KOCHI: With the message ‘Good will knows no boundaries’, three Malayalis are all set to drive to London from here, covering a distance of nearly 24,000 km, spanning 27 countries in Asia and Europe. The team, which includes former bureaucrat Suresh Joseph, film director Lal Jose and automobile journalist Baiju N Nair, will start their 75-day journey on Monday. According to the team, they will go through a variety of terrains, climates and experience a potpourri of cultures.
The team, which has also founded a company ‘Nomadianation’ for this purpose, also plans to make such journeys a regular affair, where a convoy of vehicles will undertake trips from India to England and vice-versa. The Indian leg of the journey will include Bangalore, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Jabalpur and Gorakhpur, from where the team will enter Tibet via Nepal. During the tour through Tibet, the crew will visit the base camp of Mount Everest and Lhasa. They will then reach China. “There we will have nearly 5,300 km to cover and will have to cough up nearly `4.5 lakh per person, including an official guide provided by the Chinese authorities. The shortest stretch will be 80 km through Slovenia,” said Suresh Joseph.
After China, the team, on a 2010 model automatic Ford Endeavour SUV, will reach Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia.
Out of the 26 Schengen Area member states, the drive will continue through 19, including Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, France and Ireland to reach England.
“The trip will be documented in many ways. The varied moods of the journey will be visualised using a GoPro camera mounted on the vehicle. We will document the MG Roads in all these countries,” said Lal Jose. The veteran director, who just completed the shooting of the multi-starrer ‘Vikramadithyan’, considers the trip as a rejuvenation process in his film career spanning nearly 25 years.
“The team will meet local public as well as Indians in each country. We will have a slice of the indigenous flavours, including food,” said Baiju N Nair.
The journey, which is estimated to cost `75 lakh, will be flagged off at 9 am from the courtyard of Crowne Plaza, Kundannoor.