What's made it into the backpack?

So here we are, less than a week to go, we're 'mobilised' and it's time to bring together all of the items that have made the cut that will actually go into our backpacks for our travels.

There are a few items that have a big significance to me so I'll take you through why they're so important as well as giving you a run down of what else I'm bringing that I think will be vitally important on our travels.

Running shoes

My trusty Nike Lunarglide+5 running shoes - the comfiest I've ever had and these babies have already seen some fair mileage, but they have a lot more to do yet!

To me these are a must to take on my travels. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I absolutely love to run. Back home I run as part of a running club (I'll miss you Westbourne RC!), plus I run for pure enjoyment as it makes me feel better instantly no matter what mood I'm in. Running gives me the remarkable capacity to both help me think about things going through my head and to also help me drift away from the things that are on my mind. So to imagine my life in a whole new environment as well as a new career without the escape that running gives me is almost an impossibility.

Above all else I think I'm going to absolutely love running around new places, using it as a way to explore. Even this week as I've moved to my mother-in-law's in Creekmoor, Poole - an area I do have a good bearing of but not 100% - I went for a long run to get re-acquainted and explore local routes I didn't know existed, and I loved constantly changing my route to go where I want and using my own sense of navigation to make sure I remembered my route home. Fair to say I won't always have the best self-navigation on my travels, but as long as these hold up I'll get home in one piece!

Tablet

The Hudl tablet from Tesco - rave reviews already and you can add me to the list!

For all my wanting to live a technology-free life, these days it just isn't possible (plus how would I blog?!), so an important decision was made to try and find one device that could meet both mine and Claire's needs on the road - and taking a bulky laptop wasn't going to work. So we decided we'd 'get with the times' and get ourselves a tablet, but being on a budget meant we couldn't go for an iPad. After much research and deliberation we settled on the Hudl from Tesco as it was supposed to be the best low budget tablet out there at the moment and I'm already hard to part from it! It's slim, light, works really fast, and above all else it's able to contain all of the apps we're going to need on our travels such as Skype, Facebook, Kindle, email and of course - Football manager!

iPod

As we decided to go for the android based system of the Hudl tablet, we knew that we wouldn't be able to sync our music we already had on iTunes, so making sure we had good iPods that were fully loaded with all the music we're going to be able to put on it for the next 2 years of so was massively important.
Both of us have spent ages collaborating playlists, buying more music, asking friends for music and then re-collaborating our playlists again so that we have playlists that we can simply have on us for a couple of years and not get bored of!

I've had a big help in getting music from one of my best friends Adam (who is in the amazing band called 'Lost in the riots'), and he has taken time to create personal playlists he thinks I'll like so I just wanted to take this opportunity to say thanks bud for all your help!

Clothing:

• New teaching attire (chinos, khakis, shirts, tie etc)
• Running gear
• swimshorts
• x1 hoodie
• x1 waterproof jacket (emblazoned with the mighty Southampton FC - representing of course!)
• x1 Saints shirt

Other than these, I won't be taking hardly any other clothing other than the bare essentials and t-shirts. I've been told that clothes are dirt cheap out in South East Asia and that I should travel light and just buy more out there - a plan I'm sticking to! The Top Gear Vietnam special where they bought tailored suits for about £60 also gives me encouragement that this will be easy to do and if they can find enough clothing to cover Clarkson, they'll have enough for me! Although, I've also heard that there are issues with getting the right sizes out there as a man as I might just find that I'm either too tall or broad for their standard sizes (me? broad? I know, I laughed too).

Shoes:

• Multi-terrain trainers (for all occasions!)
• Espadrills (for lounging)
• Wetshoes (for swimming without fear of something biting my feet) 
• shoes (for teaching)
• Fliflops (for.... flipflopping)

Gadgets:

• Bridge camera
• Mobile phones
• Rechargeable battery station + batteries
• Pacsafe (to tie up our backpack and keep it safe from thieves)
• Underwater camera
• iPod speaker

And the pick of the rest:

• All items required for my eyes - prescription sunglasses, contact lenses, ray-bans etc..
• Malaria tablets
• Emergency medical pack + medicines
• Diary + fancy pen (for writing in style)
• Essential documents (certificates, visas, passports and so on.... probably THE most important bunch of items!)

Of course there's more, as well as things I could've bought but have decided to wait and buy out there, all because at the moment I have to try and somehow fit everything I already have into the backpack as it is!

So if you're at the airport next week and you think you see a giant Turtle collapsed on it's back unable to get up, it'll probably be me weighed down by my bag - give me a hand up if you pass by eh?

Becoming 'mobilised'

Yesterday we moved out of our flat and into my mother in law's, where we will be storing our few remaining possessions and residing for the next few days before we fly out on March 5th. Moving out of our flat was taking the last step we needed to make ourselves fully 'mobile' - by which I mean living out of our backpacks.

This involved ridding ourselves of the possessions we've spent the last 6 years gathering together, selling anything we weren't going to keep that would be worth a few quid and chucking anything that wouldn't. It makes you wonder why we bother getting all of this in the first place?

