On Boxing Day morning the biggest tidal wave in a century hit South East Asia, killing more than a hundred thousand people and making many more homeless. The tidal wave, caused by an earthquake on the bed of the Indian Ocean, inundated coastal areas of Thailand, Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka. Seismologists are predicting aftershocks over the next few weeks.

My initial reaction - apart from sympathy for the victims - is that I should still go. Pulling out now would leave too big a gap in my life and my bank balance. On the other hand, were the Foreign Office to formally advise British nationals not to travel to India or Thailand, my understanding is that I would be uninsurable - but I don't think that's likely to happen.

My travel plans are already well advanced, and, if things go to plan, Chris and I will fly out to Bangkok from Heathrow on 9 January. We'll have about three weeks in Thailand before flying on to India. On the middle leg we'll be flying with Sri Lankan Airlines, and the Bangkok flight doesn't connect with the Delhi flight, so we'll be stopping in Colombo for a night and adding a fourth country to our travels, albeit briefly. This leaves us six or seven weeks in the subcontinent before we head home on 18 March. We are leaving the option of visiting Nepal open, considering the security situation in the country at the moment. I would be very disappointed not to visit Nepal, but both Chris and I are looking forward to trekking, so if we decide not to go to Nepal we will more than likely trek in Sikkim, in the Indian Himalaya.

Chris and I had our first brief brush with the legendary Indian bureaucracy a few weeks ago when we went to collect our visas at the Indian consulate general in Birmingham. It was an interesting appetiser of India, a place where Hindi and Brummie voices mixed, with endless, pointless queues and a faint but inescapable smell of garam masala. Sitting in the queue waiting for our number to be called, I felt the same excitement as I sometimes do sitting in an airport departure lounge, waiting for my flight to board.

In preparation for my stay in India, I have begun to learn Hindi, which isn't as difficult as it initially seems - it's an Indo-European language like English, so much of the vocabulary and grammar are already familiar, and the Devanagari script, which might at first sight look like a load of squiggles, is actually a beautifully elegant, straightforward and totally phonetic way of communicating the language.

All of this might be academic, of course. We'll have to keep ourselves up to date with the situation in Asia. If we do go, we'll have to deal with not only the culture shock of arriving in a new and totally foreign and unfamiliar place, but also the shock of arriving in a new, foreign and unfamiliar place in the aftermath of a major disaster. In a more practical sense, one cause for optimism might be that the devastation, although severe, seems localised. Essentially only coastal areas - the west coast of Thailand, around Phuket, Sumatra, the east coast of Sri Lanka and the southeastern tip of India - have been affected, so we could avoid those areas, or visit them as late as possible.

You'll know as soon as I do.