Instead of letting this site sit and rot while I’m away travelling I’ve decided to document my trip right here. I’ll be tracking all my expenses to hopefully inspire some of you chumps and chumpettes to get out and travel more. There are so many easy ways to make travelling cheaper and they often simultaneously make the trip more fulfilling.
Where, when and why I’m going
I need to start by coming clean. This website is predominantly for Canadians, of which I am one, but I’m living in America right now on a 10 month work exchange. Thus my trip begins and ends in Chicago.

This map doesn’t include all the cities that I’ll visit, only the major ones that I’ve financially committed to in some way. As far as timeframes go I’ll be leaving Chicago for London on October 30th and as for the rest:
- London – 24 hours.
- Istanbul – 4 days
- Bishkek/Kyrgyzstan – 1 week
- Urumqi/Lanzhou/Beijing – 2 weeks
I’ve been actively learning Mandarin the better part of 5 years now but I’m a long long…. long… way from fluent. Luckily there is no better place to practice Mandarin than in China! Oh and they got 5,000 years of culture and some other cool stuff to see….
China alone wasn’t enough for this trip and the true deciding factor was having an old friend living in Kyrgyzstan. I’ve wanted to visit northwest China in past trips but never had time, but since Kyrgyzstan borders China I decided that I could easily visit both places in one trip.
The next question was how to get to Kyrgyzstan? Kyrgyzstan is basically on the opposite side of the world so flying east or west works. My friend suggested we meet somewhere in Europe and since I’ve never been it became an easy decision. We settled on Istanbul, although Moscow was a strong contender.
Visiting London was not part of the original plan, but the cheapest flight to Istanbul happened to be with British airways and they offered a 24 hour stopover. And the cherry on the London cake was another good friend living just north of London!
The whole trip will last about 4 weeks.
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