The Where’s Rich Project

As many people reading this may have looked at it as they are planning thier own visit to some of the places i have tagged, I thought it would be a good idea to recall my previous visit to Africa, namely Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park, where I stayed in a bush camp for two weeks in 2007. Being in a standard camping tent surrounded by nature certainly left for some outstanding memories, and as a photographer, some amazing shots.

Below are some of the images i was able to get just moments from my tent on the Luangwa River; i hope they serve as inspiration for anyone thinking about heading off to Africa.

A male Lion rests in the dawn sun on the banks of the Luangwa River, Zambia

A lioness sends a protective glance toward an elephant heard crossing the Luangwa River, Zambia

An elephant leaves a 200-strong group to cross the Chobe River, Botswana to gain acces to the lush green Islands thriving in the dry season

An Elephant crosses the Luangwa River, Zambia

The Nightstalker

A lone elephant has a stoll on the dry earth of the South Luangwa National Park

The next five years looking back could have been better spent saving money rather than buying needless cars and going on one big trip per year, if I could turn the clock back I would in a second as I would probably be in India by now bartering for keepsakes in Delhi’s criminals market. But it wasn’t better spent, trips to Africa and twice to America (there may have been a girl involved) and the purchase, sale and loss on a Renault Clio 182 (the cup model to be fair) amounted in much debt and long-promised pay increases never came, the credit crunch reared its ugly head so as there are now no property based jobs in the whole world (except the middle east – where apparently, you have to visit to know if you will like it or not before companies hire you – whatever mate) so I must make do, sit here and wait ten more months until October 25th (which is subject to change almost daily) before finally grand plans can come to fruition. 

The plan began, as our last three adventures had, in the Chelmer Tavern, a pub about ten minutes walk from my parent’s house and the scene of many a late night conversation on subjects ranging from workable communism to the best lines from an Arnie movie. I knew that two ’semi-friends’ and my good friend Chris, the stalwart of the previous Africa and the first America trip were planning a year’s travel in 2009 involving Europe, America, Asia and Australia. I admit it may have been jealousy that kick-started the planning of this jolly but after hearing their discussions in the pub, I declared I was to be included in the trip. Over the next few weeks I thought more and more about what was on offer.

The plan was to purchase a round the world airfare ticket and then use that to get to various hubs in South Africa, Asia and Australia. This sounded good on paper until I realized that the dates for these tickets was set in stone, if you were having a fine old time in Zambia and fancied staying on a month, and then you were pretty much held to ransom to get out of there and to Nairobi airport pronto. This to me seemed to limit the sense of freedom I so desired so I pulled out of the trip and vowed to travel alone (I would not have gone on the Europe and USA portion of the trip anyway) and meet up with them on various locations on the trip.

So the planning began.

I set out a route from Cape Town to Sydney. Now I have no desire whatsoever to go to Australia, all I can picture it as is a big island with lots of British people doing what they do in England (i.e. ruining it). I never understood why it became a ‘right of passage’ for travelers and the whole thought of being there in three years time actually concerns me, but Cape Town to Busan, South Korea doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it? I’m sure I will enjoy it when I get there, I just personally don’t see the appeal in going half way around the world to live in a society of predominantly white English speaking people and hang around in towns and cities with the occasional beach thrown in, and it reminds me of Frinton-On-Sea. Still, I had a happy childhood there so who am I to question people living out theirs, besides, after 18 months on the road it might be nice to sit down and read a newspaper, even if it will be full of cricket.

I had my start and end point, the rest was just picking out the best bits on the way and I very much felt like a kid in a candy store; its amazing to just look at a map and think oh I want to see that and this and oh that would be cool. So I made a list of a few of the things I really wanted to see and do on my journey, which looked something like this – which I have tried to present in an ‘in-journey’ format;·   

• Climb Table Mountain
• See whales in the sea·
• Cage dive with a shark·       
• Visit the Okavango Delta
• See Victoria falls again
• Hang out at Jolly boys camp in Livingston, Zambia
• Visit the Track and trail river camp in Mfuwe, Zambia
• Get a quality leopard photograph for my portfolio
• (things then got a little less specific)
• Visit Zanzibar
• Climb Kilimanjaro
• Visit Rwanda·       
• Gorilla trek in Uganda·       
• See the Pyramids·     
• Petra·       
• Visit the Desert·      
• The Taj Mahal (and most of India for that matter)·     
• See a wild tiger·   
• Trek to Everest Base Camp·       
• Angkor Wat·     
• South China Sea in Vietnam·  
• Tiger Leaping Gorge in China·     
• Visit the ‘real’ old China
• Tokyo
• Climb Mt Fuji·   
• Visit Ayers Rock

So that was, I thought, a fairly modest list for a two-year journey. But I thought it best to start with what I knew best and go from there, as a little help on the ground goes a long way. I knew I had to return to Zambia to see Kirsten Gottenkieny (info@trackandtrailrivercamp.com) and the wonderful people at Track and Trail River Camp, in the South Luangwa National Park, Mfuwe. I had stayed here in 2007 and it was the most amazing time of my life (see the full report which I will include on my previous visit). I have stayed in contact with Kirsten and so Zambia was a must (also a keen photographer, I have never been to a park in my life where such photo opportunities are possible, I mean, waking up with an elephant in your tent makes for good shots!).

