What's the plan?

So we narrowed it down to China, Vietnam, Thailand, India and some eastern European countries, but now what? Where to be begin... We started to think of all the things that would need to be done and we ended up dropping them into a few categories:

• Our house (rent, house sitter...)
• Travel & Accomodations (places to visit, what to see, where to stay)
• Budget
• Health (research, shots, etc.)
• Schooling for the kids
• Social Contacts and getting in touch with the locals
• Keeping in touch with those at home

I'll leave out all the details and bring you up to speed on each.

We've managed to arrange with friends of Nadim's sister-in-law that they will rent our house at a decent rate. It takes a load of our minds to know that we can trust the people who will be in our house while we are away.

We've not booked accomodations yet, but we have done some research on what to see and which cities to stay in. We've also found that there are service apartments in certain areas that can be had at reasonable rates and would work well for us. Booking places will have to wait until we are a bit closer to our departure date.

We recently visited a travel agent and had our draft budget reviewed. Happily we had over budgeted in a few places, but not under budgeted.

We did some research about the healthcare situation. The availability of healthcare in each area that we would stay was part of our selection criteria, but we also knew that we would need certain shots before we go. We have visited the travel clinic recently. That was a story in itself. I'll tell you about it later. To make a long story short, we had some shots and have some more to come.

I've been busy researching home-schooling. I met with a mom in our neighbourhood who has three children and home schools them. She was a great help and gave me some great tips. I'm well on my way and feel much more confident than I did originally.

We've been trying to reach the Baha'i community in various areas. We've had some luck with the Baha'is of Thailand, but haven't succeeded much elsewhere. We did get some great material that is yet to be read completely yet from the National Baha'i center in Canada. Hopefully that will help. We've also been looking at how we could volunteer or work in the various areas. We still have some figuring to do in this area.

We are quite pleased to have stared this blog and hope that it will keep everyone informed of what is happening with our trip. We also plan to take a lapop to help us keep in touch with those at home. Beyond that we keep suggesting that people meet us across the world in whichever country we happen to be in!

So this brings us up to date. I've managed to condense all our plans and excitement into few short blogs.... From here on in, we'll try to keep you in the loop as it happens.

So many places...

We started with a long list of countries in Asia and began rating them based first on healthcare, crime rate, and pollution/congestion and secondarily on cost of living/job opportunities, attitude towards foreigners, and weather conditions. We used consular information sheets from the US, lonely planet websites, and other travel sites and fairly quickly came up with a short list.

The list was so very exciting that it was difficult for us to settle on just one. As we began to look at each country and the possible side trips that we might do, we began to re-evaluate the original plan of staying in just one country. We began toying with the idea of becoming nomads for a year. This presented a different set of challenges.

• Were we prepared to home-school the girls?
• How could we experience the culture deeply and connect with the locals if we were just passing through?
• Living out of a suitcase for a year was not that appealing.
• Could we afford extra travel costs without part-time work?

After many discussions we came up with the following:

• With a little research we felt sure we could home-school the girls. How hard could grade 3 be?
• As members of the Baha'i Faith in Canada we felt we could connect with other Baha'is in different parts of the world. We also felt that extended stays in a few places would be in order.
• We decided to rent apartments in at least two countries for a 3 month period and use those places as home base. We would also have some shorter stays, but not too many in a short period of time.
• Given the low cost of living in Southeast Asia we were quite pleased to find that we could afford the travel without extra income from part-time work.

Ultimately we decided upon one month in China (Beijing area), two weeks in Vietnam, three months in Thailand, four months in India, and simply because it was "on the way" we decided on two or three months in Eastern Europe!

Where in the world?

We started dreaming about our trip... What was the main purpose and what would be our guiding principles? After many long discussions we decided that it was the chance to fully experience a different culture that was driving us. It was also important for us to try to link volunteer work or some sort of community service into the experience, but really it was the new cultural experience that was motivating "The Big Trip". We wanted to experience something really new and we wanted to expose our two girls, Yasmin and Roya, to more than just Canadian culture. Beyond the new cultural experience, we also set a few more principles to guide us. The places that we went would have to be safe and have access to health care.

So we began to look at the globe and narrow the possibilities. It was fairly easy to rule out the United States, Europe, and Austrailia as we decided they weren't different enough, and besides we'd already spent some time in the US and Europe. We were then left with Africa, Asia, and South America. After a bit of research we ruled out Africa, in part because of the high HIV-aids rates and high rape statistics. From there we narrowed the trip to Asia, simply because it seemed the most different to us.

Our first idea was to pick a country, find part-time work and live there for pretty much the entire year with the excepton of some side trips to neighbouring areas for site-seeing purposes. We initially thought we would enroll Yasmin and Roya in a local school so that they too could meet new friends and deeply understand a new culture.

So we began to research the countries in Asia...

How it all started.

It all started with a book... A friend of mine had recommended that I read "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. So I read it and early on it has a section where it talks about imagining the end of your life and looking back. What do you want to see? I've always wanted adventure and travel. I knew that somewhere in there I would want to see "The Big Trip", or perhaps one of many. It would however, take some planning.

So Nadim and I got to talking and we decided that we should do a "Big Trip". Through work I could do a self-funded leave, where I set aside a quarter of my salary for three years and then the fourth year take a leave of absence and live off of the savings. So in 2005 we started saving and dreaming about what the trip would be like.