I have rarely left my house in almost four months here at home in Michigan. No luck at jobs around here, not even an interview. I’ve decided I’m going to get out of the house for a while and take another trip while I’m still young. This will give me another chance to see many of the places I’ve missed before.
Since Oasis Hong Kong Airlines went out of business last year, I thought I was out of luck on cheap flights to Asia. Fortunately, I found the next best thing: Hainan Airlines. The 4th largest Chinese airline started flying from Seattle to Beijing in June of 2008. Next year they will start service from Chicago, but for now I have to make a few connections. I found a good deal that packaged all the connections together (thanks to kayak.com) for $503 one-way.
I’ve been preparing. This summer I received new visas to India (5-year) and China (1-year). I bought two travel guides, checked out another five travel guides from the library and took photos of many pages. I’ve upgraded my laptop from 1.5GB to 2.5GB RAM and the hard drive from 160GB to 320GB; dual booting my laptop with Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.5; bought a new wireless card for the laptop that is supposed to be compatible with both operating systems. I’ve also upgraded my main PC with a Seagate 750GB hard drive, but it crashed about two months after I installed. I got a replacement and that is up and running again.
Chronological summery of my trip from September 2007 – June 2008:
- Japan = 21 days
- Korea = 10 days
- China = 60 days
- Thailand = 30 days
- Cambodia = 20 days
- Vietnam = 11 days
- Thailand = 5 days
- Malaysia = 6 days
- Thailand = 3 days
- China = 51 days
- Singapore = 3 days
- Indonesia = 15 days
- Thailand = 4 days
- Taiwan = 15 days
