Even before I started school, I wanted to do a gap year. In my opinion, it's a great opportunity to take a year out from your studies to discover, reflect and get inspired before choosing the position you'll take as a graduate.

At first, the total freedom can be disconcerting. What path should you take when you no longer have any direction? I realised that before my second year at engineering school, I had followed the clear path that was offered to me.

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During that year, a number of ideas came to mind: crossing the Atlantic with friends, doing civic service in France followed by a humanitarian mission abroad, travelling around Europe by train to meet up with ecological projects... All these options had in common the desire to explore unknown countries and to get involved in a meaningful project.

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In March 2023, we both found great end-of-year internships in research centres in New Zealand: the Sport Performance Research Institute for Tanguy, and the Antarctic Research Centre for me. We quickly got the idea: why not come back from New Zealand without flying? This would allow us to discover some very different countries while minimising our impact on the environment and promoting encounters with local people by hitchhiking and using ground transport. Because we didn't want to be just tourists, but also to have something to think about, we decided to produce reports on ecological and solidarity projects that we came across along the way. In this way, we hope that this gap year will enable us to discover the voices of commitment and inspire us to choose our own path.

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Once the project was defined, we had to find an itinerary that respected our desires, but also the conditions set by our university and ourselves: to be back in France in July 2024 and not to cross any country classified as a red zone ("formally not recommended") or orange zone ("not recommended except for imperative reasons") according to France Diplomatie. 

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To make things clearer, we printed out a map of Eurasia and coloured the zones red, orange, yellow and green! This enabled us to see a number of challenges:

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• To reach the Asian continent, one option is to sail via Australia. However, the Tasman Sea, which separates Australia and New Zealand, is very choppy, and sailboats often prefer to go via the Melanesian islands (New Caledonia, Fiji, Solomon Islands, etc.). In any case, it's difficult to find a boat to reach Indonesia from New Zealand, and we know we'll have to adapt to the captain's itinerary. So this part of our itinerary remains uncertain.
• To reach India (which is what we had initially planned), we would have to cross either Myanmar (red zone) or southern China, and hence the Himalayas, which can only be done on foot and would take us a long time given the duration of our project. So we regretfully abandoned the idea of going via India.
• To reach Europe from Asia, we could opt either for the north, i.e. through Russia and Ukraine, or for the south, i.e. through Afghanistan, or via the Caspian Sea. The first two options are largely inadvisable because of the geopolitical situation.

After many research into the means of transport available, this is the route we have chosen: 

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After reaching the Asian continent by boat, we will successively discover Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam (taking care not to cross the border between Malaysia and Thailand, a red zone). We then follow the coastline of China all the way to Beijing. Here, we can take a train across the country to Urumqi (with a few stopovers). We'll then take another train to Almaty, where we'll cross the border into Kazakhstan. After visiting Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, we'll take a ferry across the Caspian Sea from Kuryk (Kazakhstan) to Baku (Azerbaijan). We continue our journey in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. Once back in Europe, we'll cross Greece, Italy and finally return to our respective towns in south-west France in mid-July 2024!

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This itinerary is based on the geopolitical situation in April 2023, according to France Diplomatie. We will adapt it in real time according to geopolitical events and our own adventures (visas, public transport, etc.).