I haven’t written here a lot, because I did things. Vaccinations, I had 3 rabies shots, plus one for the yellow fever, one for hep-A and Typhoïd, and one for Dyphtery, Tetanus and Polio. I also had my visas cared for me by Action-Visas, a visa agency whose buisness is to go queue at the ambassies for me. They are all super nice and give to charity. So I got my Russian, Mongol and Chinese visas! Yeah! By the way, prepare your documents in advance. I was forced to apply for my visas in Urgency mode because I was a bit late. And the costs were a tad higher, like 30 to 50€ per visas.

I also emptied my flat. All of my life is now in boxes or in my travel bags, except for a few comic books I left to Caroline, a high school friend, who’s inheriting the flat. Speaking of bags, I received mine, it’s a MEI Voyageur, and I have to say I’m really really happy with it. I haven’t traveled a lot yet, but the buying process was really smooth, the customer care was great and, well, the urgency mode worked well too, I received it just in time for the trip! So now my life’s in that bag, and another smaller bag for my computer, cameras and films and precious things. And it isn’t heavy at all! Well, a little bit heavy.

Okay so I’m rambling about all the things, but it’s because of the excitation before the trip. It’s tomorrow, you know… And speaking of which, the microsponsoring project is alive and well, I have had 140 microsponsors, that’s between 1/3 and half of the days that are financed. Thank you so much dear readers, family, friends and/or (ex-)colleagues! Thanks to you I may be able to survive around the world!

Yeah, I gave back my keys yesterday, all was well except that I didn’t have a place to sleep so I went to my sister’s in urgency mode, she’s a photographer, and I finally found a charitable soul with a pneumatic bed : my cousin and his wife. Before I go, I’m cleaning the dishes but don’t tell him, it’s a surprise. Shush! Let’s hope he won’t read this blog, my twitter or my Facebook before I give him his keys back.

By the way, it got me thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if that was my real first day of travel? you know, just before taking my plane, I’m not sleeping at home, everything’s in a tiny bag and such? And there’s also the bug in my blog’s countdown code, it displays the start of my travel today instead of tomorrow (I’m bad at PHP).

And last thing, I put all my CDs and hard drives in a box and I can’t access it now. And my iPod is filled with my “things to listen to while in the parisian métro”, so if you feel I could discover some new sounds, please give me the names! And some samples of course, but no full albums in MP3 that would be illegal and illegalness isn’t really cool I guess, I’m totally for giving money to artists. Yeah. My email: octolan@gmail.com.

Ok. Shower, dishes and zou!

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Okay, so I didn’t write a lot recently. I guess I’ll tell you what’s been on my mind these days : CouchSurfing.

Basically, CouchSurfing is an online community connecting people travelling and people having a couch to host travelling people. Very basically. Because in fact, it’s much more… It’s a network based on trust, that allows people coming to a city to not be the simple tourist doing sad tourist things all alone and who’s forced to spend the night at his hotel because he doesn’t know people with whom he could have a great time talking and who would be willing to meet people from the other side of the world to whom he would show his country and how his country is the most beautiful in the world and if it’s not the most beautiful, it’s at the very least the nicest with people. There’s a cultural exchange across the couch (which could lead to other kinds of exchanges on the said couch) (but well, CouchSurfing isn’t a dating site… at least, it’s said it’s not).

How did it all begin? An american student, or was it an IT consultant? he had some cheap train tickets to Iceland (I think it might have been plane tickets), but he didn’t know anybody there, so he spammed hundred of university students to find a couch. Unsurprisingly, of the hundreds, some answered, and a few month later CouchSurfing was launched.

And does it work? Can you avoid meeting a convicted felon, ex rapist who would sell your organs to the South American Mob after eating them and burying them under a playground? You betcha! Some people like to meet strangers and trust them. And the system is based on trust. If you have a good experience with somebody, you add the person as a friend, and you write a testimonial, and you say how you trust that person… So if someone else is wondering if the person will be nice, your advice will be there to help. Freeloaders, perverts and mustachoied people are quickly banned from the community.

