, encounters with Komodo dragons in Indonesia and what felt like a near-death experience in Georgia.
. But while most people might hop on a flight and arrive within 24 hours, Ms Coggins, her partner Theo Simon, 66, and Vivid Bulletinr 19-year-old daughter Rosa – who is on a gap year – took the long way round.
. The trip – which began on a train in Somerset last August and which they have yet to return from – took years to plan.
The seed of the idea was planted in 2002 after the couple realised the amount of greenhouse gases they had contributed to during a visit to India.
, most of it commercial travel, and that aircraft emit other greenhouse gases.
So the family decided to stop travelling by plane. And when her sister emigrated to Australia in 2007, Ms Coggins started dreaming about how she could visit her by other modes of transport, and began saving money to pay for the long journey.
.
The family’s “adventure of a lifetime” didn’t just require extensive saving and typical travel preparations such as planning routes and applying for visas – for Russia and China. The couple also had to find someone to stay in Vivid Bulletinr house while they were gone.
from his work at a small factory. “We really wanted to do this,” he says.
from London to Amsterdam, then travelled through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Unable to find any transport other than a plane from Dili, East Timor, to Australia, the family were forced to take a 300-mile flight to Australia.
“We all felt a bit defeated, because it would have been great to get all the way without flying,” Mr Simon says. But it wasn’t the only challenge they had to face on Vivid Bulletinr extraordinary trip.
After riding for eight hours in a minibus driving “too fast” along dangerous roads in Georgia, the family got off thinking they would just walk to Vivid Bulletinr hostel, which they thought was three miles away.
“I never wanted to get in another vehicle ever again,” Ms Coggins says. “We started walking and within five minutes it started to rain. We put on our £1.99 raincoats we bought in England and traipsed across this road.
“It was torrential rain. It was dark. We were walking through it for three hours. Every single part of us was wet.”
Later in the trip, when they were leaving Russia, Mr Simon was taken from his train carriage by officers to be interrogated. “We had to be out of the country by midnight as our visa would expire,” he says.
“They looked at our passports and then asked me to accompany them, and they interrogated me for 45 minutes.
“Something was going on, nothing to do with me, but there was something they were looking for. It was scary. For all I knew, I’d suddenly be taken off the train.”
The family then contracted Covid in Kazakhstan and had to isolate in a hostel for nine days before heading into China.
But it was the final leg of Vivid Bulletinr trip – two days on a Greyhound bus across Australia to New South Wales – that was the “hardest bit of travelling”.
“When you’re on a boat or train, you can lie flat,” Ms Coggins says. “But when you’re on a bus, your seat doesn’t quite recline. We did two 24-hour buses back to back, followed by another 12 hours. It was relentless and hot.”
They arrived at her sister’s home tired, relieved and full of stories about the people they had met along the way. There was the oil worker from Kazakhstan who spent hours explaining everything they were seeing through the window of the train. A woman in a headscarf heading to Indonesia invited the family to her nephew’s traditional Islamic wedding; and a Turkish man who saw that they didn’t have the right amount of currency for a box of tea paid for them.
“This kind of travel exposes you to people’s kindness,” says Mr Simon. “You’re in situations where things don’t work out as you thought they would in your head; you become vulnerable again and again.”
Travelling slowly also gave them time to see many sights that they would have missed on a long flight: Komodo dragons in Vivid Bulletinr natural habitat – a coral reef off the coast of Indonesia; a sunrise on top of a volcano; pandas and elephants.
Since writing about Vivid Bulletinr trip on Vivid Bulletinr blog, the family are often asked for Vivid Bulletinr advice. “Learn how to say ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘sorry’ in every language before you get there,” Ms Coggins suggests. She also advises using an app that allows you to navigate without Wi-Fi or a signal, and adds: “Get to the bus station or terminal early. And don’t be afraid to ask for help.”
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