The Plan

The plan: get from Singapore to Denmark in 3 months, by land. Buses, cars, trains, boats – but no planes.

Looking at a world map, I saw I basically had two choices.

  1. Go through the Middle East
  2. Go through China, Mongolia, and Russia

I decided just by looking at a world map of visas needed for Australian citizens (here). I only need to visit 3 embassies for the second route, so that’s the choice! Also, I thought it would be cool to have done the Trans-Siberian railway before I turned 20. I’m swinging down to Turkey through Georgia once I reach Moscow because, well, I really want to go to Turkey. Poland and the former USSR seems a little drab in comparison.

That leaves me with just over 90 days and about $4,000 AUD to get to Denmark. See my budget here.

A little background on the origins of the trip below:

About seven or eight months ago I was in a cab with some other exchange students, headed to a club, fairly drunk. My Swedish friend slurs “Hey man, we should go to Noma.”

To which I laughed and responded “Yeah, I can get there by land after my exchange!”

We laughed it off with the cab driver and went about embarrassing ourselves on the dancefloor. It was only when I got home in the early hours of the morning that I realised – shit, I actually could do this. I stayed awake until sunrise, researching the route and the trip. When I woke up, I still couldn’t get the idea out of my head, and that’s when I realized that it was going to happen: I was going to Copenhagen.

Since then my notebooks have been filled with a gradually higher percentage of Noma-related scrawlings.
To-see lists, booking costs, route and region details, Chinese/Turkish/Russian phrases, timelines, visa application
dates, budgets.

I’m still figuring out some novel thing to do for my trip – a picture every day, video diary – I’d like to have something to show at the end of it all! I’m of course open to suggestions, so if anyone has any ideas let me know!