Malawi made sense for the next port of call; South Luangwa National park is near the border so I (at this point) assumed that there would be transport available to take us over the boarder. I don’t know a great deal about Malawi but I discovered some camps right on the lake which, if anything should provide our first and perhaps only chance for safe swimming in a natural African environment (apart from swimming out to the Devil’s Armchair on Victoria falls or getting wiped out rafting the Zambezi or Nile – though I wouldn’t call either of these remarkably safe), so tick the box.

Out of Malawi there are several routes into neighboring Tanzania so it made sense to hop on a bus, then a train to Dar Es Salem where I could visit Zanzibar. I have looked into climbing Kilimanjaro but the costs and permits involved mean that sadly I might just have to setting with looking at it, still, my only snow in Africa will make up for the disappointment.

From Tanzania I have decided to hop to Rwanda and then Uganda, two countries with a recent history all too much in the Public Eye for the wrong reasons. Gorilla trekking in either country costs $500 and must be booked months in advance. Sadly I cannot afford this (that’s effectively a years accommodation in some parts of the journey) and I also have no idea when I want to be here, its all about freedom remember! Fortunately I have read a few other blogs on here and wikitraveled both places to know that there will be enough for me to see and do here and Uganda should enable me to cross the Nile off my ‘conquered list’ along with the Colorado, Arkansas and Zambezi as rivers I have rafted and got ‘boaters butt’ on. I also want to learn more about the genocide in Rwanda and have uncovered a number of interesting sites to learn and pay respect for what happened here. I will need to do a lot more research nearer the time on where to stay and what to do in both places.

Another bus (they are all pretty much buses from now on come to think of it until I get to India) gets me into Kenya. I’ve been to Kenya before and didn’t really enjoy it, well to be fair I was only at the airport for 12 or so hours and during that time England lost the Rugby World cup (I know nothing about rugby but if you pretend its football things get more fun), it did give the impression of a place that people who still think its 1920 come to. Maybe I am being cruel but I saw a lot of Khaki in that airport and I wonder if any of those people can seriously say that staying in a luxury tent and having five star services gave them the real African Experience?

Anyway, I don’t plan to do an awful lot in Kenya apart from get out of there, what with Zambia and Tanzania I am not sure what Kenya can offer me that is any different, so at this point in time, it’s a means to an and.

Now I have the Sudan problem. I really need to look into this more. I am very much game for travelling through the country but I know that my travel friends will not be so keen. A flight from Nairobi to Cairo is a long way and looks to be around £2-300, which is a lot of money when you are budgeting for $10 a day. I think it will be a case of assessing the situation at the time, there will be people to talk to in Rwanda and Uganda who will know more than I can find out by reading books back home. At the time of writing I am considering my options, but realistically I think I might have to break up the land travel with a 3 hour flight.

From here onwards I really am in unchartered territory, I have never been to the middle east and though I have always wanted to, I don’t know a great deal about any ‘must see’ attractions aside from the immediately obvious ones, so that is exactly what I plan to enjoy. However I get to Cairo I will eventually get there I hope, so of course to see the pyramids are a must. I have wanted to do this since I was knee high to a grasshopper so it should be quite an experience. I will also try my best to get to Alexandria to continue the ‘Seven Wonders’ theme and look for the ruins of the lighthouse. I am sure I will be tempted with a Nile cruise down to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings etc; I will have to wait on a price for this as it’s at the opposite end of the country. I suppose if I do get a bus through Sudan it might be better to try and get off here and then head north, but that is a matter to be resolved on the ground as logistics cannot be predicted quite so precisely. I have to get to Dahab for backpacker relaxation and then to Nuweiba on the Sinai Peninsular, where I might take a walk up Mount Sinai and see if I can get my own list of commandments (thall shall have free accommodation and food would be a good one).

From Nuweiba I need to get a boat (yes my first boat – I am more excited about this part of the trip than any other right now!) to Aqaba in Jordan where I will be spending some time on the Red Sea, in the Capital Amman and of course in Petra and Wadi Rum where I have seen some amazing looking nomadic tours you can go on for a week or so. I may also take a trip to Israel if there is a good service to Jerusalem – which would probably be the closest to home I will have been for some time!

