Saturday, October 23
This is the beginning of a one year backpacking journey for two Canadians who have been recently married. Tim Kingshott and Mari Farquharson, who have been working in Natural Resources (Fisheries, Forestry, Geology etc.), are heading from Toronto, Ontario to Toronto, Ontario. En Route we will visit New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, South-East Asia, Indonesia, Nepal, India, Turkey, and Mediterranean Europe.
We were married less than a month ago in very fitting Canadian Style in a small country church, and have spent the time since then arranging for our trip. We board our plane tonight (Saturday), and will be in Auckland sometime early on Tuesday. On our last night in Canada, I had a beer and we went to watch a hockey game.
It has been a very busy month, as Mari and I rush around Ontario (it’s a big place) picking up last minute items, saying good-bye to friends, arranging our various shots and plane tickets, and building a web page. The web site will highlight the trip and includes itineraries, maps and photos. It can be found at www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Bay/2680.
One thing we have discovered as we got ready for the trip, was that packing can cause a lot of stress. Add to this the extremely biassed opinions of two experienced backpackers and watch what happens. What Mari and I tried to accomplish was to have one big backpack each, and then a smaller one for carry-on and day excursions. This has been a proven formula from previous trips. The problem was, how do we take everything.
It became apparent that due to the diversity of the trip, we needed a large variety of things. One language guide soon became many. Diving gear for Australia was mixed with cold weather equipment for Nepal. A mound of rock climbing equipment was balanced out with a tiny camera for museums. What was all this stuff?
Eventually we packed our money belts. Once this was done we were able to say, “that’s all we really need” and we down-sized from there. We did get all we wanted into our two backpacks, and we even have some space. I look forward to seeing how the packs are laid out in a month.
