360 in 365 – Joachim voyage autour du monde

Why?

The most comfortable in a trip is the time when you imagine it, twenty weeks before actually going. You plan one year of being elsewhere, experiencing other cultures and seeing other horizons… one year you see in the course of a minute. There and there, and there too! And a stop at that spot over there… Leaving is easy, with a cup of tea in your hand some marshmallow-smooth Jazz in the gramophone… So very comfortable to travel thusly, with some Cointreau in your Earl Grey. One year… it’s a bit longer than that. And Cointreau doesn’t quite mix with bergamot orange.

When I tell my friends I’m planning a trip, the main question is “all alone?” Yep, I’m goin’ all alone. Never though, “why?”… Strange, isn’t it? But well, I can go with that. I don’t have any more reason to go, than I have a reason to go alone.

In fact, I woke up one morning, knowing I should do this trip around the world. Since, I thought more and more seriously about it, and now here’s this project. To be on the road around the world during the year between my 25th and my 26th birthdays. Why? I don’t know!

The last trip I undertook (I should disgress from the french version at that point, just to say I’m currently reading Moby Dick in english, and, well, the caracteristic litterary style might leave some mark in my writing… or not.)… the last trip was last autumn, in 2008. In the course of 20 days, I traveled Europe from South to North, from Venice, Italy to Stockholm, Sweden, by train. I visited Vienna, Berlin and Copenhagen in the course of this trip, and similarly, I did it without a real reason, just an impulsion. Or, as I wrote it in my notebook before I started my trip:

The main reason, I believe, is only that I want to know what travel’s all about.

In this travel, I met people, I took pictures and discovered horizons previously unknown ; but that might be a good subject for later.

Coming back from that trip, I wrote in conclusion :

I think I know a little bit more what I desire : go back in a train, see people and places. Make images, live a simple life and traveling frequently.

Yeah, I didn’t wait very long to start a new trip.

But it doesn’t answer the why. Maybe I should try to make the goal clearer. Ideally, the goal would be to go and make images on the road. Pictures & postcards mostly. Write a bit but it’s not images, isn’t it? To tell you the truth, I’m still more confortable with images.
And if I like those images, and people like it too, all the better!
Yes, that would be the goal. A part of the why now has an answer.

The real mystery is the impulsion, the driving force behind my desire to go. But then… I still have time to figure it out.

in the train