The First Post

So let’s get this thing kicked off!

The plan is that this blog will form a public view on our travels. I apologise in advance for any boredom that sets in while reading it – we’ll do our best to keep it interesting!

Under a week before I finish work. Under a month before we head off into the sunrise. The most common question I’m being asked is “Have you planned where you are going yet?”. People seemed surprised that we have planned no more than the initial flight to KL, Malaysia. In true Project Manager style, I know that any plan will fall apart within the first week, and a big reason for going on this trip is to get aware from the norm, so no planning until we get out there.

Having said that, we do have a rough list of countries we’d like to visit – Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, India, China plus any others we can arrange visas for when we’re out there!

The second most common statement made to me recently is along the lines of people being envious of what we are doing. I’ll definitely try to remember that when we’re spending our third week in a dirt-cheap hostel, with the rats and bed bugs keeping us company and a bout of Delhi-belly :-)

There’s a slight difference in my planning to Emma’s so far. I’ve bought a netbook, a solar charger, some SD cards, tons of bits of security to hamper anyone wanting to nick any of the technology, and have sorted out my music library (eventually – I *hate* iTunes!). Emma, on the other hand, has planned the clothes she is taking, malaria tablets, typhoid injections, shoes, toiletries etc. etc. I’m sure this is no indication of a gender gap! Between us we may have everything sorted!

Neither of us seemed to be affected by the Larium malaria tablets. There’s a risk of paranoid tendencies and weird dreams, apparently. I’m not sure either of us noticed any difference from our norm during the 2 week trial! So Larium it is for us. Which is good, as we will need at least 6 months worth of malaria tablets and Larium is taken weekly, whereas others are taken daily – we would have a backpack full of malaria tablets if we couldn’t go for the weekly one! Plus it would have cost a fortune – the Larium is costing about £50 each, others would have stretched to the hundreds!

We’ve decided we cant afford a full set of injections. So, rather than pay for a rabies injection, we’ve decided to avoid mangy looking dogs and bats. Obviously if we’d had the injection, we’d have petted every dog and caught every bat we came across.

I’ll plan to update this blog now and then, to let people know where we are, what we’ve done and where we’re going. Feel free to comment and keep in touch via the blog, or via email – I’m sure we’ll have internet access for a fair bit of our travels. I cannot promise exciting updates – I will look to others to provide interesting comments instead.