Why am I leaving this wonderful place again?

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Welcome one and all.

This is my first post to my brand-spanking-new blog. I've decided to keep a blog for the rest of the year as I travel around the world (or at least those parts of the world that I could fit into twelve months).

Why a blog? Well, the short ansewer is that I'm lazy. With a blog I can post the address to everyone who might be interested and then they can check back whenever they're interested. It also means that people don't get flooded with random emails from me as I travel, which hopefully means I don't end up on too many friends' spam lists by the end of the year.

Of course, knowing me, the reality is that I'd be likely to start writing emails regularly, then gradually trail off as time goes on, until I haven't written anyone an email for six months and nobody (including me) has any real idea of what I got up to in my year circumnavigating the world. Hopefully, by going to the effort to set up this blog I'll do a little better in keeping up regular bulletins about what I've been and done.

Anyway, I leave tomorrow to travel around the world for about eleven months. I'm using up all my holidays and long service leave and won't return to work until February 2011. I will make it back to Australia in December, which will give me a little bit of time to enjoy a Sydney Summer after all the travel.

I've wanted to do a trip like this for about five or six years, and this year just seems to be the one where everything aligned: work wasn't exceptionally interesting; I had a huge amount of holidays saved up; I'd finished my postgraduate studies (for now) and also been made a Chartered Professional Engineer; and I really needed a break ( obviously the most important part of the equation).

I started out, back in July, wanting to do three things: trek the Inca Trail; climb Kilimanjaro; and trek in the Himalayas. Suffice to say that my goal posts have shifted since July as I started to flesh out the trip; what is the point of going all the way to Tanzania to climb a mountain if you're not going to see the rest of central and southern Africa? Of course, I may have been listening to Toto's Afica at the time and become a little excited.

So, eleven months on this wondering voyage.. what are the plans?

I'm glad you asked.

I fly to Buenos Aires tomorrow, leaving at 11 am and arriving at 10am the same day. From there I'll do a little bit of time in a Spanish Language School before going north to Foz de Iguazo and south to Tierra Del Fuego. I'm going to spend most of February travelling north through Patagonia, before heading up to Bolivia and Peru. I'll walk an alternate route to Macchu Picchu and check out the Nazca Lines and Lake Titicaca and the Amazon Rainforest. Then I'll fly up to Quito and head across to the Galapagos Islands.

Come the 14th of April I'll be flying to Mexico City. I'll spend a couple fo days there and then push south down through the rainforest and ruins and end up at Playa del Carmen, close to Cancun. In early May I'll fly up to the USA, head to Las Vegas and Denver, before seeing some of those big East Coast cities everyone always talks about: Boston, Washington DC and New York.

10 June will see me flying to London, and I'll spend seven weeks tripping through Europe. I'd like to see a bit of France and Spain, but I don't have any real plans for the Continent.

At the end of July I fly to Nairobi and spend the next couple of months travelling through Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. I'll see gorillas, chimps, big cats, climb Mt Kili and maybe even do a cage dive with a great white shark...

Then, at the start of Octrober I fly to Delhi and travel up into the Himalayas. Once in Nepal I'm going to do the Annapurna Circuit and Everest Base Camp, then make my way down to India again to do some more exploring. Finally I fly out to Hong Kong for a couple of days in luxury before I arrive back in Australia, sometime around 20 December...

Whew, that makes me tired just thinking about what lies ahead of me.

In the meantime, I've been lucky enough over the last week to be reminded that Sydney is a great city, with wonderful beaches, cool cafes, decent pubs, and a pretty good way of life. I'm sure I'll be looking foward to getting back home by the time December rolls around.

Anyway, I write this at 2am on 20 January. I'm meant to be up in about 4 hours to pick up my dad from the airport so that he can take my car back to Yass. Guess it's time to get some sleep so I actually make my flight.

Next stop Buenos Aires.

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