New Destination(s)

As has been the trend for this entire undertaking, plans are changing... this time, quite vastly.

The original post-Australia plan was to depart from northern Queensland to Port Moresby, New Guinea, and then fly from there to Honiara, Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands. My long-standing interest in the history of the region made it pretty high up on the to-do list; thus I was pumped to be able to explore it.

Then I found ticket prices.

It turns out that because it's such a small place, and because relatively few people travel there, flights in are extremely expensive; they hop from place to place picking up as many passengers as possible before landing. Obviously, this ups the prices; the cheapest thing I could find was a roundabout voyage jumping from city to city in Australia, over to New Zealand, all the way up to Fiji, and finally to Honiara. The price: $1200 USD.

For obvious reasons, this nixed my plans for the region; New Guinea was a little cheaper, but add in a flight out of the place and the cost was still much more than I was willing to pay. (Traveling around the world on less than seven thousand dollars doesn't lend itself to much flexibility, I've found out.) I'd been weighing several other options, so I looked for alternatives. I found them.

It's official: I'm going to Thailand. Yesterday I bought a ticket from Brisbane to Bangkok (with a bonus stop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.) I'll leave on March 24, a week from today's date.

There's several awesome things about it that led to my decision:

1) Southeast Asia is extremely inexpensive. I've talked to a number of people that've traveled there and it's legendary for being cheap... the exchange rate is huge, and I've heard of rooms being rented for less than a dollar a night. With my funds starting to drain rather rapidly, this is appealing. Very appealing.

2) There's a bunch of different countries in close proximity to one another. Besides Thailand, there's Burma to the west, and then Laos and Cambodia to the northeast and southeast respectively, and Vietnam on the other side of them. To say nothing of the compelling recent histories of the regions, that's gonna be a crapload of cool stamps in my passport.

3) A good buddy of mine is gonna be in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He's on a missions trip during the month of April, and it'll be a chance to spend some time, swap stories, and discuss our bet. (Before our respective departues, we threw down a gauntlet: whichever of us slays the greatest beast in our travels gets treated to a steak dinner with beer and celebratory cigars by the loser. His boot-crushed tarantula is winning; so far I've mashed an ant. Southeast Asia is a good place to work on that.



So the end result is that the last week of March and all of April will be spent in somewhere I never planned on going. What else is new?