It's an amazing feeling being mobile, knowing that home now is simply wherever we sleep at night and we have nothing to tie us down so we can go wherever we want, whenever we want. In fact, I can hear the Bohemian lifestyle calling and I have no problem answering and giving it a try...

So what did it take to 'mobilise' ourselves? Well it took a hell of a lot of hard work and stress and most of all: planning. It took about a year of clearing debt so we can leave the country owing to no one but our student loans (which I don't care about), it meant focusing ourselves to decide upon a plan of action and a line of work which will enable us. It means being free of furniture, free of a car, free of insurance, of phone contracts, of gym membership, of a rented apartment, of responsibility, of ANYTHING that can tie you down.

It's not until you decide to do something like leave the country that you actually look at those things that do actually tie you down and would need sorting if you were to follow through. And It's not until then that you realise how many shackles you accrue over time, without meaning to but that western civilisation compels you to accumulate, so ridding myself of them is a really liberating feeling. As a result I don't want to ever tie myself down in so many ways ever again!

This is me for the foreseeable future!

For a full list of all the things we needed to do to leave the country and start our travels, check out this post on my wife's blog.

How the greatest films fuel the desire to travel

After my recent post about the 3 biggest influences that made me want to travel, one of my friends was surprised that I mentioned Sonic the Hedgehog as an influence, since then I've given further thought as to what would influence a person to travel.

My instinct is always to analyze the things I love the most and as we all know, there's probably nothing more influential these days than movies. Due to the emotive power they possess, you grow up with them, you have a film you watch in every mood and you grow old with them too.

After some thought I realised that some of the greatest movies of all time share a very common theme: Things start on an equilibrium, then comes the dis-equilibrium where someone leaves home, and when they do that's when the story really begins and eventually ends in some sort of re-equilibrium. Take a look at this list below, it contains arguably some of the greatest films of all time, in fact I defy you to have not seen at least one of them:

Peter Pan
Alice in Wonderland
Batman (Christian Bale trilogy)
Star Wars
Star Trek 
Spirited Away
Princess Mononoke
Wizard of Oz
Lord of the rings
Forrest Gump
Any James Bond film
Any Indiana Jones film
Harry Potter
The Beach
Almost Famous

The theme occurs throughout these films, whether someone returns back to their original setting or not. Either way, someone leaves home, goes to new places and the whole story comes about from that life change.  

The same can be said for many books as well including any of my favourites about Robert Langdon (The Da Vinci code, Angels and Demons, Inferno), The Alchemist, and The Hobbit to name but a few.

Why's Batman on the list of films you say? Well although he lives in and defends Gotham, he left Gotham as a young man, travelled, learnt new skills and returned as the man we know him to be. He wouldn't be Batman had he not left Gotham in the first place, so it's a worthy inclusion on the list.

I suppose that's what I like to think will happen with myself; I'm nowhere near the finished article yet and I won't be until I step outside that comfort zone. Obviously I plan on coming back (most of the time!), but when I do return I want to have had such an experience that it makes me the man I'll be for the rest of my life.

So there you have it, if you can think of any others that belong on this list let me know as I'd love to hear them, otherwise what are you waiting for? No one knows how your story will go, but if these stories tell us anything it's that it won't fully begin until you make that journey into the unknown...

Luke Skywalker looking to the stars in Star Wars: A New Hope - he seeks a life beyond his native Tatooine.
I've been doing this same thing out of my window at work for the past year!

'Del Boy' mode

As the calendar flipped over to February this week, Claire and I have been in a whirlwind of organisation, sorting some of the last bits before our departure. This has involved changing our addresses, cancelling accounts and most stressful of all, selling our possessions.

We're moving to Claire's mums for 10 days before we fly out and the only things we are keeping whilst we are away are the essentials, which will be stored in the loft (thanks Mandy by the way!). All of this means that everything else we own has been up for sale, which has pushed me fully into 'Del Boy' mode.

I can't bear to throw out something I could potentially make some money back on, so we've both been constantly advertising our possessions on Gumtree and Facebook on a first come first served basis. Dealing with responses has become almost a second full time job whilst working my normal 9-5, especially with my well practiced skills in haggling (I'm the expert, so if Claire is selling something she checks if I'm happy with the price first before going ahead).

All of our furniture will soon be gone and I've even managed to flog my mattress and pillows to a guy I know from work. I never thought someone would pay for a used mattress and pillows! Del WOULD be proud.

All of this is actually good practice though as haggling will certainly be a valuable skill on our travels - one I've honed selling insurance in the past as well as further "crash courses" during trips to Turkey and Egypt.

This has kept me so busy I've barely had time recently to think about the life changes that lie ahead - but the quicker I sell all our stuff, the quicker I can get back to focusing on Vietnam, sunshine and noodles.

So, anyone want to buy a Peugeot 206? 60k miles on the clock and in great nick, I'll sort you out a good price once Rodders has cleaned the blimmin' thing. Cushdy.

TV stand? Peugeot 206? Used mattress? I got em all in stock...