Basketball at Midnight

As of about 14:00, KL Time, today, Friday, 8/8/08, I was thrust forth from my den of responsibility and obligation into a new period of self-willed exploration and adventure.

It took me nearly 6 hours, until 20:00, to achieve the bare minimum to make me feel that I will be able to survive the next 2 months, 18 days, and 12 hours (roughly).

Itinerary

Let me begin immediately with the practicalities of the next 2.5968 months.  If you take my paid-for plane flights as a rough itinerary, I will making the following journeys:

• On 12-August, I will fly from Penang, Malaysia, to Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia: a stable, north-central city on the coffee-rich island.
• On 16-August, I will fly from Peka Bharu, Sumatra, Indonesia (yes, it reminds me of Pekaboo, too) to KL, Malaysia.
• On 18-August, I will fly from Singapore, Singapore, to Bangalore, India, which is central-south and on the Deccan Plateau.
• On 20-August, I have the option to fly to Mumbai, India, which is West by Northwest.  The “option” is a result of various failures to be explained later.
• On 17-September, my friend, Becky, flies into Delhi, and I have promised to save the Golden Triangle to travel with her.
• On 7-October, Becky flies out of Delhi.  I have not promised that I will see her off.
• On 27-October, I fly out of Delhi, stop over in Newark, NJ, and then continue down to Greenville, SC, where my parents will hopefully pick me up.

That is all of the booked plane flights at the moment.  Sometime in November, I expect to take my long awaited motorcycle trip to Austin, TX.  Sometime in November after the Austin visit, I expect to be back in St Louis.

What you, the reader, might expect now

From my current view, I will probably take the next few days to recover from the crashing down of reality (saving that for a future post), and I expect to replace or repair things lost, dropped, and broken.  You will probably get several blog posts in the next four days, after which I’ll be returning to my traveler’s routine that, I believe, had me writing an average of twice a week.  My travel plans, aside from the time with Becky, which will be more or less on the Indian tourist track, should keep me most frequently off the beaten finster.  I think that style of travel has traditionally led to some of my most introspective posts.

I may try to contact a school in South India that I have been donating to regularly to see if they are interested in a visiting teacher for a few weeks; however,  I have to admit that it would be hard for that school to be further from the two areas I am most interested in visiting: the Northwest (Kashmir and Leh) and the Northeast (Darjeeling and the more frontiersy states).  We’ll see what happens.