How To Travel The World On The Cheap!

I've been stuck on the border with Papua New Guinea for the last few days, so not wanting to waste my time I made this here video for ya! It's set up so that EVERY CLICK results in money going to the charity WaterAid: so why not set up an auto-refresh program, such as this one for Internet Explorer or this one for Firefox, leave it running overnight and give give give without spending a penny!! Enjoy! Share! Comment! Here's the link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAbCgr6jJ_0

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“Graham’s World”: My Very Own TV Show Starts Tuesday!

Okay, Odyssey fans... this is it, the television show documenting my travels is being shown every TUESDAY at on the Nat Geo Adventure Channel, which is available in 40 countries across Asia and South America.  If you can get it, great.  If you can't, you're stuck with my YouTube videos until it gets broadcast on the BBC (fingers crossed) early next year!! The eight episodes of season one cover the first 133 countries of The Odyssey Expedition - my journey from Uruguay to Egypt, starting on 1st January 2009 and finishing on 31st December 2009. EPISODES: 1. From Argentina to Guyana 2. Caribbean Castaway 3. From Cuba to Tunisia 4. Arrested In Africa 5. African Rough Road 6. Congo Chaos 7. Africa Island Hop 8. Pyramids Or Bust As for the final 67 countries... (including Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea) Lonely Planet TV have just bagged first refusal on the second series... WATCH…

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THE ODYSSEY: Review of 2009

I guess now is a good time to look back over what was the year that was, the highs and lows of life on the road. If you can't be bothered reading my blogs for the whole year (and who could blame you?) here's 2009: An Earth Odyssey in a nutshell... January 2009 Ah, January – the whizzbangshebang through South America... for the first two weeks I was on target and on schedule. But then The Caribbean reared it's ugly head and well and truly stuffed me up for the next couple of months. Countries Visited: 19 Running Total: 19 February 2009 February was a difficult month – just getting from St Vincent to Mexico required all my skill and dexterity, of which I have neither, which is probably why it took me a month, not the week I expected it to. Countries Visited: 10 Running…

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Day 251: The Overlander

08.09.09: In a trend that will no doubt continue for the rest of the month, I got up at 5am only to find that there was no transport to the Congo border until much later. At about 7am, I hopped into a shared taxi, which was apparently heading to the frontier, but spent an hour driving errands around town and then kicked me out – he wasn’t going to the border after all. I waited by the side of the road for an age before a bush taxi finally turned up. Squished in (as always), it would be 10am before we actually headed towards Congo, only 50km away. Three separate border stamps to get out in three separate offices. A combination of bureaucracy and a bad (well, non-existent) road conspired for it to take HOURS to get to the border. At the final checkpoint before I…

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Day 250: Clinging On For Dear Life

07.09.09: We motored in to Port Mole at 7am, gathered our things and got taken by the ferryman back to dry land. THE ANDREA WAS STILL IN PORT!! Oh yes, it STILL hadn’t left. It was still filled to the brim with the Cargo that had been loaded two weeks ago. Marc you legend, you might have just saved The Odyssey from collapse! We said our goodbyes and I headed over to Tatayo’s gaff to say goodbye (and take a much-needed hot shower!). Justin had gone through his initiation and was nursing a cracking hangover (as well as more insect bites than could possibly be good for him). Alex had wussed out of doing it, so The Doctor was standing in his stead. Other than that, life we pretty similar down at the Bwiti Ranch. Oh yeah, election results – Bongo-Son-Of-Bongo (predictably) won, there were some…

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Day 249: Sail of the Century

06.09.09: After yesterday’s epic sail we only had about 70 nautical miles to go today. I woke to find myself staring transfixed over the silver - and by silver I mean seriously, it looked like we were floating on mercury – sea, a line of gold trailing towards the rising sun which beckoned us back to Africa. However, the wind gods were not as kind to us and by 3pm we had gone a paltry twenty miles and once again had dipped below the Equator. Something must be done! I persuaded Marc to let me fire up the outboard for a bit, which we did and covered a respectable seven miles in just one hour. But conscious of fuel consumption etc, he chose to throw out the spinnaker again. And my word – with the other sails down and the outboard off, we cut through the…

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Day 248: Blister In The Sun

05.09.09: That night we made tremendous progress back to Gabon. I really liked Sao Tome, but there was no sense in hanging about – I’ve still got another 92 countries to visit this year AND IT’S BLOOMING SEPTEMBER!! Now the Reol, bless her, is a simple craft – a manual rudder, no engine (just a little outboard) and sails that are a little past their sell-by date. That being said, we covered over 60 nautical miles before noon, which was awesome going. We were a little off tack, though – managing to plunge down into the dreaded Southern Hemisphere (oh NO!) but managed to fend off the krakens, the hydras and the giant squid that populate the lower uncharted regions of the Earth. I for my part spent the day getting ridiculously sunburnt, the equatorial sun devouring my lashings of factor 30 like some kind of…

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Day 245: Do You Know The Way To Sao Tome?

02.09.09: We had a couple of things to do – first up, get some damn maps (sorry, Hugh – charts) of Sao Tome downloaded so we knew where the bally thing is. This was not a success. The GPS that I had purchased had a serial, not a USB link. Marc and I had to search high and low for a reasonably-priced converter (I was quoted €75 in one place!) and in the end the damn thing didn’t work anyway. So I downloaded maps (sorry, charts) from Wikipedia, Google Maps (sorry, charts) and the Lonely Planet site, but they were all about as much use as a sexy nun. Hell with it – we had the co-ordinates, that’s all we needed. A final trip to the Mbolo supermarket for supplies (loads of water, fish, biscuits and bread) and we were good to go go go. We…

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Day 244: My Kingdom For A GPS

01.09.09: I had a mission. Mission GPS. The results of the election still hadn’t been announced so half of Libreville was closed and it wasn’t going to be easy to find specialist sailing kit in the half that was open. I headed to the Mbolo Supermarket as soon as it opened, but all they had were GPS Loggers (much like the one I have strapped to my arm right now). I rang Marc to see if he was having any joy – no. The Gabon Meca (where the guys at Mbolo had told me to go) was a damp squib and Michele Marina was closed until next Monday. I headed to Port Mole. The Nigerian guys who work at the port are awesome – amazingly friendly, they fall over themselves to help out a fellow Anglophone in need. Two guys deserve special mention – Richard, a…

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