping with friends…..museum trips, art galleries, bush walks, outdoor bonfires, lake escapes….we love them all.
It’s great to find adventure, to slow the usual rat-race-pace, to share moments with friends and make memories to cherish, to see God and each other through seeking eyes.

Rob came home last night saying “I was in a meeting today and we were working out who to send up to China to deliver a programme next year”
He had put his hand up.
Of course noone thought he was serious.
What? 11 weeks away from your family?
No, I’d take them.
What? Take them to China? All of them?
Yeah, they’d love it.

Now they KNOW he’s mad (as if there had ever been any doubt!)

By the time he’d told me this much, I was excited.
But then he said,
“That could be the beginning and then we do something else.”

Oooooooh I could hardly sleep and I’m not allowed to tell the kids.

Will this mark the beginning of our pilgrimage….two adults, eight kids and a grandpa?
Which of our dreams will become a reality? To walk along the Great Wall, to live in a yurt in Mongolia for as long as someone would have us, to live in a trullo in Italy and a gypsy caravan in Romania, to renovate a castle in Poland, to travel across America in a covered wagon, to tour on bicycles in Holland, to live in a houseboat somewhere, sometime…..oh, and to be tourists in England, making the pilgrimage back to where our ancestors came from!

In the meantime, I’d better get the kids’ Mandarin tapes out…..if only I had paid attention when they were listening to them – all I can say is “apple”. They can manage “the big bus is on the road” and “the fat man is calling the waiter”.

We’ve got a long way to go!

Here’s another of our pre-blog posts….we’ll catch up within the week!

Auckland, New Zealand
13 April 2007

Blog Post Number Two
By Rachael

This past week has seen “progress” made in our investigations.
On Good Friday we went to visit a Missions Ship that was moored in town….we had just written to Mercy Ships to find out if they would take us and it seemed like a good time to go and look at a boat! Unfortunately we’ve since heard, there are too many of us for the Mercy Ships;-(

BUT…..Global Volunteer Network have not ruled us out…so now we can see if we can be of any use on any of their programmes around the world.

AND….the owner of Anak Ranch in Mongolia is (apparently) “enthusiastic” about the prospect of us coming…but we need to wait and hear from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. An email from his right-hand-man might not truly reflect his own position (oh, but we hope it does).

PLUS….our friend Becca, who lived and worked for many years in Romania and who is just about to return there, is seeing if she can line up some volunteer work in an orphanage for us.

There is so much you *could* do. Having lots of children is not actually a bad thing – it just helps to narrow down the options you can realistically be involved with!!!!

Only a week after the last post, we were writing this one.

Auckland, New Zealand
22 April 2007

The Trip Is *Off*
By Rachael

A late night followed by a bad day and we sit here thinking it’s a mad idea to take the kids up the road, let alone round the world.
But this isn’t about taking perfect children. It’s not about waiting until they’re big enough to not be an embarrassment to us or until they are pleasant enough that we enjoy being with them all the time. We don’t need to wait for them to learn to look after their things before we can give them their own backpack: in fact, perhaps seeing those less fortunate than themselves might make them more mindful of the material belongings they are not caring for now, and certainly they will have less stuff to look after on the road!

OK so it *is* a mad idea. We knew that anyway.

Then….once the kids were all in bed asleep, Rob asked, “Should we take a video camera as well as a digital?”
Maybe the trip is still on after all.

Last week we realised our plans included arriving in Beijing when the Olympics are on. We’re not snobbish travellers, but we’d really prefer not to be where half the world is at one particular time! Given that the Chinese academic year is not going to be altered merely to suit the preferences of one guest lecturer, we’re trying to bypass Beijing and go directly to Jinan. When you start thinking outside the box, the options open up. Why not take a train? If anyone can tell us how to go about booking a train from Hong Kong to Jinan, we’d be forever indebted to you. Failing that, our allegiance will remain with Mr Google. UPDATE TO FOLLOW POST-RESEARCH.

Just as I was about to turn off the computer for the night a why-didn’t-we-think-of-that-sooner-thought flamed through my imagination.
If we can manage a train trip from Hong Kong to Jinan….and if we can do the 36 hour trip from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar (as we are planning)….WHY are we thinking of catching a plane out of Mongolia? Why not hop on the Trans-Siberian Railway????? Why-ever-not?
Preliminary investigations suggest it would cost our Private Tour Group (aka dad, mum and the kids) about half the cost of flying, making it a Very Attractive Proposition. Hang on, a week incarcerated on a train at the end of winter with eight kids? Attractive? Absolutely! – that sounds like our kind of adventure!!! Of course, when you take a week to do something rather than a few hours there will be additional costs – like food, and in this instance, Russian visas, but it’s still going to be cheaper, isn’t it? Not to mention the Adventure Factor

*plane* rhymes with *train*
*train* rhymes with *adventure*, doesn’t it?

When we’re away we are all going to keep a journal. The kids don’t know it yet, but I’ve managed to pick up some nice not-too-little-but-not-too-big ones to tuck in their packs and be discovered on Christmas morning. Rob hasn’t seen them either, but he has noticed the money leave the account;-) You’d think buying ten of everything would entitle you to at least a ten percent discount, but in reality, those cash registers just ring ka-ching ka-ching and the shop owners laugh all the way to the bank. Ah well, we have nice notebooks, HB 2H and 4H pencils. We even have some watercolour pencils and a few tubes of gouache (which is apparently pronounced gwaaaaaazh, and not gow-atch or go-uch-ee). Thing is, we don’t really know how to use them all.
So we got hold of a *how to become a great artist in 73 trying lessons* book and we’re working our way through it faithfully.
Lesson The First was completely do-able, even for artistically-challenged Mother (don’t think I’ve ever got over my second form art teacher writing “lacks confidence” in my school report). In a few short moments we discovered one of our good friends, Degas, had once enquired of a master how to become a great artist. He had been advised, “Draw lines, young man, draw lines”. So we joined him, drawing lines…..lines…….lines……and more lines…….accompanied by the chant spurring us on to greater future works. Aha, we were in good company!
Today’s lesson (number ten) we drew still more lines. But not just lines. Our lines had *value*. That doesn’t mean we could sell them yet! But we are one step closer to great pictures….surely. Besides, we can now do ellipses and ribbons and toasters too.
By the time we hit the road, I’m sure we’ll be able to draw a bowl of noodles or the Great Wall snaking over the mountains….we’ll be able to adapt week one’s ribbon study to get the wall looking real and we even know that if we draw the train windowframe we’re looking through nice and big and the mountains nice and small, those mountains will look like they’re far away and our picture will have *perspective*…..no doubt, you know all that already, but we don’t didn’t and now we’re one little bit more prepared.

Remember this?

Rob came home last night saying “I was in a meeting today and we were working out who to send up to China to deliver a programme next year”
He had put his hand up.
Of course noone thought he was serious.
What? 11 weeks away from your family?
No, I’d take them.
What? Take them to China? All of them?
Yeah, they’d love it.

We were meant to arrive in China in September.

Now, take a look at this:

Rob came home last night saying “I was in a meeting today and we still need someone to go up to China in February”
He had put his hand up……again.
I wasn’t sure if he was serious.
What? Leaving in under five months?
It would mean two summers in a row instead of two winters;-)
But ER mightn’t quite be toilet-trained.
We’ve done wilder things!

Grandpa sighed gently and said, “Tell me when we’re going and I’ll make sure I’m there”

You’ve got to love them both!

It was hard to concentrate on *overlapping objects* this morning…….it was easier to wonder if we would actually see the Mona Lisa rather than just read about it…….it’s very tempting to put The Children’s Education on hold for a day and concentrate my efforts on seeing if we could be ready in four months – not entirely impossible, I suppose. Once upon a time we got engaged, planned a wedding, sold all our earthly possessions and planned our open-ended trip to The Other Side of the World in exactly that time frame.

