Ooooo, a travel thread! How did I miss this?
Like I said in the other thread, I'm setting off in January for New Zealand (possibly via NYC) then on to Australia, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, China, Nepal & India. I'm finally going to be utilising my zoology degree for something worthwhile & am going to be doing some voluntary work in an elephant shelter in Thailand, a bear rescue centre in Cambodia & hopefully, fingers crossed, a tiger conservation project in India. It's difficult to convey just how much of a dream this last one is for me, but the difficulty I've had is in giving them a firm date for when I'll be wanting to do it.
The same goes for planning in general really. I want to leave the whole thing as open & flexible as possible but just pitching up to a conservation project as & when I feel like it isn't really feasible. China & India, for example, are vast countries & I anticipate spending a good few months in each, but as India is the last stop on my trip I know not neither when I'll first set foot there nor how long I'll stay once I do. As it gets closer to the time I expect these things will start to settle in my mind a little more. I've given myself a time frame of around two years for the whole trip because as duck_racer alluded to, charging around & trying to cram as much as possible in as short a space of time as you can will mean that so many things will pass you by.
Since finishing uni I've saved a colossal amount of money to fund it all, partly through fortune of circumstance but mostly through hard graft & an almost ascetic lifestyle. This has had both its pros & cons.
On the downside my social life has gone from the swirling maelstrom of drug-fuelled abandon that it was at uni to an at times mind-numbingly mundane routine of work, work, some more work & ummm, what was it? Oh yeah, more work. I've changed jobs to keep myself on my toes, done as much weekend voluntary work as I can, devoured books like a fucking demon to keep my mind active & spent so much spare time writing that I may as well have a pen grafted on to my right hand, so a feeling of stagnation has just been kept at bay, but it's been cut fine at times. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that my social life has been almost non-existent, especially this past year.
On the upside it's brought into sharp focus just who my real friends are & made me appreciate them all the more for it. It's meant that my health & general fitness have increased ten-fold & a general sense of physical well-being has followed in their wake. It's also conformed in my mind once & for all that a) if you're young, free & single it is entirely possible to save a large amount of money if you really set your mind to it & b) a life relatively free of material possessions makes for a far lighter ride.
As regards travelling alone, I think as with just about anything else it's dependent on the individual. Some people cannot bear the thought of doing anything on their lonesome, while others relish the opportunity. I fall into the latter camp & will unashamedly say that the thought of being my own master in a foreign land with no one having any idea just where I am is pure bliss. Maybe if I get stabbed & am lying in a pool of my own blood down a Bangkok backstreet I may reconsider this statement, but I've always been perfectly happy with my own company. What's important is to be open to meeting new people at all times & by all accounts the opportunity for this to occur when travelling is like no other.
This whole escapade has been about ten years in the making, no word of a lie, & as the first glimpses of light appear at the end of the tunnel what do I feel?
Trepidation, certainly. It's going to be a fucking long journey both in time & distance to places that have a culture completely alien to anything I've ever experienced, & there are bound to be hiccups along the way. But then that's a large part of the appeal. Placing yourself in a situation that demands you deal with it & draw on reserves that you didn't know you had is how you grow as a person. Trite clichés are all but impossible to avoid (especially the way I write) when talking about this, but I never fail to get pissed off with people who scoff whenever the notion of a journey of self-discovery rears its head. Of course you're going to discover something within yourself during such an experience - even if it was buried within you all along it still needed to be excavated, & that's the appeal.
But more than trepidation I feel an overwhelmingly intoxicating sense of excitement & hope. Excitement at the prospects of all the many things I know I'm going to do & hope for all the many more that will come unannounced. In the last week I've been exchanging PMs on here with someone who is embarking on a similar journey to mine in the same month as me, & I cannot begin to tell you the size of the smile that sits on my face when conversing with someone who knows what that feeling of excitement is like.
And if you've got this far (well done!) in what should really have been a journal entry & you happen to be one of those people who's considered going travelling but have never done anything about it I say: fucking do it! Stop making excuses & putting it off till a day that will never come.
One last trite cliché? Yeah, why not:
"Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting over lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
My plan would br start at Mexico and finish in Argentina/Chile and I think I'd give it 6 months. Desperately want to go to Belize and I have friends/contacts in Ecuador, Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil.. Ahh you have to love pipe dreams 
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
