Counting down

In about ten days time, I'll be leaving New York for three months in Asia. My new employers have kindly consented to me taking the time off, so with the ink still wet on my job contract (we have slow-drying ink around here), I'm getting ready to abandon web services and Windows for wats and water buffaloes.

At the moment, our plans are almost entirely unformed. M. has to speak at a workshop organized by ZiTeng in Hong Kong in early May, and I've been designated as the semi-official documentor for that. After that, the next fixed date is the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok in July, where M. has more work to do. Everything else we have to make up as we go along.

This site is my travel diary. My earlier attempts at blogging at this address foundered when I discovered that my daily routine offered me practically nothing of interest to say to the world at large. I am hoping that travel might offer me a little more to describe, and that trying to update this journal 'on the road' might be a useful exercise, as well as a way of communicating with friends, family, and the occasional random stranger who has been lured in by beckoning robots.

Ten days and counting. I have a new pair of summer pants and a shirt. I have just shot a roll of Velvia through an EOS Elan that Holger was kind enough to loan me to try out, so that I can decide whether it's time to replace my Canon AE-1 (which celebrated its 21st birthday a few months ago) with something a little more 21st century. I have no hat or shoes suitable for the tropics, and my backpack is beginning to show signs of disintegration. My state of preparedness is best-described as "mixed", or perhaps "un".