Adios Anglia – The Buck starts HERE!!
August 2nd, 2005Yep. The time has come. I dont think I’ve totally got my head around it but in 40 or so hours I will be on a plane to Abu Dhabi. i’m looking forward to a really good hour there & then I’m going to move on. Its not that I think I’ll be able to “do” Abu Dhabi in that short time, its just that I have a connecting flight to Bangkok & it would be foolish of me to miss this.
Saying goodbye to people is perhaps especially difficult because I really dont know when i’m going to be back in the U.K. It might be a year, it might be two. But the flip side to this uncertainty is an enormous sense of freedom. I haven’t got a wife or a girlfriend. I haven’t got a mortgage. I haven’t got a course or a pet or a toddler waiting for me to return. I’m scared & excited in fairly equal measures, and I’m going to miss my family & friends a hell of a lot.
Ok. so here’s the plan, as much as one can really be said to exist. Indeed if I end up sticking to this I’m going to be both surprised & slighty dissapointed in myself for not being more spontaneous/impulsive/foolish. Right, so I fly out thursday morning, stopover in Abu Dhabi, then arrive in Bangkok on friday morning. I’m spending a month at a teacher training college in Ban Phe. I’ve stuck a map that someone else has helpfully labelled here. After that month it all gets a bit hazy! I’m thinking at the moment to spend the 4 or so months till christmas travelling up through Thailand, then back down through Laos and Cambodia, north through Vietnam and along the Chinese coast to Japan where I hope to spend the holiday season with some friends. Along the way I may well ease myself into teaching with some short-term or vountary work. At the beginning of January my folks are going to meet me for a week, probably in Vietnam, and after that I’m going to get a proper teaching job somewhere & settle down for a while.
I know I’m going to look back at what I’ve just written above and laugh in the weeks and months ahead. Ah well. What will be will be.
hope I haven’t bored you all with a long post without any entertaining pictures. I will post up some photos of my goodbye drinks at East slope and the Bull & Butcher in the next few days.
Cheers for reading. The Adventure is about to begin.
The Buck starts here…
The Dude