About The Trip Overland™
The Trip Around The World
I am a documentary and portrait photographer, specializing in a raw approach to shooting everything under the sun. From the streets to the posed portrait I like to use a balance of light and dark in order to bring out the natural beauty in mundane things, current events and everyday people. I feel strongly that each of us has a right to a valid say in the world and it is my desire to capture and promote the many voices around the world.
The origin of The Trip Overland, started with in 2008 with TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program.
What is TARP?
I had to look it up, but thankfully, there is the internet, so this was not much of a problem. Wikipedia told me that TARP or “The Troubled Asset Relief Program was the main program of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 signed into law by George W. Bush in October.”
“Hmmm,” I thought, “how can I get a piece of that?” I read on:
“Its primary function was to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions in order to counteract the sub-prime mortgage crisis, itself the main indicator of the entire financial crisis, the rise in sub-prime mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures. Delinquencies occurred, due to the more than 80 percent adjustable rate nature of the sub-prime loans, when these rates rose to levels which could not be paid by the people who took out the mortgages.”
My reptilian surfer mind took over, “But like, hey brah, um, what does it mean?”
What I thought it meant was with a little over 309 million people in the United States, the 700 billion dollar TARP bailout equated to roughly $2258 for every man, woman and child. Socialism for Big Business.
I decided to protest the TARP bailout money for the everyday victim of the recession by traveling from Kyoto, Japan to San Francisco, California on $2258. Easy you say? It is after all the era of cheap international flights. JFK to Heathrow for $300. O’Hare to Suvarnabhumi for $750. There would be a flight from Kansai International (servicing the greater Osaka and Kyoto areas) to Los Angeles for close to $500 if I looked around a bit in advance and were willing to sit like one of the gutless sardines in the tin of soybean oil that I snacked on. Sure, I could save money and get home fast. But that’s when it hit me: What am I going home to? That’s also when my self-correcting English grammarian inner voice spoke up and said, To what am I going home?: soaring unemployment? The dying breath of print journalism? Prepackaged Costco spicy chicken parmesan bites?
OK, fine, I get it. America is broken, but broke or not, she’s still my home. If I give her up to the greedy Wall Street swine without a fight what kind of American would I be? So, why fly? Why not take my time? Why not go not just over land, but completely over board? If I am honest, the thought had been wrestling around with my frugal better half for a while. I was due for a bit of the hard trek. I popped the cork on my Chimay Blue and poured the amber-colored nectar into a glass, admiring the dizzyingly effervescent and fruity aromas, as I asked myself, “So then, how does one go about getting off of an island anyway?”
Map of The Trip Overland
Initially a ferry from Osaka served to reach Shanghai, after which point I will begin traveling in a westward direction overland across China, into Mongolia, past Lake Baikal and deeper on into Ekaterinburg and other Russian territory, ending in St. Petersburg (the end of the Trans-Siberian Rail) where I will begin the difficult journey of avoiding the expense that Western Europe presents, jumping over to Helsinki (or heading south into Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania) and from there to Copenhagen, which is where The Trip will get interestingly tricky.
I had initially planned to go by boat through to Seyðisfjörður in Iceland (I don’t know how to say it either), which is possible via Bergen in Norway, Esbjerg in Denmark and Scrabster in Scotland for way too many €uros. A few problems presented themselves since researching The Trip west from Iceland and onward into Greenland, Newfoundland in Canada and the continental U.S.
- Iceland is prohibitively expensive. The cheapest price for a hostel I found was €55, which would be about $75. No wonder their banks failed first and were hardest hit in the economic “downturn” of late 2008, their Big Macs are $10 apiece…
- Apparently there are no connecting ferries to Greenland, because, also apparently, no one wants to go to Greenland. The world has found out about Iceland’s ruse of misnaming the big, roadless block of ice as “Green” and decided that, well yeah, actually, why would we go there? And if we did, why would we take a boat?
So with the looming possibility of conquering China, marching through Mongolia, rouletting Russia, and skirting Europe to make it all the way to Iceland, only to get stuck in one of the coldest, most expensive places in the world, doesn’t seem as attractive as it did, well, hell, even before writing this (despite the solid research time already put in, I’m kind of winging it here). So the question remains: How will I cross the Atlantic Ocean?
A Trans-Atlantic Container Ship from Le Havre, France to Newark, New Jersey, is how. But $2258 doens’t last as long as you might think. Donations to the Cause are always apreciated (All donations are tax deductible. Ask for a receipt!).
Unsure of how much information possibly exists “out there”, but if anyone knows of any methods (including possible employment opportunities), commenting would be greatly appreciated.
“To while away the idle hours, seated the livelong day before the ink slab, by jotting down without order or purpose whatever trifling thoughts pass through my mind, truly this is a queer and crazy thing to do!”
Yoshida Kenko – Tsurezuregusa
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