Introduction
I came down to Earth with a bang in summer 2004. I had signed a contract with a top music manager in Los Angeles, California and what looked to be a promising future in rock and roll, ended up falling apart, but not before I had sold all my belongings and quit my job. All of a sudden I had nothing and didn't know what to do next.
Earlier in the year, during the negotiations for the aforementioned management deal I went to a party in London to say farewell to my mate Joe, who was going on a one year round-the-world trip with his girlfriend Wendy. It was something he had been saving his money to do for years. I always remember him saying he would do it one day and he did. I really admired that and at the end of the evening as I left the pub and wished him bon voyage he scribbled down a website address. This would provide anyone who visited with information on where Joe and Wendy were on their trip. Consumed by dreams of rock and roll stardom in the USA I didn't think much more about it until that fateful summer day when I learned that my dreams were not to be. At least not the way I had imagined.
One day in August I thought of the website that Joe had written down and decided to have a look. What I saw changed my life completely. Although I had said that I always wanted to travel I had never done anything about it and reading of Joe and Wendy's adventures made me want to go so badly I couldn't think of anything else. I couldn't sleep I was so excited. It just seemed like the right thing to do at exactly the right time. I still had a little money left and I spent my days reading every single entry that Wendy had written in that travelogue, starting in Asia. I was so totally involved in it I felt like I was living the adventure with them, so I sat down with a pen and paper and worked out how long I would be able to go away for with the money I had and where I could go in the time I had. I looked through a few brochures that organize backpacking-type trips and they all looked great, but all the trips I wanted to go on overlapped, so it was nearly impossible to plan 3 months. I decided I would take a leaf out of Joe & Wendy's book and go "freestyle". It would take some guts, but I always imagined what it would be like to do Michael Palin's job, but without the TV crew of course! Now was my chance to see if I could do it.
Joe and Wendy felt like travel companions for the weeks that I read their blog and every morning I'd be up early in anticipation to read the latest updates and feeling disappointed if there weren't any. What interested me the most about their travels was South East Asia. I decided that was where I wanted to go and I worked out that 3 months was as long as I could afford to go for. I emailed Joe to tell him I was going travelling and it was him & Wendy that had inspired me. He gave me some good advice and told me some good tips and information. After many forums and travel websites I decided to make my own way around Thailand, Cambodia and Laos and on November 15th 2004 I boarded the Thai Airways flight to Bangkok and had the adventure of a lifetime with a return date set for February 14th. Well, what with one thing and another, I didn't make it to Laos and I returned home on January 13th and if you read my travelog you will find out why. I do hope to get there one day though.
This travelogue describes the life-changing journey I embarked on, inspired largely by Joe and Wendy. Thank you so much.
Before reading, let me explain the reason for the apparent switching from present to past tenses, which is grammatically incorrect. The initial entries in my travel diary, which formed the draft for these pages were partly entered whilst I was living the situations I was writing about and partly at the end of my day during dinner or a quiet moment in my room, catching up on the day's events. I have decided to leave the tenses of my entries as they were originally written in order to convey the feeling of living through the experience as you read it, rather than just a story of what happened two years ago on my travels. Unfortunatley I stopped making entries after December 16th, so I have decided to write a summary of events for the period of Dec 17th 2004 to January 14th 2005.
