D - Day

Our itinerary takes us from Heathrow to Hong Kong then on to Bangkok, where we'll leave the world of comfortable scheduled flights behind and train, bus, rickshaw, tuk-tuk and bike our way around certain parts of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. Returning to Bangkok we'll then fly on to Sydney, then Fiji, back to Australia, Singapore and then home.

While both of us have travelled before, having seen quite a lot of the accessible world from the comfort of hotels and apartments, neither of us have ever travelled rough, living out of rucksacks and staying in $1 per night hostels. This is however, something that we've wanted to do for quite a while - ever since friends and family started coming back from their own travels, filling us with envy and wanderlust and something that needs to be done before getting too into the whole career, baby, mortgage thing.

The planning started about 8 months ago with picking our route. Right from the start it was quite obvious that we wouldn't be able to save up enough cash to see every country that we were interested in (deciding that we'd rather see a few places properly than many in a hurry).

We resolved to cut South America out first as it's so huge and there's so much we'd love to see there that it warrants a separate, future trip of it's own. Next we axed all expensive (i.e. Western) countries where we didn't know people who we could stay with. This left a fairly manageable list.

Choosing where you want to go is only half of the battle, you then have to navigate the enormously complex rules' of a RTW air-ticket who you can fly with, where you can fly from and to and how many miles (29000?) the whole thing will take. I strongly recommend using an online, interactive planner such as the one at travelbag.co.uk to take much of the pain out of the process.

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With route planned we gave STA travel a call and booked our flights. These guys are almost always the cheapest for young people doing trips like ours but the major advantage of going with them is that you can change your flight dates and times at any point and with no charge.

We spent the next several months trying to save money, collecting kit that we'd need and researching the places that we were going to. This is definitely something that you can do too much of. The problem with guide books is that they make everything and everywhere sound fantastic and unmissable. Personal recommendations from opinions that you know and trust are a much more useful resource.

Next came a chat with the nurse about travel health precautions. Treatment for certain diseases (Typhoid, Diphtheria, Hepatitis A, Polio, Tetanus) is mandatory and more importantly free but there are a few important decisions that you have to make if you want to go to the same part of the world as us.

First there's Malaria and you've got about three options; the cheapest is Larium which makes some people hallucinate and feel fluey and which is losing it's effectiveness in some places as the pathogen develops an immunity. In the middle is Doxycycline which is highly effective but the possible side effects include thrush and an over-sensitivity to sunlight. At the top of the market is Mallarone which has no side effects but costs a king's ransom and while it's the most effective, it's only guaranteed for up to thirty days use. As we don't fancy the hallucinations and can't afford Mallarone it's Doxy for us. Drugs aside, the best anti-malarial precaution is to avoid becoming dinner for a mozzy in the first place.

Secondly there's rabies. This jab costs £100 and extends the amount of time that you have between getting bitten by a suspect animal and getting treated in a hospital from one to three days. As neither of us are very keen on dogs and we don't plan on being more than 24hrs from civilisation we decided to give this one a miss.

Lastly and trickiest of all is Japanese Encephalitis. This is a horrible and untreatable disease which basically makes your brain swell inside your skull until it bursts. It kills about half of its victims and leaves half of the survivors with permanent brain damage. Again the jabs cost £100 and there is a possible risk of brain damage just from the inoculation. However this disease is extremely rare and the chances of contracting it are almost one in a million. We spent so long agonising about whether to have it or not that we ran out of time for the month long course of injections. This one will just have to be down to fate.

Last week we picked up our currency a mixture of travellers cheques, US dollars (universally accepted), and pocket money for various countries. A brilliant discovery recently means that we don't have to take very much though Nationwide allow you to withdraw cash and buy things with their debit card anywhere in the world without charging you a penny this is by far the most convenient and secure way of using your cash abroad.

So now we're all packed (everything we'll need for the next six months fitting into a combined volume of 90 litres and weighing just 17 kg) our goodbyes have been said and we're ready to go.

We'll be keeping in touch with the world via email and this website over the next six months and we'll hopefully have some interesting stories to tell so please check back here occasionally and if you want to contact us (with advice, questions, etc) you're welcome to: flown_south@yahoo.co.uk