“Something Different” on a World Tour. What is this “something different” thing? Actually, it’s something really beautiful. It’s something that came about when two engineer friends resigned from their jobs and embarked on a world tour that would last 13 months. These friends are Özcan BOSTANCI and İsmail ÖZGER. In fact, the website they launched about their journey, baskaturlubirsey.com, is the icing on the cake.

On the page where they introduce themselves on this site, it says:

“It all started with small trips first. Every trip we took became the reason for another trip. Reaching the southernmost point of the Earth during our South America trip boosted our courage to its peak. We started to think we could go anywhere now. Finally, the idea of a world tour matured in our minds.

Like most people when we were on the school benches, our dreams were to get into good schools through the university entrance exam (ÖSS) and then secure jobs in corporate firms. All of this came true. However, we realized that this wasn’t what we wanted, and we decided to leave this safe harbor. We are leaving. We are going to question life anew, to discover completely different lives in completely different places, to read the other pages of the world that we haven’t read…”

something different is what I want it resembles neither a tree nor a cloud the country I’m going to is not like this place its sea is a different sea, its air is a different air… — CAN YÜCEL

Their Plans Regarding the Itinerary and the Outcomes

• How Did We Decide on the Route? “While planning the trip, we marked the places we wanted to see in the world on a map. Then, we simply connected these points to create a line, and this became our route. However, we knew that this line could change depending on conditions. And indeed, it did.”

The Planned Route

• Why is Africa not on the route? “Africa is definitely one of the places we want to see. It was impossible to visit all continents within our planned timeframe of 1 year. Distances may look very small on the map, but this isn’t like crossing from Üsküdar to Beşiktaş. When traveling by land, going from one city to another sometimes takes days. Considering we spent 2 months just traveling around China, we needed an extra few months to travel around Africa. That’s why we postponed Africa to another trip.

The Actual Route Taken

• Why didn’t we go to Australia and New Zealand? “Although it was on our route, we couldn’t go to Australia and New Zealand. Because we had spent much more time in Asia than we expected, and the winter season had begun in Australia. Adding dwindling time and budget to this, we left the Oceania trip for another time.”

Özcan and İsmail set out from Istanbul on 20.07.2010. And the route they followed looks really quite long. I am sharing only 1/10th of this route with you. Just think, this date list is only a 1-month portion of a 13-month itinerary. To access the full list, you can look here:

• 17.08.2010 / 25.08.2010 – St. Petersburg, Russia

• 14.08.2010 / 17.08.2010 – Tallinn, Estonia

• 12.08.2010 / 14.08.2010 – Riga, Latvia

• 10.08.2010 / 12.08.2010 – Vilnius, Lithuania

• 03.08.2010 / 10.08.2010 – Minsk, Belarus

• 30.07.2010 / 03.08.2010 – Grodno, Belarus

• 30.07.2010 – Bialystok, Poland

• 26.07.2010 / 29.07.2010 – Krakow, Poland

• 23.07.2010 / 26.07.2010 – Lodz, Poland

• 20.07.2010 / 23.07.2010 – Warsaw, Poland

• 20.07.2010 – Istanbul, Turkey

They really had a wonderful journey. I mean, how beautiful it would be if it were granted to me one day as well. Anyway, you can check out baskaturlubirsey.com for more. Also, I just saw that they are publishing a book about their journey; you can follow that on their website too.

And here is the video that led to my introduction to “Something Different”: