Two opposing ideas bash up against each other in my head. One: I've decided that I want to end this RTW trip around the end of this year. Two: I have no idea what I want to do after I finish travelling.
At times earlier in this trip, it felt like revelations about my future life were coming together; since arriving in Asia however, that feeling has disappeared. Through travelling, I've learnt a lot about myself, more than I would have believed possible, but learnt relatively little about what my place in the world should be. And the serenity I felt in the Cameron Highlands, that feeling that it didn't matter where the world brought me - that calm doesn't have quite the same clarity right now.

It is of course an immense cliche to finish travelling with no idea what to do next, one I had hoped I would avoid; but cliches are remarkably sticky. I perhaps wonder that my not doing much volunteering or stints of working during this trip was a big mistake - perhaps they would have given me more ideas. But, equally, it always felt like there was a lot of world to see, always the next place calling from the horizon.

There's no need to grieve for me, however, as my immediate next step after travelling has I think been resolved (if all necessary visas are granted). When I met Louise back in April, she was deep in the process of applying to Australian universities to do a masters degree in tourism management. The University of Technology Sydney has now offered her a place - but on the basis that she attends and passes the pre course eight week English course. This is annoying for her parents, who have to pay for it, but neatly good for me. Louise is planning, assuming visas work out, to fly to Sydney at the end of November. I was thinking I'd want to stop my travelling around that point - so I took this to be a lucky coincidence and will be flying to Sydney at the same time. So now I have an end date for my trip and know the start of the next chapter - looking for a job in Oz. I am very happy with how things have worked out, although a little nervous about how able I will be to get a fun job in Australia. It is going to be more of a challenge, I'm sure, than getting an English teaching job in China, Japan etc. But the idea of living with all the options great city like Sydney offers, with a place of my own to live in, and being able to drop the backpack for a while is immensely appealing.

To say goodbye to solitude...?

I am more nervous about going to Australia than I am about India. I will no longer be a rich man, will no longer be special (in fact I'll be English, so the lowest of the low), and also I will have to choose one job or another. I am going to have to spend some time thinking about how to make this period of working (and hopefully earning some money) worthwhile.

The only job-type activities I've done on this trip are managing a language school, English teaching and writing these articles. All were enjoyable; I think the first one is closest to what I ideally want. But equally, I also have various other things that I want to do in my life, apart from doing whatever my ideal job turns out to be. There are a number of places in the world that I'd really like to live in for a while - Vancouver is probably at the top of that list. I'd like to spend at least a couple of years doing something constructive for the world. And there are lots more places that I'd like to visit.
For, it's not travelling that I'm growing tired of - I have little desire to return to London. Rather it's backpacking I'm getting exhausted of. I mean backpacking as a particular method of travelling: moving around all the time, staying in hostels, not making many plans beyond today's meals, typically having a fairly shallow understanding of the country one is in. I'd like the next bit of travelling I do to be fairly non backpackery. I am thinking this would entail doing lots of researching and planning during the saving up process, decide on several places I'd like to do something in and maybe spend about a month in each - so see one or two places in each country, rent a flat and doing something that seemed meaningful there. That could be learning something, volunteering, or just enjoying buying food, reading books and being a part of a community for a while. Maybe simply going to eight places and spend a month in each learning their language.

I'm well aware that the best parts of this trip have been when I've stopped somewhere for a while and sought out some unique or educational experience. However, as a French traveller recently said to me, it's strangely difficult to change the nature of a trip once you've begun it. Being part of the backpacker world influences one's decision making process - even if one resists, it's hard not to think about a good trip or being a good traveller in terms of number of places visited (and their relative exoticness). One's past budget decisions also become constraining - one feels obliged to have some consistency in one's decision making over time. Splurging, even if you are comfortable doing it at that moment, seems to make a mockery of all the past scrimping and hardships (and vice versa for abstaining, once you have got used to luxuries such as fresh coffee most days). Trips seem to acquire a life and character of their own - so I hope through a different plan and vision, my next trip will be quite different from this one. I think doing this trip this way was inevitable and completely for the best - I needed to learn about how I like to travel, needed to see a fair amount of the world to feel relaxed about not seeing the rest of it. But I am looking forward to a slower and hopefully deeper second RTW journey. I may even buy a suitcase with wheels, as part of the mental cleansing process.

Not sure when this second trip will be, it will require a fair amount of saving up. But that's something to wonder about in the future. The real point of coming to Australia is not working or earning money, but to relax after all this time on the road, and, most importantly, to get to know Louise properly. I only spent three weeks with her in China - living with her will be a whole new adventure.

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After writing the body of this entry, I've thought a bit more about what I might want to do post travelling, and was a bit surprised about how many ideas came up - both for Australia and other parts of the world once my working visa runs out. Perhaps all this backpacking has been more beneficial than I thought - perhaps it took deciding on an end for the trip to make my mind process all these things. I would write about my ideas now, but, newly born, they sound so sketchy and rambling that I'd prefer to wait a for couple of posts before I tell you more. Right now I'm back in Bangkok sorting out visas, a ticket to India and going the dentist. Tonight I head up to a quiet corner of Chiang Mai, with the intention of spending the next two weeks taking yoga classes - so sure a lot of my thoughts will congeal better soon.

Daniel, 17 August 2004, Bangkok