Proposed Route

To talk much and arrive nowhere is the same as climbing a tree to catch a fish - Chinese Proverb

OK, enough fanciful dreaming of eastern adventures, time to put facts into action. Here is my proposed route. It keeps changing so if I blog from Utar Pradesh, don't be alarmed.

 

The stars denote the main cities I plan to pass through or visit at length or indeed just have the misfortune of being on en route:

Cardiff - London - Brussels - Cologne - Warsaw - Moscow - Ulan Bator - Beijing - Xian - Chongqing -  Guangzhou - Shanghai (via a visit to Nanjing) - and finally Lianyungang where I will be living and teaching. I have given myself around six weeks to get to my final destination. If I have the time and money I will also try to visit Japan but at the moment it's looking too expensive and also for reasons I cannot disclose, it may not please my good friend, Ros.  

 

And so it begins...

Do not wait until the conditions are perfect to begin. Beginning makes the conditions perfect - Chinese Proverb

They say that adversity favours the versatile so with that in mind I have decided to terrify myself by being versatile. The adversity is also self inflicted as my business partners and I have decided to change the way we work in order to explore our own alternative interests. This means that our business is moving from the traditional office based job to a virtual cloud type thingy which means that we can be anywhere in the world and continue to run it. It means we are starting from scratch in many ways as we are reducing our current client base to fit our new fandangled plans but on the plus side it frees up a chunk of time as we re-establish ourselves as modern, forward thinking, über flexible photographers (www.rocksaltphotography.com if you need us... ;)). How very exciting - @RocksaltPhoto moving with the times but also allowing its three intrepid worker bees to do, well, anything we want!

My particular choices are as follows.:
1.) I have enrolled in university to study history and archaeology. This insanity will begin in late 2013 so that gives me nine months  in the interim to fill.
2,3,4 & 5.) I came up with the obvious idea of travelling to China by rail in order to teach English as a foreign language. What else would a seasoned photographer choose to do?!

I duly checked with Rocksalt HQ, enrolled on a TEFL course, put my house and two cats up for rent, doubled my home insurance and landed a job in Lianyungang. The myriad reasons for choosing to do this include ticking off some major bucket list items such as visiting Russia and China, travelling along the Trans Siberian line and living in a different country. I also want to do something totally different to my regular job and learn a whole host of new skills. This blog will chart my progress and hopefully be a rich source of clues should I get kidnapped/murdered/sold/eaten.

Here we go...