Starting Out... A Trip Around the World Without Flying

What was vaguely planned as a "trip in Southeast Asia" at first gained a whole new concept recently and turned into something else...

If you have talked to a few travelers and asked for their recommendations, you must have heard these two phrases:

1. "India is amazing!"
2. "Southeast Asia is a very cheap backpackers' destination"

So, why give up this route and travel through Kazakhstan and Siberia instead? Well, there are two issues: visas and border crossings. These two alone can make your overland trip to Southeast Asia expensive, exhausting or -in some instances- even impossible. That's probably the reason why many European hitchhikers go to India and fly back or vice versa. India was a dead end.

How the first itinerary looked like 

As a Turkish citizen, you need visas to visit many of the countries in the region. The border crossings after India and Nepal were either closed or really hard to travel through; (at the time) if you wanted to travel east without flying, you needed to book an expensive tour for entering China through Tibet or get a special permit for crossing the Indian-Burmese border (which only a handful of people were able to obtain). The Indian, Pakistani and Chinese embassies in Ankara all told that a plane ticket and hotel reservations are needed in order to apply for a visa in my home country and that it was not possible for them to issue a tourist visa for such an overland trip. The bureaucracy simply required you to buy a plane ticket and stay at hotels, or better yet, to take an all-inclusive guided tour (as was the situation with Chinese Embassy)...

In less than a month, all the plans were changed. It made more sense to take an alternate route where there was less hassle with visa and border issues. Although some great places would be missed on this newly adopted route (India, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea to name a few), the introduction of the unknown and unplanned more than made up for it. And who can say one is better than the other?

Visa free countries for Turkish citizens (in blue)

After taking a look at this map, it shouldn't be too hard to draw a route if you don't want to apply for visas, wait to be issued one and maybe get rejected and start all over again. Yes, a decision to head north and go through Russia instead... The countries in darker blue allows regular Turkish passport holders to travel without a visa for a period of one month to 3 months (and some even for an unlimited period of time).

The new route is also not yet clear, especially the South American part, but at the end it should look something like this:

Draft new route