Planning and development

The idea of this blog is to keep details about my journey back home from Bangladesh where I’m doing some volunteer work at the moment, you can see more about the work at www.disabledindhaka.blogspot.com.

When I was on Expedia booking my tickets to come to Bangladesh I wasn’t that sure about the flight dates, I knew that I was going to be coming over here at the end of September but I didn’t have a clue when I wanted to get back to the UK since there was nothing to go back for. Now if the volunteer placement wasn’t what I expected then I could quite easily be leaving shortly after my arrival but equally if it was really great than I could stick around for longer, so with this in mind I thought the best action for me to take would be to get a one way ticket over here and book another when I decided to leave.

This is when I had an epiphany. Why waste a golden opportunity like this? I mean here I am about 5’000 miles from home, there must be so many amazing places that I would fly over without even realising it if I jumped on an airplane, so instead why not travel back across land? This epic journey would start early in January and would be made slightly more interesting as I’m a wheelchair user. This idea just sounds so good to me, every time I think about it I never fail to have a big grin on my face, it would be such an awesome adventure!

I imagine that the main methods of transport would be trains and buses but it would be a lot of fun to see what else I could find. There are some things I have to consider such as accessibility of transport, but I’ve never really found anything that I can’t haul myself on and off. Another important planning issue for this is the route back home; so far it goes something like India, China, Kazakhstan, Russia then off through the Scandinavian countries to get a ferry back to somewhere on the east coast.

So far I don’t have any of the visas, this is mainly because if I would have got them before leaving the UK then I would have had to pay for 6 month visas instead of the 3 month visa that I need. The plan now is to get them either here in Bangladesh or en route back home. I’ve applied for my Indian visa as I need to go there in a couple of weeks anyway, this was hard work when they didn’t believe that my visa for Bangladesh was real and now I have an interview with the high commissioner next Friday, so it’s a case of wait and see what happens before I can decide what my next move is.

This blog won’t be updated that often until I set off in January but I’ll be posting whenever I get any more ideas about places to go or anytime I manage to bag myself another visa.