We Drew Backpacking Routes Years Ago. They Still Work. Use Them.

We Drew Backpacking Routes Years Ago. They Still Work. Use Them. This is not a hajj. It is not a pilgrimage circuit, and nobody has to believe anything to walk it. In October 2016 I published three long-distance backpacking routes. The whole point of them was one thing: every stop is reachable from the one before. Long overland travel does not usually fail because someone runs out of will. It fails at the joins — you can afford to get to a city and then the next leg needs a flight you cannot buy, or a visa you cannot get at the border, or a crossing that quietly closed. So the routes were drawn backwards from that problem. Each leg was chosen because you can actually get there from the last place by road, rail or a short boat, inside the days the previous country gives you. Across all three routes there are only four places where the land genuinely runs out, and the document names each one and where you pick the road back up. The three routes Route 1 — the Americas to the Indian subcontinent. Colombia (Medellín, Cali, Sincelejo, Cartagena) → Venezuela (Maturín) → Brazil (Manaus) → Peru (Cusco) → fly Cusco–Los Angeles–Delhi → India (Delhi, Manali, Pushkar, Palolem, Palakkad, Varanasi) → Nepal (Kathmandu) → Tibet (Lhasa, visa obtained in Kathmandu) → China (Chengdu) → Guam. … Read the full post on melek.salon: https://melek.salon/melek/@hathor/backpacking-routes-overland-use-them