The Intrepid Honeymooners

Its the old cliche; Opportunities are all around you – abundant and all-enveloping. They are often not to be chanced upon in a shadowy unfamiliar space but mostly appear in familiar landscapes, hobbies, relationships and daily routines. Embellished with familiarity as it were. This is to say that true opportunities – the ones that really fill your veins with cortisol – are all around and often blindingly obvious. It is up to us to recognise them against the background noise of our own subconscious experience.

Opportunities are often consequences of cultural and moral idioms and our decision to act on them; If you don’t like your job – Quit, You only live once, opportunity is just around the corner etc. This honeymoon is a glaring tinsel-wrapped example of how opportunities cling to the hope that you will  A) notice them when they materialise, and B) choose to pursue them into the unknown.

As seasoned globe-trotters Abbi and I became mindful of the opportunity to really exploit our honeymoon to have the experience we’ve always talked about together. Ideas arise amid the mist of excitement when planning a trip and we blurt out all kinds of exciting scenarios and adventures. If we were to save a couple thousand pounds for an indulgent 2-3 week honeymoon, why not postpone the leaving date by a few months, use the extra time to save an additional couple thousand pounds and use it as an opportunity to have an extended period away; albeit on more of a budget.

So we have a plan: Rather than have a shorter, more indulgent experience, we substitute for a much longer experience where we shall spread out the indulgent experiences that one would expect of a honeymoon, and instead use the opportunity to assimilate ourselves into different cultures around the world. This presented many exciting questions and opportunities [o] in itself. If we have X amount of money [m], how many X amount of months [t] could we travel?… and how many countries [c] could we realistically visit within these two parameters.

f (o) = m + t ÷ c

We agree that the there are other parameters to navigate too: I am in my final year at University so we agree that i will write my dissertation while we are away. If anything, we agree, this would probably present a better opportunity to write the damn thing over the distractions of everyday routines and work back in the UK. Finally Abbi and i have been plant-based [lest the word ‘vegan’ has a lot of associated baggage in the West] so we must consider this into our travels as well as our own senses of morality and philosophy towards the environment and the natural world.

After some few weeks and months of talking about our ambitions over dinner, on long walks and at pretty much any opportunity we agree the following laws of the land (as it were):

  1. We will visit at minimum Thailand, New Zealand, Myanmar, Nepal & hopefully Japan.
  2. We will try to volunteer [via the work-away organisation] for at least a third of our total time away. This will save us heaps of money and consequently prolong our travels because for a few hours a-day gardening, building, teaching English or cooking you often receive full board accommodation & food.
  3. I will write my dissertation while we are travelling. This will give me good headspace to research and write in my free time.
  4. To compliment our plant-based lifestyle, we want to practice as much of an eco-travel experience as we comfortable can. This means that we want to reduce our impact on the natural world and animal kingdom as much as possible wherever we can. To get started we have acquired some re-usable bamboo cutlery to replace any plastic knives and forks we are offered. We have our own re-usable coffee cups and flasks, re-usable steel water bottles and we have a large bamboo lunch-box-style tub each to replace any plastic or polystyrene containers we are offered. We won’t use any straws, we will cycle instead of renting scooters and we will use this opportunity to be more mindful of our experiences with each other and the people around us moment to moment. Maybe throw in some yoga & meditation classes too!
  5. Finally and most importantly we want to blog about our experiences as we go. This is to try to give a bit of a colourful escapism-esque read for our friends and family back home, and also to spread the message that you can backpack around the world with minimal impact on the animal kingdom and reduce your use of single-use plastics to virtually zero. We do accept there are certain inalienable truths and caveats: We will still have to use aircraft, we will always have a small indirect impact on the animal kingdom because we are 21st century homo-sapiens, and we will sometimes slip-up or have to compromise. Swings and Roundabouts!… But as with all things like this planning is the key. In fact, almost everything we will do from where to eat, where to get water or to how to travel will take consistent planning but hopefully this will be a beneficial double edged sword: We will effectively be vegan-plastic-free eco globe-trotters and also learn to manage our time and impact on the planet more and more the further along the journey we go.

So here we are, at the cusp of the most dramatic adventure we will have experienced together and we would love you all to join us for the journey – via the written word, not physically of course – that would be far too expensive!.