360 in 365 – Joachim voyage autour du monde

Four months.

A few days ago, january 3rd, was the end of my fourth month of traveling, and so it ended the first third of my trip.

So I guess I just have eight more months to discover the rest of the world! Gotta be fast now!

What did I do in 4 month?

If I look at my map, I have travelled around 22 000 km. I think I must be around 25 000 km because of the roads, they’re not as straight as my estimations.

If you look at the diameter of the globe, (40 000 km), you’ll see I went further than half of it! Not bad for a wine-fed city boy from France!

I travelled between the 58°N (Perm city in Russia, 40 minutes stop in the Transsiberian) and the 10°N (Mekong Delta), and between the 2°E (Paris, start of my trip) and the 121°E (Shanghai). and the highest place I stayed at is Shangri-La (aka Zhongdian) in China, at 3 300 m above sea levels.That’s nice but far away.

I took 4 359 digital pictures since sept. 3rd, and if my camera hadn’t broke down in the middle of China, I’d be around 6 000 images (and around 7 of them actually good). The number of analog pictures I shot won’t be counted. Because I don’t want to imagine the bill when I’ll develop them as I come back next autumn.

I think I slept in about 60 different beds, if I don’t count the sleeper busses and trains because you don’t sleep there. Also, instances of shared beds where I didn’t sleep weren’t included.

I could survive 10 days without the Internet, when I was in Mongolia (after 5 days without the ‘net in the Transsiberian train) and I felt good. But when I was sick of the Dengue in Vietnam I did the opposite, watching tv series all day long, cause that’s kind of what you do when you’re sick of the Dengue in Vietnam.

Microsponsoring-wise, 177 days were financed. That’s about half the days in my year! I sent already more than 65 postcards I drew or painted, but all are not yet arrived. And some people don’t tell me when they don’t receive anything… or when they receive their postcard… Speak up people!

Oh, and speaking of postcards, the postal expenses are about 10% of what I earn in sponsorings from the people I send them to. Send. To. What was the meaning of this sentence? Crap. I think I meant that this one time in Cambodia, I sent 10 postcards and it cost me 15€. 10% of what people gave me. And of course I don’t speak of the “free postcards” and souvenirs I send to cute girls around the world.

I met one person every 3 days. That’s a very precise statistic. And I travelled with people almost 59.3% of the time : (that’s even more precise) a polish santa, a parisian and a belgian CS girls, a radio announcer from Uppsalla, a texan girl who loved to say Nihao to chinese people, a swiss guy on a bike non stop from Istambul to Tibet, a french guy who’s not guilty of my Dengue fever, then a biker couple (with their bike and a friend) with whom I had a lovely new year’s eve on the other side of the world, and a juggler, and a guy who shoots with film. A luddite like me :)

But I’m forgetting lots of them.

Other dumb statistics : 1 is the number of times I asked myself “What the fuck am I doing here?”, and it was in Mongolia, I didn’t have a book to read and no light to read it anyway.

Book. I read about a dozen of them and not only to color the images. Bus traveling takes a lot of pages. Except in public busses and women with loud children coming from the market and road workers and chickens.

Oh and I took about every kind of night train classes in China! Soft Sleeper (not so soft, in closed compartments of 4, and with a greater probability of anyone speaking english), Hard Sleeper (when it’s not two grandmas knitting and bitching about other grandmas it’s 6 beds in an open compartment and people giving you posters of Chinese Red Army tanks) and Hard Seat where you seat and try to sleep, with two chinese people sleeping on you. And an actual soldier from the Chinese Red Army as one of them.

For the busses I rode popously in Vietnam (tourist VIP bus), with a little less luxury in China and really not safely for me and the 26 other people in the pick-up described in an upper paragraph, in Cambodia.

What else? I don’t know. If you have anything to ask me about my trip, feel free to ask me!