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travelroute
Report:
Around
the world in 80 days - an adventure, which
doesn't date. 3 Styrians on the trails of
an old myth.
July
2001 - Graz (Austria) is hot and sticky.
Everybody is working, especially students,
who finance their own studies while having
a summer job. 3 of their college friends,
being completely unaffected by it, are
going on a journey around the
world:
The
childhood dream "In 80 days around the
world" didn't require any general staff
planning, everything had been prepared
rapidly - a map of the world, a credit
card, inoculations and a pocket-knife.
That's already everything being useful.
And even a fair amount of courage -
because what even looks like a walk,
represents in reality a journey full of
adventures and dangers. At first, it was a
crazy idea, suddenly it became
reality.
At the
first of july, we travalled by train from
Graz to Hamburg, then by airplane to New
York. Actually, we wanted to get along
without airplane and cross the Atlantic by
ship. However, that wasn't temporally
possible and would have brought problems
on entry to the USA. Starting from New
York, we passed by bus through the USA
while having an arduous journey, went on
to China - to the fascinating temples oh
the Shaolin, to the capital Peking and to
the forbidden city. We didn't get further
to India - one time a monsoon washed away
the roads right infront of us, some other
time it wasn't possible for political
reasons to enter India via Burma. So we
decided to take the northern route via
Mongolia.
In
comparison to China, Mongolia was exciting
- the Gobi Desert with all its dangers and
wonderful landscape contrasts surely was
the highest point of the journey. Time was
pressing. We went on to the most
unpleasant part of the journey by taking
the Trans-Siberian railway to Moscow. It
took us 4 days and nights being
unconceivably long. How to survive such a
journey? The dining car was our salvation.
The whole train was a black market:
corrupted costums officers, and the train
crew looked over it, while the fellow
Mongolian travellers pushed ahead their
deals in the train or directly on the
platforms.
Moscow
was quite a bad surprise: The outcome of a
usual police control was, that our
equipment, credit cards, money and
passports felt into the hands of the
corrupt police men. After hours at the
police quarter we got back nearly
everything, apart from the money, a credit
card and the pocket-knife.
Via
Helsinki to Germany, by train to Berlin,
to Prague and Iglau, Vienna and then
finally back to Graz. Already gone are the
80 days!
We had
won a bet, because exactly 80 days
later(!) we returned to our starting
point, a sausage stand in Graz (see
photo).
A
dream was fulfilled!
And
the next book of Jules Verne is already
waiting for its translation into action:
"A journey to the center of the Earth" ...
but that is probably a different
story!
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