The Trip Overland™ from Kyoto to California

Trans-Mongolian Express - Path of Blood (Manny Santiago)

From Beijing through Ulan Batar to Moscow, the Trans-Mongolian Express rolls on a Path of Blood

The Trip Overland, will begin with a three-day ferry from Osaka to Shanghai, after which point I will travel in a westward direction overland across China, into Mongolia, past Lake Baikal and deeper on into Ekaterinburg and other Russian territory, ending in St. Petersburg (the end of the Trans-Siberian Rail) where I will begin the difficult journey of avoiding the expense that Western Europe presents, jumping over to Helsinki (or heading south into Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania) and from there to Copenhagen, which is where The Trip Oerland will get interestingly tricky.

I had initially planned to go by boat through to Seyðisfjörður in Iceland (I don’t know how to say it either), which is possible via Bergen in Norway, Esbjerg in Denmark and Scrabster in Scotland for way too many €uros. A few problems presented themselves since researching The Trip Overland west from Iceland and onward into Greenland, Newfoundland in Canada and the continental U.S.

  • I don’t even know if there is a ferry to Iceland anymore. Didn’t they go belly up in the financial crisis?
  • If I can get there, Iceland is prohibitively expensive. The cheapest price for a hostel I found was €55, which would be about $75. No wonder their banks failed first and were hardest hit in the economic “downturn” of late 2008, their Big Macs are $10 apiece…
  • Once in Iceland, apparently there are no connecting ferries to Greenland, because, also apparently, no one wants to go to Greenland. The world has found out about Iceland’s ruse of misnaming the big, roadless block of ice as “Green” and decided that, well yeah, actually, why would we go there? And if we did, why would we take a boat?

So with the looming possibility of Iceland, only to get stuck in one of the coldest, most expensive places in the world, doesn’t seem as attractive as it did, well, hell, even before writing this (despite the solid research time already put in, I’m kind of winging it here). So the question remains: How will I cross the Atlantic Ocean?

Hop on the back of a turtle? Swab the decks of a human/organ-trafficking mafia organization? Stowaway on a Trans-Atlantic container ship? However it will come to pass, I will be working on photographic projects, writing and blogging from my new site all across China, Mongolia, Russia, Europe and the Atlantic!

“To while away the idle hours, seated the livelong day before the ink slab, by jotting down without order or purpose whatever trifling thoughts pass through my mind, truly this is a queer and crazy thing to do!”

Yoshida Kenko – Tsurezuregusa

This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2011 at 04:23. It is filed under Projects and tagged with , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.