This blog is intended to be a travel journal to keep track of my journey across Europe to Asia, and to share with friends and family my experiences on my way home. Starting off from New York to Amsterdam October 5th, the trip was originally an invitation by a good friend for his vacation, and intended to be a break for myself before returning to Hong Kong since graduating from Cornell as well as living in the United States since 2000. While wrapping up my life in New York and packing for the trip, I decided it would be the best opportunity to act on an inspiration from an extraordinary journey undertaken Jim Roger, a master of investing, who wrote the book “Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip“, which documented his millennium adventure driving across four continents to see the world from the ground up. Heres an excerpt from Jim:

“We made it! We arrived back in New York, our home, on 5 January 2002, just 1101 days since we departed on our round-the-world, Guinness World Record Journey. Passing Through 116 countries, we covered more than 245,000 Kilometers during our Travel, which began in Iceland way back on 1-1-1999. Our non-stop, self-contained, three-year trip in a one-of-a-kind Mercedes-Benz took us to Six Continents, where our goal was to explore as much of the world as possible at the turn of the millennium, to learn what people and countries were doing and to see how well they were doing it. We met extraordinary and ordinary people, drove through war zones, blizzards, deserts, jungles, faced epidemics, tasted divine and sometimes horrible food, while covering vastly diverse landscapes, cultures, and societies.”

Since reading “Adventure Capitalist”, it has always been an aspiration of mine to experience world the way Jim did. In March 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Jim in person and had him autograph my copy of Adventure Capitalist. Jim wrote, “See you on the road!” In the spirit of “exploring as much of the world as possible”, I am finally on the road and I’ll be as ambitious as I can while keeping the journey to a reasonable budget. My goal is to travel across as many cities from Europe to Asia until the deadline of late December of 2007, when I should end my journey and return to Hong Kong to celebrate Christmas and New Year with my family and friends. My next stop is Paris followed by London. The rest of the trip is still in the planning, but tentatively it will consist of Dublin, Ireland, Iceland, Madrid, Morocco, Barcelona, Naples/Ischai/Sorrento, Athens, Istanbul, Cairo, Israel, Dubai, Karachi, Mumbai, New Delhi, Arga, Singapore, Vietnam (HCMC).

I sincerely recommend Jim Roger’s book “Adventure Capitalist”; it contains all sorts of insights about investments, culture, government, people, development that makes it a real page turner. I have enjoyed every page of it and I think you will like it too. For starters, take a look at Jim’s journey in map.