Leaving for an Adventure in Asia

Last summer a friend of mine - Drake Mailes - and I had a long day packing up the supplies of the Boy Scout camp at which we were working and began talking about traveling the world. We bounced around ideas of places to which we could travel and, slowly, the conversation morphed, I don't know how, into where we could travel the following summer. Initially, we talked about taking the Trans-Siberian railroad from Berlin to Beijing before traveling around Asia.

A couple of days later we were in London - the camp was in the UK - and we walked by a travel agent's office. We looked at each other.. And walked inside. We only talked to the travel agent for a minute and the price we were quoted for the Trans-Siberian railroad was, well, rather exorbitant. However, we didn't let this deter us, we just started talking about alternatives that might be cheaper. Finally, we decided on a trip to Southeast Asia, specifically Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia.

I'll be honest. This trip almost never happened. When I returned from the fall in Ecuador I was spending so much of my time simply getting readjusted to the thing called 'school' and the 'homework' associated with it that I stopped thinking about the trip and the summer started to approach at lightening speed. But, Drake stepped back into the picture, searched for flights and was nice enough to keep me in the loop through phone calls, emails and text messages. Before I knew it, tickets had been booked and dates had been placed on the calendar.

This adventure, concocted at camp where we were working on too few hours of sleep and while we were walking around the rainy streets of London, starts in just over 6 hours when I leave for the airport. Well, that's only partly true... The true adventure starts after my 6 hour flight to LA, the following 12 hour layover and crossing the International Date Line (IDL) during the more than 15 hour flight to Taipei, Taiwan where I will arrive just under 48 "hours" (including time change "hours") after I arrived in the airport in Washington, DC.

However, this is probably all just part of the adventure - my Asia adventure where I won't know any of the languages and will be fearful of the mosquitoes, but hope to see new things, learn a new phrase and come away knowing more about a part of the world that's 'home' to more than 500 million people, yet which I know so little about.