Mongolia

The long way to bangkok Trailer

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• published: 16 Oct 2010
• views: 1051

First attempt at a trailer for the video of "the long way to Bangkok." I decided to make a few trailers just to give me a chance to practice before I go ahead and make the real thing - and to check all my software and hardware can cope with the HD video content. I'm off to the countryside tomorrow to do some Muay Thai for a couple of weeks so won't have another chance to practice for a little while - but will get to work on some more light hearted trailers! I hope this trailer conveys some of the epic scenes we encountered on our journey to Bangkok. The map is a bit blurred I know...need to find a higher res map so If anyone has one... All video content straight from the camera - always learning new things about video...I already wish I had taken more footage and used a higher contrast setting. Its all practice though and the videos are just going to get better and better! June 14th 2010, three students and one full time worker were about to embark on a huge adventure. Myself, David Schulte, Sasirapa Charlanawat and Wei Tang had decided to go to Thailand from London by land. We were going to use buses, local drivers, trains, boats and a good pair walking boots to get us to our final destination of Bangkok by the 4th August 2010. It took a few months of planning due to the mass of required visas and the coordination of dates that are associated with time restricted travel. The route developed naturally - or shall I say, I wanted as tough a route as possible and to get away from all commercial tourism. It was originally just myself who planned to take on this trip and infact, my class mates laughed when they first heard my plan. Little did they know that several months later they would be sitting on a three day bus journey through the heart of Mongolia. After hearing an urge to travel from my good friend Dave, I invited him along for the ride. The rough plan was to head quickly through Europe by train torwards Moscow. We would spend a few days in Moscow before getting a train to Novosibirsk which was around 50 hours away from Moscow. This is where my desire for tough travel started to kick in. It is a fairly simple task to ride a train from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar directly and this is what most tourists do. Not satisfied with that, I found some information on other routes into Mongolia, primarily through the Altai region. There wasn't so much information available on the net and pretty much zero information in the guide books so I thought this would be the right route for Sam Spicer. I sent a few emails to the UK embassy in Mongolia to check up on the border crossings and whether they were still open. Upon recieving a reply from the embassy the route was decided. We would get off at Novosibirsk, catch a bus down to Barnaul where we would then find a local guide and his jeep to take us down through the Altai Republic heading torwards the Mongolian Border. Once at Kosh Agach (a small market town before the strictly controlled border area) we would need to hitch a ride over the border into Mongolia. Ofcourse this was all a bit unpredictable but thats how I like to travel. The back up plan would be to back track back to Novosibirsk and wait for a train direct to Ulaanbaatar. Next up we would have to catch a bus or hire a vehicle to take us from Western Mongolia to Ulaanbaatar, the capital city. We planned to stay a whole week in Ulaanbaatar so we would be there for the Naadam games which was quite an experience to say the least. We had reserved train tickets for the Mongolia - Beijing train leaving on the 16th July knowing full well a lot of Naadam festival tourists would be taking the same route. After Beijing, Shanghai was next on the list followed by a train right across China into Yunnan province. From the city of Kunming we would make our way down by bus to the Mekong river to catch a special boat which goes directly to Thailand (Via laos and Burma without the need for visas). The original plan was to be in Thailand by the first of August to meet with my Thai teacher who lives in Chiang Mai. Not all went to plan, but I'll let you read the photo descriptions for an explanation. The final leg would be a simple overnight train down from Chiang Mai to Bangkok where we would send Dave off to the airport back to sunny England...or maybe to be a dog sledge racer in Alaska (A slight development mid trip). Not all went to plan but it was an amazing trip. Dave, Sasi and Vivien had not travelled like this before and did really well making it through some of the tougher parts of the journey. Even Sam Spicer himself was struggling on the three day bus journey. I am intending to send this link to the various emails of people I met along the way so I'd like to take this opportunity to say; Thanks to everyone we met along the trip, you all made it a truely magical and memorable trip and it is not something I will be forgetting in a hurry. Many thanks to the guys at the rainbow hostel, Tim, Dimitri, Japal,