Well having looked at a myriad websites about trains, planes and automobiles, oh and ferries, it would appear that trying to go "Around the world in 80 days" is not only very possible, but been done so many times by so many people from all over the world, and starting from just about anywhere you care to mention, that in fact it's almost becoming a bit old hat.
Also the cost isn't as much as you might expect either.
Nope, the real trick is to decide how long you can afford to go for, exactly which route you wish to take and how much of the locations en route you want to pause in enough to warrant a separate ticket or stop over.
Using public transport railways for instance :-
In 3 days you can reach Moscow from London, via Warsaw, for around £150.
In another 7 days you can reach Beijing from Moscow for around £300, or less if you speak fluent Russian or are well verses in using foreign phrase books.
And finally a further 2 days journey can get you to Hanoi from Beijing for around £71.
So you can see, in under 2 weeks you can go from London to the bottom corner of South East Asia and all for around £500, sound good?
Well maybe surprisingly no, as other than getting your passport stamped at the border, and not to forget having to buy all the relevant visas in advance, this is travel in its purest and simplest form, just getting from A to B.
It is not really visiting any of these places and you get no chance to be a tourist. This is not allowing for any stop overs, sight seeing, clothes shopping, photo opportunities ( unless you like blurred photos or those of far away mountain ranges through a pane of glass ), meeting / mingling with the locals, sampling native cuisine or haggling in market stalls for souvenirs to take back home.
In fact, in a way it is no better that flying from airport to airport with as soon as you land from your inbound flight being escorted directly to the departure lounge for your connecting outbound flight out again soon afterwards.
I remember one of the first times I went to London with my mother, it was such a big occasion, we went to the Imperial War Museum, I was rubber necking myself the whole time and the noise / pollution combined gave me a massive headache. These days I commute into London daily, often falling asleep on the train and listening to my Walkman all the way from the station to my office, only looking around enough to wait for clear ways through the road traffic and to avoid slower moving pedestrians.
Imagine a huge circular commute journey where you do nothing but catch 40 winks every few hours, grab an overpriced sandwich and mineral water when your peckish, and work your way through a novel or sudoku puzzle book, all the while trying to avoid the eyes of your fellow commuters. It would be the most pointless and needless waste of time imaginable.
Upon arriving home again would you be any more worldly wise? ... Would you have gained memories you will cherish for the rest of your life? ... Would you have enough photos to stick into 3 albums with which to bore your in-laws to tears? ... Would you have become firm friends with someone from the other side of the world with whom you have promised to keep in touch? ... Would you be eager to save up enough money and vacation time and do it all again if you could?
Probably not, no!
So as these days much of the chore has been taken out of travelling, this gives you more opportunity to enjoy it at your leisure and at your own pace, so I suggest you don't be in such a hurry, after all now more than ever it would be wise to keep in mind the age old saying "life is a journey, not a destination".
And thus if your planning a travelling trip, whether it be just around a single country or big enough to make it to the next continent, first off make a list of all the places/people/things you want to see, then decide how long you want to stay in each place before you even think about how to get from one place to the next or in what order you plan to do them all, and doing it this way afterwards you will be glad that you did.
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