CouchSurfing is in the whole world. You can find a couch at the last minute in Paris, or be friends with people from Micronesia or Pakistan, or organize your trek in Argentina with Korean people, or even party all night long in the transsiberian with CouchSurfers from around the globe. Well, I guess it’s possible, you just have to search for a couch and the occasions will jump at you.

So yeah, I’m a CouchSurfer. I discovered that website a few years ago, but I only joined the community when I traveled in Europe. Thanks to that I could be hosted in Vienna and eat the best falafels with three german speaking CS girls, I was hosted in Berlin by a translator / choregrapher / singer from the US who invited me to stay longer to see him in concert, and the same in Stockholm except it was a french-speaking IT professionnal, and instead of a concert it was beers in a typical swedish bar. And then I visited Copenhagen, Christiania and Tivoli with a danish student girl.

Back in Paris, and having no room in my flat to host people, I said I was all for a Coffee Or A Drink. So I was contacted by Alina, who knew nobody in Paris… We went to the Louvres, the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, and one of the places I like for a change, the Canal St.Martin (less touristic than the other things, and I love the effect it does: “Aw I know this place, it’s where Amélie was filmed!”). I also showed around Paris to my Swedish host, and to various other people. Last Sunday, I was with Katya & Roma, from Moscow, in the Parc de La Villette, watching a movie with a wine bottle and a camembert…

So yeah, CouchSurfing is an awesome experience, and it will be one of the big things in my travel. Thanks to CS I could find people with whom I will travel around Mongolia next month, the more, the better (to share the expenses). And I’m also contacting russian people to host me in Moscow on the first night of my adventure…

Travellers, curious, open minded people… Don’t hesitate to join CouchSurfing, you’ll find all kinds of good friends there.

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In my previous post, I wrote about a train trip I did last fall, from October 2 to 17 I traveled from Venice, Italy to Stockholm, Sweden, and I stopped to Vienna, Berlin and Copenhagen. I travelled with Interrail tickets and CouchSurfing, the community that connects traveling people and people hosting traveling people. I coult write about that in a next post.
One of the things I wanted to know, is that if I could travel alone. Some people have problems with that…

I didn’t have any so I decided to do a longer travel, the one I’m preparing right now, this Round the World trip. I thought I should try to learn things about my previous experience : what could I do to travel better than last time?

1. Have a smaller bag.

   I had a sailor bag. A huge one, around 60L or 70L, filled to the top with lots of clothes. It wasn’t great at all to travel with this bag. Way to big and heavy for comfort… I regretted having it when going to the railway station in Venice and when I arrived in Copenhagen at 8am and had to go to the hostel… Next time, I want a 45L backpack.

2. Travel with a real backpack.

   The problem with the sailor bag is that it isn’t practical, due to the lone strap. I had one of these and a messenger-type bag for my cameras. It was’t really comfortable.

3. Take a seat in the night trains, not a couchette.

   Night trains are very practical but not comfortable. The best way to sleep, I found out, was’nt to take a couchette, but a seat. You have less neighbors in seat-compartiments than in couchette-compartiment… and try to sleep when your 5 swede night neighbors engage in a snoring contest. At least, when you’re alone in your compartiment, it’s quieter. Plus, seats are cheaper!

4. Travel longer.

   This one is quite logical. You should be able to take your time digesting your travel… One year should be great in that regard…

Well, that’s all I can think of for today. Now I have toremember that when packing my backpack and planning my route!

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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.

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Well, here it is… I began my travel blog.

This is the blog I’ll keep during the whole preparation, and then it’ll be my travel blog… I began to fill the relevant pages : About the trip, About me, and so on… see the menus! This blog is bilingual. All the posts will have pictures in it. That’s really classy, I think. By the way, the paint is still fresh, if you see some display bugs, please tell me!

Enough about the blog. The real objective’s the trip! Yeah! Eastwards, always eastwards… And then southward. And then nortward I think.

150 days before I go. And I like this :)

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