Getting from Jordan to Dubai is another problem. I would love to go to Saudi Arabia, I have always wanted to see it and experience the ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ lifestyle (which I know of course is not how it really is, but the sand is still there). But it’s not the easiest place to get into. From everything I can see you need either an invite, a business visa or to have planned the visit to strict deadlines which a trip like mine you cannot really do. This is another one of those ‘need more facts’ routes, but in case I cannot get in, a flight from Amman to Dubai is around £200 which again is too much but it isn’t the end of the world either.Dubai will be a transition destination. I might go skiing just for the fact that it might be my only skiing for a good while (though I am sure there are some in India, Nepal and China to come). I might take a boat out to Kish Island in Iran if for nothing more than to get an Iranian stamp in my passport.

Getting from Dubai to India is possible by boat, though I have only seen this on television and will have to find out more details. None of the travel guides I have read have mentioned it as a point of entry though Mumbai is the natural port of India so there must be some trade routes. Another one to stake out on the ground in Dubai, flight, in a recurring common theme is £200 as a back up option.India I wont even go into, in fact I will only be there for a week or so if that as I need to get to Nepal before then end of March to have a chance of trekking to Everest Base Camp. The plan is to get a train from Delhi to Varanasi, then close my eyes as to not ruin it for later, then a bus to the Nepalese boarder, then another to Katmandu. From there the Everest Base Camp trail is fairly well documented and I hope to spend around 2-4 weeks in this country, which after 10 days for the trek gives me a bit of time to explore its other magic.

Then a return the same way to India which is India and I will be here for around 3-4 months I expect and I could write now forever about what I want to see so I will have to come back to this nearer the time. If I see the Taj Mahal and a Tiger I will be happy, if I see a Snow Leopard I may well quit and come home as it’s not going to get better than that.From India I finally HAVE to get a plane. I need to get to Bangkok and I cant see any way around it, so it must be done as travel through Bangladesh and Burma will no doubt prove very hard. Again I will seek advice from local people but I am not holding my breath.

A flight from Delhi to Bangkok seems to cost, you’ve guessed it, £200.So we are really looking too far ahead now, Thailand will lead me to Cambodia, where I as I think everyone who has ever been there as a tourist before am looking forward to the ruins at Angkor, then its through to Vietnam where I hope to be able to purchase some sort of motorbike or scooter to do a trip from south to north and into China, with a stop at Laos on the way to sample the delights of the Mekong.China, like India is too big to go into, all I can think about is trekking Tiger Leaping Gorge and heading back into the Himalayas again up to Tibet, where I will take local advice on the possibility of entry. I will make my way across this country in around 3-4 months and know that I will have to update my visa as time dictates so it may well end up being less than this if that is what needs to be done.From China there is a boat to South Korea and then Japan, and from there I have heard stories of ships to Western Australia, though I am well aware I may need to either swim or get another plane – cost likely to be significantly more than £200!

Well I set out to go from Cape Town to Sydney only on trains and busses, I think a cautious 4 flights in that distance isn’t too bad going; so let the saving and planning commence!!!

Deciding where I want to go on holiday every year has never been a hard thing; I am fortunate to have an understanding and (more often than not) incorrigible bunch of friends who have the remarkable ability to agree to slightly obtuse trips at the drop of a hat, an example;

‘Chris are you up for going Zambia next week for a bit?’

‘Ya man’

No more explanation is really needed on this, lets just say I’ve had some interesting trips in the past when the traditional ‘use up all of your year’s holiday in one go and hope you don’t get ill or have much of a social life for the rest of the year, in fact also don’t have any birthdays or Christmas too’ philosophy. But now a more permanent solution to my desire or perhaps lust to see the world has presented itself in quite the random circumstances that I have become accustomed to.

I’m not really sure how it came about, certainly it was something I wanted to do sooner rather than later; I had travelled across Europe on my own in 2006 to escape a bad exam result (and ended up with a $1,000 phone bill – lesson learned) southern Africa in 2007 for a month to much fanfare and joy and last year was spent navigating the Appalachian Trail on my own ‘the English way’ via car (I will probably post on each of these later on when I have nothing to write about the current trip as they both served up some anecdotal treats).

