Prologue

Well, here I am, sitting down to blog. For someone who was never into the e-social networking phenomenon blogging is pretty low on the totem pole - the mimes of the entertainment hierarchy if you will; pretty much bottom of the barrel, with the possible exception of Peruvian Street Bands.

Regardless, I thought I'd give it a try to serve as some sort of documentation for my trip. It's always easy to snap off a bunch of pictures while traveling but I never seem to sit down afterwards and organize them in any sort of functional way. At bare minimum it'll let my mother know I'm still alive... so she'll enjoy reading it even if the rest of y'all don't.

Anyway, to try to keep this short a brief summary for those not in the know: I got laid off a bit ago, after 9 years working at Orqis. During that time I think I had two vacations that were longer than 1 week in length. So I figured I'm long overdue. I hightailed it over to the Southern Hemisphere for a bit of rock climbing, exploration, and copious amounts of fantastic Asian food straight from the street vendors. My basic itinerary should look something like this:

New Zealand: Auckland, Wharepapa, Christchurch
Australia: Sydney and the Gold Coast
Singapore
Indonesia: Jakarta, Bali, Komodo, Java, Sumatra
Burma
Thailand: Krabi, Chang Mai
Laos: Luang Prabang, Vientiane, Vang Vieng
Cambodia: Phnom Penh, Angkor Wat, Siem Reap
Vietnam: Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh