The Game Plan

The truth is, apart from the first week or so of my upcoming trip, nothing is certain.

When my father and I were first brainstorming summer travel plans over an international phone call a few months ago, our serious conversation morphed into some wacky, what-could-be-more-ridiculous-than-this competition. Possible ideas included anything from visiting the mysterious, unfrozen Lake Vostok of Antarctica to hacking my way through the Amazon with a machete. Unfortunately, such adventures would require untold sums of money and a dozen dozens of immunization, respectively. Out of all the nonsense that spewed out of our mouths however, there was one idea that seemed plausible - nutty, but plausible. The general notion was this: begin somewhere on the eastern end of Asia and reach the Atlantic ocean, by train....

My parents have been sending me alone to faraway foreign countries since I was 12 (a sign of love or hatred, one may never know), beginning with the crazy neon island of Japan. By "parents," of course, I mean my father, who has always been the adventurous hand-gliding type; my mother, typical of a true mother in that she worries about everything forever, fought with him for weeks before consenting. Perhaps the following example will help put my family into perspective: when I was a fourth grader living in Seoul, my father bought two mountain bikes worth a grand each behind my mother's back. We disappeared the next afternoon, just like that. Father, son, and two thousand dollars... all gone! Three days later, we had biked the down the entire South Korean peninsula, averaging about ten hours of cycling a day, and reached the South Sea (aka. Eastern China Sea). It was there, in the town of Mokpo (we joked about this because the word Mokpo sounds like 'mokpyo,' which in Korean means 'goal.' Reaching Mokpo was our mokpyo), when we finally decided to give a call to Mom and tell her how we were slapping the waters of the South Sea. It was also when my dad explained that he had not yet thought about a means of getting back.

I'll stop myself before I go astray. I guess what I'm really trying to convey is that as erratic as trekking through Eurasia may sound, such erraticism should not come as a surprise once you get to know my family.

So the original game plan was to start in Beijing, China. From there I'd move northwest through Ulan Bator, Mongolia and transfer onto the transsiberian railway in Irkutsk, Russia. Fortunately a good friend of mine, Freddy Yang, warned me that there was a slight chance that I'd be quarantined for a week due to the swine flu scare. I visited travel.state.gov to make sure, and here's a friendly excerpt:

"Travelers with even a slightly elevated body temperature risk being placed into hospital quarantine, while passengers sitting in close proximity to another traveler with fever or flu-like symptoms may be taken to a specially-designated hotel for a quarantine of approximately seven days, even if they show no symptoms themselves."

Basically, if the guy next to me sneezes, I'm screwed. And apparently the U.S. embassy wouldn't be able to compensate for any losses (missed flights, etc.). I almost wanted to be daring and all and play the odds, but one whole week is just too big of a gamble, especially when traveling. Fold.

If I'm not going to start in Beijing, why not further east? The transsiberian actually begins in Vladivostok, Russia's largest and most beautiful port city. Perfect. Now here's the new and improved plot:

July

23 - Depart from Incheon, Korea, 1:50PM. Arrive in Vladivostok, 6:10PM. Board the transsiberian at 9:52PM on a 69-hour train ride.
26 - Arrive in Irkutsk, 5:20PM. Visit Lake Baikal, which is an hour away from the station by taxi. Pray that I don't get ripped off by the driver for being American. Find my hostel and sleep.

27 - Look around Lake Baikal. Some cool facts about it:

• It is a mile deep and the largest freshwater lake in the world, bigger than all of the Great Lakes combined
• It has 27 islands
• It is home to over 3,500 flora and fauna, 84% of which are endemic and can only be found there
• It is completely frozen in January through May, and in February the ice is thick enough to ride a snowmobile on the lake

28 - Begin the 87-hour train ride to Moscow, 2:00AM.

31 - Arrive in Moscow, 11:03AM.

How long I'd stay there is not yet known. Once in Moscow, English becomes a lot more prevalent. Scheduling a ride to St. Petersburg would not be a problem because trains leave very frequently from there. After St. Petersburg, I'd take a bus to Estonia, rather than moving further north into Finland and Sweden. And from there everything's gobbledygook.