Travel has always been in my blood, well maybe in my heart is a better way of putting it, well somewhere insde me anyway. I had the traditional family trips when I was younger. We would often go to France, my dad would drive us all to the south west, the huge pine forests of the region to relax in the Eurocamp resorts with our own little caravan sheltered from the sun under fifty meter pine. We would canoe in lakes, fish in streams and generally try and do a few ‘French things’ as, although they have never been intrepid explorers, I always get the feeling my parents do actually want to experience some sort of culture for two weeks a year. Trips then moved on to Scotland and Wales where my love of the outdoors met with being on holiday in an orgy of ‘is this right? We’re on holiday AND I get to climb trees and climb rocks!’ style questions which my mum and dad tentatively said yes too; probably wishing their son was on a hot beach where he couldn’t fall off anything. So that was the family effect. I thank them dearly for introducing me to hot weather, airplanes and in-car arguments which is enough to get anyone started.

The most endearing memory of these trips and why I am mentioning it in this increasingly wayward blog was the journey there. I have always enjoyed long car, coach or train journeys, I get quite sentimental about passing people and cars and towns only to forget them as soon as the next one comes and goes and on a 26 hour journey this can happen a lot as the sun goes down and cars and towns become lights and sounds. Then of course there is the thrill that you are in a foreign land, place names so mundane to the residents become a fantasy land that put you out on your own a million miles from home listening to different music which would then forever remind you of a moment every time you hear it for the rest of your life, etched in memory like it is etched on the record itself. And then of course there was Paris, I will cover Paris in another blog.

I toured Europe in my teenage as a promising footballer in my teenage years, my dad would be with me for much of it; they were all loan exchange deals so I got put up with a nice, say German family who’s son was getting the same deal back in the UK. Although he wasn’t really as the places I stayed in Germany were a lot nicer than what he was living in now in the UK I am quite sure of. So I had spells in Germany where I was enchanted by Munich and the Black Forest, I also spent time in Prague and Poland which for a World War II buff was quite fascinating. I then played in Barcelona, which as a lifelong admirer of the football team I was very much looking forward to. But actually as a city and country I did not enjoy at all, in fact it goes down on my all time destination blacklist. I thought it was dirty, hot, crowded and downright dangerous. After nearly falling off La Sagrada Familia (which is mind numbingly beautiful in a very scary way it has to be said) I vowed never to go back to Spain and spent most of my time there at the old Olympic hockey venue in Caella, near Badalona. I came home shortly afterwards, in fact I don’t think I was there much longer than two weeks, it was ultimately the last such trip I would make as university and a thing called a career got in the way.  

A significant fact of this trip though is it was perhaps the first when I was truly on my own. There were other players of course but none that I knew and most I couldn’t talk to as my Spanish is as you say, inelegant, so here I was in a big city on my own in a quite partisan town (‘they no lika the English’), if perhaps I had signed for FC Barcelona I would have one more friends, but I digress, for this spell was actually when the travel bug really first hit.I think being on my own for the first time brought something out of me. I didn’t feel it at the time, I thought it was a quite awful experience, but subconsciously I think it clicked something in my mind, as fast forward a few years and I’m 21 or 23, I don’t remember but I hate everything, its all too easy, people are idiots etc, the sort of thing a million bored people say every day and with good reason. I’m bored of the routine, the mundane and I swear it might make me insane. But then I thought of Barcelona, something a million miles from where I was. That is what I am escaping from, that is what I don’t need or want in my life, adventure for me, happiness if you will is putting me in a place where I don’t know what the next moment will be, I don’t know where that road leads or what is around that corner, its a journey of discovery, of being captivated by the unknown. I had found my passion. The hustle, the fear, the exploration, being a total stranger to a whole country. It was so different to what I was living like at the time I suddenly believed it might be the answer, I needed to leave my comfort zone behind, I could find peace through mayhem.

It was a moment of enlightenment and for a few small moments it was like I had discovered the meaning of life, well my life at least. So I did some research into ‘Barcelona-like’ scenarios that would cure me of the temporary insanity that I was sure was haunting me and it led me to Africa, where, despite the isolation and seemingly perfect location for my cure, I was a little unsure about going alone, which led to a meeting at the local pub with the question:

‘Chris are you up for going Zambia next week for a bit?’

‘Ya man’

Which rounds the story off nicely

Hi, Im Richard. I could go on to tell you about my life, my past and hopes and dreams, but no one is here to read that and I dont think im even here to write that. This is about freedom and I must allow myself to carry that into my writing to avoid cliched paragraphs on how I got sick of a 9-5 and grew tedious of my countries failure to protect my investment in education. Freedom needs to forget about such things and even though I am writing this from my office desk, looking out at the thousands who perform like circus animals on thier daily lunchtime show to the sandwhich shop and back, its already in the past. Im 26 years old and by the time this blog is over I may well be 28 or 29, I may never finish it or I may not get the chance to grow old but at least I can smile and say I tried.

So here goes