Time to rave about Boots-n-all.
They’re a friendly bunch over on the fora….full of good ideas and just as opinionated as I am;-)
Said fora are well-organised, easy to negotiate and there’s something for everyone -and I mean EVERY-SINGLE-BODY.
You post a question and you get a few replies.
Even if you ask a question that’s been asked seventeen times before, someone jumps in with a polite and no-less-informative-than-the-first-time-the question-was-asked reply.
You start up a blog (this one), you run into a few inevitable-for-newbies-hitches and someone waves a magic wand or kicks their computer harder than you kicked your own and ~ voila ~ fixed!
Did I mention friendly replies to posts?
They make you feel so at home that last night I found myself posting the wildest of questions.
Wild – not in the African safari sense – wild in a I’m-a-product-of-an-individualistic-independent-I’ll-do-it-my-way-society kind of way…..and there I was asking total strangers where we should go after England.
I mean to say, what would they care?
For gooness sake, if you can’t decide *where* to go, how on earth do you think you are going to manage to get there? That woulda been my answer;-)

But you know what?
They told me exactly where to go (and it was not in the slightest impolite!)

“They” – yes, “they” – “more than one” sent a reply flying through cyberspace.

Here’s my favourite one:

Personally, I think you’ll know what you want to do by the time you get there. I know you’ve got a lot of kids so you probably have to do more logistics up front than most, but there is no reason you can’t decide this later on in your trip. You’ll hear about a lot of other places from the travelers you meet along the way. Something you hear will inspire you.

Do you see what I see? For a start, even though I’m fairly new to the board, he knows a bit about me. That sense of community is really rather endearing! Secondly, he is realistic (or more to the point, he’s not a total head-in-the-clouds-fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants guy – well, he might be, but at least he understands that travelling with a bunch of kiddos = some constraints). Thirdly, he leaves me a sense of anticipation, intrigue, excitement (in spite of his American spelling!). And, finally, though I didn’t realise it when I posted my “where on earth to go?” question, he said what I deep down wanted to hear!

Of course, it would feel frivolously irresponsible to leave home not knowing where we’re going, especially with eight kids in tow, but oh the allure!!!!! I suspect we’ll end up doing just that!
What’s the worst that could happen? If we get stuck, we can log on to Boots-n-all and *someone* will have some good advice to get us unstuck. And whatever “it” is, it’ll make interesting reading on our blog!

I’d not really thought about it before. But it keeps cropping up in various things I’ve been reading. Apparently there’s this divide and each side supposedly thinks it has THE answer on THE way to travel.
Being a very black-n-white kind of person, you might expect me to plant my feet firmly on one side or t’other. But not this time. This is one of those issues that depends on the individual…and neither way is right or wrong, not even better or worse (in a gross generalisation sense).
And quite frankly, aren’t there more important things to devote our energies to? (particularly given that I don’t have an awful lot of THAT left over at the end of each day).
All the same, it’s an interesting thought.
One highlighted again just last night in discussion with my mother about *trips*.
She is reassured by the certainty of knowing when she is going, where she is going, how much it is going to cost, what kinds of food will be available, not wasting time looking for transport…..so cruises and organised tours suit her perfectly. That’s not to say she didn’t enjoy saving lots of euros the day she and dad took a train into Rome instead of joining the cruise ship’s tour party!
Me? I want to save that many euros *every* day!! Not knowing where we’ll sleep tonight only heightens the adventure. Searching for the right platform is part of the fun. Reading train timetables to *anywhere* in the world is more full of promise than reading a luxury tour brochure. For me.

So I say (and instead of commenting on the blogs which praise one way at the expense of the other I’ll just say my piece here and get it off my chest once and for all)…let’s accept that there are different approaches, and each person’s journey will look different to the next one’s.
Let’s learn from the path we tread, and from those we meet as we walk. Let’s celebrate each other’s accomplishments, share each other’s burdens, and perhaps travel a mile or two together.