Here we go!
(Mario, Italian plumber)

This is what I would say if I were a video game superstar with a hysteric laugh and an infinite number of lives. In my case, I am just wondering if this idea of a round-the-world trip was a good one.

I am just starting to get used to that feeling. Two, or just one day before taking off, this is what is happening in my mind. “Are you freaking nuts?”, “What was that idea in the first place?”, “Where on Earth did I put my socks?” and “How are you gonna only survive alone in a country you never put a foot in when you barely manage to properly cook a meal?” are some frequent questions I ask myself before any travel.

It is a kind of small fear that grasps your guts and does not let go until you are in the plane. No idea why, considering everything is awesome from the second you land at your destination. Is everything prepared? Am I ready? What do I do when I arrive? But the most important is surely this one: man, this is the dream. I am really taking this plane, going there, and discovering this new country, this new culture. How lucky am I?

When I told people about what was previously only a dream, then a project, and then a totally real reality, two behaviors could be observed.
“This is SO DAMN COOL,” would mainly say people from my generation. I could not agree more.
“This is SO SCARY,” would mainly answer people from the previous generation. I could not agree more.

But when I first thought about it, years ago, my opinion was of course that it would just be damn cool. What is important in this life? Love, money, happiness? Dreams, I would say. They give me an objective to pursue, a reason to struggle, a simple answer to the metaphysical question of why I am right here. This trip is a dream. A dream of exploring countries, discovering places and people, learning from them and from their culture, so different from the French and Chinese ones that they could only open and broaden my mind.

Of course, I have been helped by the numerous travels I made to Hong Kong. They not only got me used to moving from a side of this planet to the other one, but also put a small seed of cultural differences human beings could experience. I have seen behaviors that border on nonsense for the other culture, and vice versa; I have seen people simply incapable of understanding foreign habits because they would only think as they were taught to. And because they would think everyone should have the same opinion. I do not want to judge anyone at all here, however; this is not my point. I only want to say that I am happy to only be able to be conscious of it.

This trip is a luck. Some would say, a once in a lifetime luck, and they are undoubtedly right. I have gathered so many factors to realize it: of course the materialistic issue of saving money to spend through the year to come; but also the will to do it, the countless hours of preparation, organization, thinking and planning; and last, but not least, the social freedom of taking a whole year off.

This seems to be the main answer to the logical continuation of my conversations. “If you think it is so damn cool, why don’t you do it yourself? — Because I cannot leave my job/friends/family/what I got here (delete whichever does not apply).” All of these, indeed, bind you and exhort you to stay where you are, to do what you do, to continue tomorrow what you did today. Quite a normal way of life in a sedentary society.

Again, I do not want to judge them: if they are happy, all is for the best (maybe not in the best of all possible worlds though). But here is my point of view:

The things you own end up owning you.
(Tyler Durden in Fight Club, by David Fincher)

Some people – I like to think I am among them but it may only be a childish boast – do not see any reason why they should follow anything that is called normal only because it is called that way. Some people like to move where they want, always curious about what they could find there, as if the world had not any borders, John Lennon’s Imagine style. Some people want to get rid of this socially built fear of the unknown. Traveling for a long time, or even better moving to another country, indeed implies that you give up everything you built and gathered, and requires that you forget your everyday comfort and step into the unknown. This is scary. But let us rather say it is thrilling instead. Or, at least, it is the way I see it.

I am lucky. Lucky not to be bind in such a way, or in such ways. Lucky to be able to free myself from such concerns. So lucky that I cannot even measure how lucky I am. And I am not doing the mistake of letting this luck go before my eyes. I am realizing what I dreamt about, what so many people dreamt about, and, most of all, I am realizing my life through it. What I really want, through this trip and hopefully others, is to live, i.e. to experience what I really wanted to, instead of simply, passively, existing.

I will try to keep this blog updated on my spare time, when I have electricity, an Internet connection and enough strength to upload pictures. I may miserably fail at this, but I will still try – I think my texts won’t be wonderfully interesting though. Posts will be in English or French, depending on my mood. Oh and I almost forgot: about the itinerary. Following the advice of my old friend Choupair, I used a powerful tool named Google – they say it is pretty famous – and I will try to draw the map of my trip and update it here regularly. Here is the first section, my plane travel from Paris to Cairo, taking off in two days from now!