Changeable South-Easterly

If you've looked at some of my older posts, you'll have seen my efforts to develop a route to drive round the world, and noted that I haven't gone yet.

The main reasons, in descending order of importance, are as follows:
1) I didn't find anyone to go with. I only looked among friends and acquaintances, not online because I was sceptical about working out from a fairly short meeting whether I could spend months with someone. I thought about going alone, but didn't reach that point, because...
2) It isn't as easy as it sounds. You need visas, mostly in advance, from the edge of Europe to either Thailand or Namibia. The "Stans" on The Silk Road most notably. That rather turns a voyage of discovery based on happy accident into a tightly-scheduled route march. The Americas are a notable exception to this. In addition, there are impassible bits a vehicle would need to be floated past: Atlantic, Pacific, Myanmar, Darien Gap.
These all conspire to make dragging a vehicle round the world seem quite a chore.
3) Global economic meltdown, well at least its implications on getting a job on my return.

So I thought I'd look at the big trip a different way. No vehicle, which means public transport. Solo, which means one has to stay in hostels to meet people. Standard backpacking, then.

I didn't know if that would suit me, so I gathered 5 weeks off work to trial-run this new style of travel.

Then I met Clare and everything changed. Her employer will let her take a 6-month paid sabbatical, to which can be added a month's leave, but she's currently making a new role her own, and so can't go until 2012.

6 months obviously isn't long enough to see the whole world in depth, but South America currently seems a good fit, particularly due to visa-ease. That would mean going for the early part of a year to hit the Andean summer. Clare and I are starting to consider taking the first half of 2012 off, returning in time for the Olympics. We'll need to compromise between our different aspirations, as it'd quite likely be a once-in-a-lifetime thing for both of us.

So now I'm not thinking of backpacking solo the way I was, and so I don't need my trial run of that style. I do have my month of leave booked, though. Clare only had a week's leave, so we went to the Caribbean, as I wrote last time.

Clare isn't attracted to the Far East, but I am. So that makes it a good thing to do when she can't come. To get the most out of my trip with the least organisational overhead, I decided to go on organised tours.

Hence I'm writing this on a looooong flight to a 3-week trip to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

This involves a lot of flights, taking my tally of airports travelled from, to or through from 66 to 72 (as close as I can reckon):

5th-6th Nov Heathrow (LHR)-Bangkok (BKK) TG911
8th Bangkok-Phnom Penh (PNH) TG584
11th Phnom Penh-Siem Reap (REP) K6101
13th Siem Reap-Hanoi (HAN) VN842
17th Hanoi-Hue (HUI)
20th Danang (DAD)-Ho Chi Minh City (SGN)
24th Ho Chi Minh City-Bangkok TG551
24th Bangkok-Heathrow TG916

Here goes :-)