Halfway around the world: Where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going

ISTANBUL, TURKEY - Halfway around the world, and four months on the road, there are two constants we’ve learned: One, sightseeing is fine and dandy, but it’s the people that make the place. And two, the dirty clothes sniff test that we thought had been well tested in college, well… let’s just say that we’ve lowered the bar slightly.

Symbolically, more through luck of the calendar than outright planning, the night train from outside of Venice, Italy, to Zagreb, Croatia, crossed over more than just another nation’s boundaries. Somewhere shortly after midnight on April 30th, we straddled a point where four months of travel was behind us, and with another four months ahead of us to go we left the world of the familiar and headed into the unknown.

Getting off the train at five that morning, Cyrillic letters and a whole new set of experiences came into light with the rising sun.

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Map it
With all these destinations, a map would be useful wouldn’t it? It’s a major feature we’ve been lacking and now we’re ready to go live with it. Swing on over to bostonglobe.longjaunt.com/map/. Going forward you’ll be able to see where we’ve been, where we are, and where our general itinerary is going to bring us. Click on the pin of any one of the 42 destinations we’ve been to so far and you’ll see all of the photo galleries from our visit there.

See it all
Or if you want to explore by date, click on over to bostonglobe.longjaunt.com/photos/2008/ where you’ll get a chance to peek into every intimately documented day of the trip since we started on January 1st.

Your Journey
Which brings us to another point - we haven’t been doing that great a job in putting the you in our tagline: “Our trip. Your journey.” Even though we just broke 1,000,000 pages served up to viewers like you, we all agree, there are many areas of the blog with room for improvement. We’d really like to hear what you’ve liked about the trip so far, what you think can be improved upon, and what you’d like to see added to it. See that comment field on the bottom of the blog page (right here) – please use it.

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Our previous travels have brought at least one of us to nearly all the countries we’ve been to so far. From now until we reach the shores of America’s west coast (save my native Sri Lanka) everything will be new. In the past few days, we made a mad dash across Eastern Europe, falling in love with the cerulean blue shores of Croatia, and have gone to unlikely destinations like Belgrade, Serbia, where destroyed buildings still stand nearly ten years after NATO bombed the city to drive Slobodan Milošević out of Kosovo.Standing here on the edge of the Bosporus River in Istanbul, Turkey, another symbolic crossing presents itself: A step across its waters and we’re in Asia. Current events once again have put our plans in the air. The ongoing fighting in Beirut, Lebanon, between Hezbollah and the government makes the area a no-go zone, and heading to our other destination, Syria, visa-less could present major issues. From Syria, it’s on to Sri Lanka by early June and India by the end of the month.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 and is filed under notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.