The beginning

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Tonight is my last night sleeping in my own bed. The next time I am in a bed, I will be almost exactly 5000 miles away. I have my bag packed, sitting on the floor ready to go. Three shirts, two t-shirts, two pairs of pants, one pair of shorts, and three pairs of socks and underwear. Tomorrow afternoon I will be sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to Osaka on Asiana Airlines. The first leg will get me to Incheon airport outside of Seoul, where I have a short layover before the second flight into Osaka. I was fortunate enough to get this flight with miles accrued from several years of flying back and forth from Cleveland and a trip to Tokyo a few summers ago. When I get into Osaka, it will be around 9:00 at night, and after customs and an hour or so long train ride to my the J-Hoppers Osaka Hostel, I will hopefully be ready to get to bed around 11:00 pm to get a good nights sleep before exploring the city in the morning.

This first night will be the start of about two weeks in Japan, where I will make my way south down the coast through Kyoto, Kobe, Hiroshima and Fukuoka. From Fukuoka, I will take the fast Beetle ferry to Busan, South Korea. My time in South Korea will be split into about a week in the south, and then 5 days in the Seoul area. I will then board a flight to Beijing. I will spend the most time in China of any of my destinations, about a month. The path I will take will lead me from Beijing to Xian, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Guilin, with a few stops in between. From Guilin, I will board a train to Hanoi. In Vietnam I will have about a week in northern Vietnam around Hanoi, about a week in Hue and Hoi An, and another week around Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong delta. From there I will go to Phnom Penh to begin a week in Cambodia. The bulk of that week will be in Siem Reap and Angkor Wat. The remainder will be split between Phnom Penh and Battambang. The next stop is Thailand, where I start in Bangkok, from where I will make my way north to Chiang Mai. After a week and a half, I will move on to Laos where a slow boat will take me down the Mekong to Luang Prabang over the course of two days. After a few days I will slowly make my way to the capitol Vientiene. I then have about a week and a half to spend somewhere in Thailand, to be determined, after which I will fly to Tokyo to meet up with family for nearly three weeks before heading home, Nearly 4 and a half months and many thousand miles after I started my journey.

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Photos

My Gear
22 Pounds of clothes, camera equipment and all the stuff I will be living off of for the next four months.