2006-06-24
Bangkok, Thailand - Monsoon season - Trip Planning
I'm sitting in my guest house room listening to the rain and thunder that is typical in the afternoons during monsoon season. This one seems to be a particularly violent storm. Just before it arrived I was eating lunch in an outside cafe and watched the street vendors preparing for the onslaught by rolling out rain tarps and bringing fragile items under cover.
I finally have some time to catch up on my journal. It may sound strange to say that "I didn't have time" because many people consider a year around the world trip as a really long vacation. Maybe it is that way for some, but traveling to 23-countries backpacker style, planning every part of the journey and trying to keep a web site to share it is enormously time consuming.
One of the realities that came to light was that there isn't enough money to complete the trip as planned. We still want to travel for a full year, so our solution is to move some of the travel time in expensive countries to cheaper ones. We're in the process of doing that now. We're moving the additional days, other than those for an overland safari and an Egypt tour, from Africa to SE Asia.
Yesterday I spent another 8-hours on the Internet communicating with travel agencies in Egypt and Africa working to define and price out our travel there. I have spent almost a week in total on this part of the trip alone.
Part of the purpose of this trip is to share, through photos and journal entries, some of the experiences. So far we taken over 7,000 photos, selected the best ones for the web site, added captions and sent them to my kind cousin Ric who posts them on the web site. John has spent countless hours on journal entries and web links to share the journey. I'm really glad we're doing this, but there's not a lot of breathing room between planning, doing, recording and sharing the journey.
Back to what's going on...
John's out exploring Bangkok on his own. We each need some time apart on occassion, as can be imagined. We're traveling together 24/7 most of the time.
Meeting other people is also a way to ease the strain of traveling together for such a long time, but that hasn't been easy on Khao San Road. When you leave the guest house onto the main street it's a circus - lots of street vendors trying to peddle you stuff, people just arriving or getting ready to depart and taxi and tuk-tuk drivers badgering you to go somewhere. Everyone ends up having a kind of dazed look on their face. Not the best environment for meeting people!
The rain has stopped, for the moment, and shortly I'll be heading back to the Internet cafe to do some more travel planning and to post some blog entries.
Bangkok, Thailand - Monsoon season - Trip Planning
I'm sitting in my guest house room listening to the rain and thunder that is typical in the afternoons during monsoon season. This one seems to be a particularly violent storm. Just before it arrived I was eating lunch in an outside cafe and watched the street vendors preparing for the onslaught by rolling out rain tarps and bringing fragile items under cover.
I finally have some time to catch up on my journal. It may sound strange to say that "I didn't have time" because many people consider a year around the world trip as a really long vacation. Maybe it is that way for some, but traveling to 23-countries backpacker style, planning every part of the journey and trying to keep a web site to share it is enormously time consuming.
One of the realities that came to light was that there isn't enough money to complete the trip as planned. We still want to travel for a full year, so our solution is to move some of the travel time in expensive countries to cheaper ones. We're in the process of doing that now. We're moving the additional days, other than those for an overland safari and an Egypt tour, from Africa to SE Asia.
Yesterday I spent another 8-hours on the Internet communicating with travel agencies in Egypt and Africa working to define and price out our travel there. I have spent almost a week in total on this part of the trip alone.
Part of the purpose of this trip is to share, through photos and journal entries, some of the experiences. So far we taken over 7,000 photos, selected the best ones for the web site, added captions and sent them to my kind cousin Ric who posts them on the web site. John has spent countless hours on journal entries and web links to share the journey. I'm really glad we're doing this, but there's not a lot of breathing room between planning, doing, recording and sharing the journey.
Back to what's going on...
John's out exploring Bangkok on his own. We each need some time apart on occassion, as can be imagined. We're traveling together 24/7 most of the time.
Meeting other people is also a way to ease the strain of traveling together for such a long time, but that hasn't been easy on Khao San Road. When you leave the guest house onto the main street it's a circus - lots of street vendors trying to peddle you stuff, people just arriving or getting ready to depart and taxi and tuk-tuk drivers badgering you to go somewhere. Everyone ends up having a kind of dazed look on their face. Not the best environment for meeting people!
The rain has stopped, for the moment, and shortly I'll be heading back to the Internet cafe to do some more travel planning and to post some blog entries.
posted by Chris at 9:12 AM
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