And off we go!

Many people, both friends and foes, have asked me the same question over and over again:Why do you engage on such a journey?

Ironically, most people connect such a trip to thoughts like "running away from something" or "looking for something that you won't find anyway if you can't find it here". What if none of both were really true? What about a genuine fascination to the world around us? What about learning truly being independant in the most difficult situations life has to offer, like having no food or water, or no safe place to sleep? What about learning about new cultures, not just from movies, books or documentaries or a cropped-up-three-weeks-bus-ride-call it how you like it-tourist-vacation.I could come up with tons of reasons, but those two answers just keep coming up in people's minds over and over again.

In reaction to those many strange opinions I've heard over the past few months, here is why I am doing this trip, and not why you THINK I'm doing this trip.

First of all, travelling around the world has become fairly easy these days and much more comfortable. It demands less and less physical requirements, and it is also much less dangerous then it used to be(apart from a few places that is). Even when we are in a dangerous situation, nowadays there are rescue teams and helicopters that will reach us far sooner then anytime in the past decennia was even thinkable. Equipment got much better and lots of technological improvements have been introduced; example: CELLULAR PHONE. Call anyone, anywhere, anytime you want. I don't want to say it's "better" nowadays. It's just different.

"The need for fascination; the desire for the unknown - that, which is on the other side - has always intrigued people curious of the wide world; curious of "something different" - Thor Heyerdahl once wrote.Be it in the bushes of Australia, the Gran Salar in the Atacam Desert or the Kilimanjaro which yearly more than ten thousand people climb nowadays, you will meet tourists representing all professions: students, nurses, lawyers, engineers, secretaries, doctors, bus drivers. It is known that contact with different cultures changes a person; it forms and shapes his views and helps him to better understand the diversity of the world, which in todays' times of conflicts, wars and ignorance is more important than ever before.

Some sceptics say "Know that just leaving as a donkey, will not make you return as a horse." But when leaving on such a trip, one must do so with an open mind ready to register new things, experience new situations and meet new interesting people. The Danish arch-bishop Christian Andersen once wrote "He who travels, lives twice". The famous French geographer Elisée Reclus once said: "A man who travels a lot, is like a a stone carried away thousands of miles by water; its shape becomes more rounded, and its sharp corners disappear. Its' roughness fades away and it becomes much more softer."I think travelling ensures a tremendous educational value, awakening emotions in a person which enable us to experience the beautiful, get to know different people, and most of all, ourselves. Winston Churchill, famous politican, strategist, historian and laureate for the Nobel Prize of Literature wrote that "Some travels may have greater value then 2 years of university studies".

I do this because I feel a NEED to do this. I always did. I'm too curious. I just never had the guts to break with every day life and experience something so completely different. Well, now I will.

I'm packed and ready to go, ready for adventure. I start in Sydney, Australia and will continue my way north along the eastcoast. Next up will be New Zealand or Indonesia. I don't know at this point yet.

I just hope you can understand :-)

P. x