The Plan

Ha-ha, got you!

The plan is there is no plan!

Here is a rough idea of where I want to go on the 1st leg of the trip:

Red Line
I only have one flight booked, so all the dates are very flexible. On the 30th of October I fly to Crete to start my travels where I'll stay for a few weeks before moving off to the mainland where I'll work my way place-to-place or island-to-island towards Istanbul where I'll spend.. well, however long I feel like, then I want to do a backpacking month around Turkey doing my thing. 

Orange Line
From Istanbul I'll fly to India as the route through Iran is still not quite possible for a person of my nationality. After a while in Mumbai I'll zig-zag across the country mostly by rail trying to avoid tourist hot-spots to Kolkata.

Blue Line
I'll get to New Zealand via one or two stops in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and/or Australia. To be honest I'll make my mind up along the way and buy the transportation a little in advance.

So that's it! Now you know as much as me!

Today I tried a variety of load configurations on my backpack, filled it up and walked around a bit. I'm trying to go as light as possible, however that looks like being 16-18kg on my back including a tent and 4kg on the front/carry-on luggage. I will send my first couch requests after finishing this post and I will try to get an idea of where I'll be spending a night about 4 days in advance of arriving there. I will research places in depth as I go and generally be my own guide. I will do my best to meet and befriend as many local people as possible and avoid tourists, fancy hotels and gap year backpackers, I will sometimes stay in one place far too long, skipping other 'must see' places altogether. Sadly I will be flying a bit, in my opinion too much but I'll be doing a lot of 'slow travel' between these. Which reminds me of a book that was a present from an amazing former student of mine:

I loved reading this because I had already come to many of the same conclusions as the author on the nature of travelling, he just put them in a kind of 'slow travel' manifesto/guide.
Do read it if you can, just don't ask to borrow mine, it's in a box somewhere....