About

I’m trying to travel around the world without flying. I made this blog to keep my family, friends, and anyone who’s interested updated.

Why I’m travelling

It’s mostly so that I don’t kill my soul in an office somewhere when I’m twenty four.

Why I don’t want to fly

I want my trip to be difficult and filled with unexpected obstacles that take faith and perseverance to overcome. With a few thousand dollars and a good passport I could travel around the world and completely skip the adventure, or I could save some money and find out for myself what the ‘hard’, dangerous, or tedious parts are that people say you should fly over. As the travel writer, Jason Elliot, wrote about flying:

There’s no arousing sense of passage towards your destination: no slowly changing landscape reaches back along the line of your motion, adding usefully to an awareness of where you will end up. The quantitative measure of the distance you are travelling loses all relevance; miles mean nothing as you leap, in a single, stratospheric bound, across the barriers that have guided, ever since humankind stood vertical enough to get over them, the very passage of civilizations.

What I’ve done so far

After graduating university I bought a van and worked in Canada for two years saving up money – tree planting, pinecone picking, building a pinecone picking machine… Once I saved up enough cash I hitchhiked across the States. There I found myself a spot as crew on a yacht delivery from Virginia to Korea. Now I’m travelling overland across Asia and the Middle East, toward Europe.

Thanks

Thanks to my family, friends, and strangers, without your support I couldn’t be travelling – whether it has come in the form of a bed, couch, food, work, ride, boat, or words of support and encouragement.

Contact

Couchsurfing, Vimeo, Trustroots.org – @gnarlycraig