Preparation

With less than two months to go I have realised there is a lot of work involved with taking such a long time off. Imagine that.

We are going to need advance Visas in order to be let in to some countries so that is pretty high on the list. Fortunately we are able to fill out a majority of them online, which is a great thing, unless you have a weird passport like me that crashes the application form. That struck me as a kind of funny, since I thought internationalisation support would be high on the list for an e-visa application, but that may just be me. I hope the paper based one copes better.

Vaccinations is another thing that is a pain, quite literally. Since we'll be covering a lot of ground, we'll need a lot of vaccinations, and they are not the most pleasant ones either. In fact, I count 7 individual jabs, all done over a period of 4 weeks. Is there no UN resolution about that? We've both already caught the jab-flu once and with a couple left, chances are we'll get it again. But at least its not swine-flu.

One thing that has not been that much of a problem is getting all the gear we need together. Turns out we are quite good shoppers. I'm typing this on our netbook, which we bought just to bring on the trip so we could keep on updating this very blog. We've also hunted for other travel essentials as first aid kits, trekking shoes, walking sandals, proper clothing, swiss-army knives, stuff-sacks, sink-plugs . This list goes on and on - and then on for a little bit longer. And I haven't even mentioned all of the other electronics we're bringing either, that list is fairly long as well :)

Good job we got proper backpacking backpacks that can take a lot of stuff.