Summer Holidays - the introduction
Well, it seems that my last but one LJ post made me look a bit of a plonker... You see having put the first hints out there about planning a bit of travelling virtually six months ago to the day I formulated some plans. I plotted, I planned and then I discussed it with friends...

Well, that's what I thought had happened. After that recent post and everybody going "Whu!!!" I realised that in fact I hadn't really said much at all. Nobody seems to have a clue what is going on but there is a consensus that it is jolly interesting and I should tell you.

Well, three weeks later I'm finally getting around to it.

So, the big plan goes something like this...

On July 5th I'll be leaving this country and flying to Shanghai. hendybear has offered to put me up for a bit so I am going to abuse his hospitality to recover from jet lag and acclimatise to the different culture and climate. From there china is only vaguely planned (ie no definite dates and places yet) but I have provisional ideas.

From Shanghai I'm goign to go up to Beijing and see the sights and then across to Xian to do likewise. From there I am wanting to go to Jiuzhaigou for the extreme prettyness and then make my winding way back east, hopefully via some buddhist temples atop mountains where I can learn the arts of kung fu, down the yangtze river and through the three gorges and ultimately ending up in hong kong for the 31st July.

On 31st July the solo part of the trip finishes and I meet up with other people in hong kong. This includes mi_guida (H) who is virtually a native there (having lived there for a year (or was it more?) about ten years ago. I think we will have two others at that stage, G and R (not the R that quisalan always talks about), but I'm not sure. I think R even has an LJ but I'm not sure what it is... I should mention I'm yet to properly meet either of those two as well. :)

After a week in Hong Kong the trip sees H, R and I heading back through china on our way to Hanoi, via Nanning. Hanoi will hopefully inclue a trip to Halong Bay which again is very pretty (part of my plan was got from just looking up UNESCO sites on the web).

AFter Hanoi we continue down vietnam to Hue and Da Nang (which I am told is famed for tailors so where I will pick up some nice clothes I hope). Ho Chi Min City (saigon) beckons after that and following that we head up into Cambodia, primarily for Angkor Wat though stopping off at the capital and Chambok eco-tourism center.

Then we hit Bangkok which I am hoping will be a little more stable than it is currently. If its not I suspect we'll spend more time in the previous places and then nip in to bangkok just to ninja our way onto the final flights which are on the 27th August. I believe we lose R at this point and H and I complete our holiday with a stop off in australia.

We're going for a week in sydney where H's godmother is (well, she is near it anyway) and I'm hoping to be able to bump into a couple of people I know (erikarn has suggested he might be in town for his birthday which would be randomly cool).

We then take a week up in the north of australia somewhere around Cairns. This is the final relaxation where I'm hoping to spend a lot of time on beaches learning the australian arts of keeping your beer cool.

The flights back are on the 10th/11th September and then I'll be collapsing somewhere and back to work on the monday like nothing ever happened. Well, except that I'll hopefully be bouncing at everybody for the next month or two (or three or...).

Its going to be awesome.

I'm very worried about getting stuff sorted but H is being a wonderful organiser - she had similar independant plans which mine have merged with so while I'm wandering around china she is making her way through moscow, mongolia and many other places before getting to hong kong. She has thus been wonderful in such things as compiling lists of things we need to do, timelines of when stuff needs to happens, what we need to do for visas and taking my list of places to go and making a plan out of it with dates and other useful stuff.

So yeah, that's my plan. Maybe some more stuff about it later. Things like why I'm goign to various places, more detail on it and that sort of things. I take requests if you want to ask me about anything big enough to post about. Or just ask me small stuff that I'll answer in comments. :)

So yay!