INTRO

Never blogged before but a few days into the trip and we're beginning to believe this might be exciting.

Anyway for those who don't know us, we're a family of 3, Anu, Unni and Yannick our 11 year old son. We live in Bombay, India.  We're filmmakers and bitten hard by the travel bug. A few months ago while reading an email about a family that set sail after selling everything they owned, we began thinking of our own little journey. Anu jumped into it right away, I had my reservations and fears, as did Yannick.

We have 2 dogs at home, and more importantly its never easy to stop running the rat race and turn away even if only for 6 months. Luckily for us, we have great support at home in Ajji, and Pramod  so the dogs are taken care of. About 2 months ago, I finally made the decision. It wasn't as tough I had expected it to be. In fact it was actually liberating. I had made up my mind and said no to most of the work that came my way. I started thinking of ways to sort out the financial repercussions of such a trip and it began to sink in. It was about this time that a friend of mine and I were working on a script that kept threatening to get green lighted. Anyway things worked out in the way they always do and I was finally free to leave. Of course just when I felt that way the Income Tax authorities decide to show up with a situation that has been dormant for over a few years...

The other big question that we had to deal with was Yannick's school.  The school was super supportive of the trip, and we plan to do some amount of home schooling through the trip, so we're guessing the experience of traveling, new cultures, foods, people, and places should make up for the difficulty he might face when we are back in learning how to divide fractions!


Rule #1 - there will always be a million reasons why you mustn't go, and only one why you must.

So make sure the one reason you must go is overwhelming enough to overcome the other million.


Once the decision was made, the world conspired to make it work out. Antima and Bino friends who had traveled thorough SA for a few months a couple of years ago convinced us to do South America rather than any other place. The few bottles of wine during this chat made the trip even more exciting. Later they would share intimate details like detailed accounts etc that allowed us to budget the trip and get a feel for what we could expect.

We then met Aparna Shekhar Roy, this wonderful traveler who shared routes, tips, friends, and everything she could with us. Like wise others started putting us in touch with friends of friends across South and Central America. We were beginning to feel more and more comfortable. Friends of Aparna's invited us to stay with them in Rio, others were willing to share their experiences so it was all coming together nicely.

We needed backpacks and other equipment, we needed visas to some of the countries at least, we needed to figure out some sort of a travel route and decide to use the weather as the overriding factor in making this decision. We also need warm clothing, something most of us who live in Bombay don't have any of and decided on a kindle rather than carrying bulky lonely planets.  Finally we found couch surfing! It is by far the best way to see the world. We shared our home with a few travelers in the month or so prior to our trip and we hope and plan to share the homes of other couch surfers during this trip to get an real local view of the places we visit! Highly recommend joining up !!

We started work on the visas, and our travel agent helped creating fake tickets and hotel bookings because the embassies in India don't seem to be able to understand the concept of backpacking. We managed to get visas for Brazil / Argentina and Peru. We know have to figure out where we need to apply for the Chilean visa since that is a country we don't want to miss.

Alongside this we figured the best airfares would be to start and end in NYC so that ticket was bought. Sharad and Stella , old friends of ours offered us there house as a base along with all their hiking equipment. An offer we couldn't refuse!