Last Preparations

I'm now one day away from my departure. I'm pretty much finished with all of my trip preps and have just been enjoying my last few days in San Diego. On Friday, I had a bunch of friends over for a great farewell/MBA graduation/out of the Navy party. I'd like to thank everyone who came out for the party. It was great having all of you celebrate with me Friday night.

Apart from finding a good book, getting some traveler's checks and a few last calls to friends and family, I'm all set to head out Tuesday evening. Here are my thoughts on the final preps I've been doing over the last 2 weeks.

• Gear: This was the fun part. Got lots of great stuff to take with me on the trip.
• Camera: Nikon D40: I love taking pictures and having been thinking about getting a DSLR for a a few years now. So far I love the pics I've been getting with it. Much better in low light than what I was getting with my point and shoot. Although its only 6 megapixels, I think the picture quality and size is more than enough for what I need. For photo storage, I bought a photo connector for my Ipod. This will allow me to download pics from my camera directly to my ipod. Although the reviews said it was slow and drained the battery, my tests downloads have been very good so far.
• Clothing: My goal was to go with a minimalist packing list. For the main part of the trip, I'm bringing 5 pairs underwear, 3 travel shirts, 2 t-shirts, 2 pairs of pants, lightweight windbreaker, and a pair of sandals. For the hiking portion, I'm bringing 2 pairs of long underwear, 2 long sleeve shirts, hiking boots, and 4 pairs of socks. I plan on renting/buying cheap gear in Kathmandu once I get there. After I'm done in Nepal, I plan on sending all the cold weather gear and hiking boots home to save space. (Hopefully, the Nepalese postal system is reliable!) Whatever else I need, I can get on the road. My primary goal with clothing was to get breathable, dark color clothing that will dry quickly, not show dirt and keep me as cool as possible in India. I did end up soaking most of my stuff in Permethrin, a insecticide for clothing.
• Packing Stuff: To keep my pack more organized on this trip, I gave in to my anal retentive attention to detail and bought a bunch of Eagle Creek organizer bags. This should help to save space in the pack and help to keep it a bit neater.
• Vaccinations: Thankfully, I'm all done with my shots. Hopefully, they'll keep me safe. For malaria, I ended up going with the Larium pills. It's big advantage is that its a once a week pill. The downside is that it causes depression and hallucinations in a small percentage of people. I actually met a girl last weekend who saw demons after taking them. So I started taking them last Monday night with a bit of trepidation. On Tuesday morning, I was grateful to awake neither being depressed nor seeing little green men.
• Travel Insurance: This was the first time I actually went out and bought travel insurance. In the past, I've either felt comfortable with my current insurance or wasn't really too worried about where I was traveling. Although you can insure just about any portion of your trip (lost luggage, delay, etc), I decided to only go with medical and medical evacuation. The big challenge with that was actually finding a company who would cover me for high altitude trekking. Most companies all have a disclaimer about not covering trekking above 4000M. The highest I'm supposed to be going is 5500m. I ended up talking with the travel insurance consultant at the Boots N' All website and he set me with a policy from the International Medical Group. I got $500,000 worth of coverage for $235. It sounded like it covered me for just about everything. Hopefully, I want have to use it.
• Photosharing: I'll be using Flickr. After checking out the rest of the websites, it seemed like the best in terms of actually showing your pictures to other people. Unlike a lot of other sites it lets guests download high resolution copies of the pictures and doesn't require them to sign in. My favorite part of the site is the map. When organizing your pictures, it gives you the option of using Yahoo Maps to tag the location of your picture. You can then view a map of the world showing where all of your pictures come from. Besides seeing your pictures, it also has a cool "Explore this Map" function which lets you see other peoples pictures that have been tagged to that location.
  

My Thoughts on Trip Planning

Research: I didn't start really researching this trip until the end of June (2.5 months before I was planning on leaving). Realistically, I should have started earlier. I initially started off using a Rough Guide India and a Lonely Planet Nepal that I bought. However, I found that the new interactive online communities have transformed trip planning. The best resources by far were the Boots N' All and the Lonely Planet Thorntree online forums. The wealth of knowledge provided by travelers is a great help in determining where the best places to visit are and what you really need to bring with you. Additionally, it also gives you real time information on good lodging options that a hard copy guidebook just can't do.

Vaccinations: This is the main reason why I wish I would have started the trip planning process earlier. When I called the Navy travel clinic in San Diego, it took me 3 weeks to get an appointment. Luckily, I had already had my first Hepatitis A shot a few years ago (otherwise I would not have had sufficient time to get the full series). I ended up getting a whole batch of shots: 2nd Hep A, Bacterial Meningitis, Polio, Japanese Encephalitis, Rabies, and Typhoid. I just barely had enough time to complete the Japanese Encephalitis and Rabies shot series.

Visas: These were surprisingly easy. You basically have three options, you can either go to an embassy/consulate yourself, mail them to consulates individually, or pay a service a small fee to do it all for you. I didn't want to spend 2 days in LA bouncing between consulates and it sounded like it could potentially take a long time to send my passport to consulates. So I went with option three. For ~$50, Visa Express got me visas to both India and China within 1 week. I was pretty impressed with their service.

Travel Tickets: Initially, I was planning on piecing together an itinerary myself using Mobissimo or Kayak. However, when I started pricing the leg from Shanghai to Nepal, it started looking prohibitively expensive. The cheapest tickets I was seeing were in teh $1200-$1500 one way ball park. That astounded me...as it was more than both the San Diego to Beijing and Delhi to San Diego legs. I ended up going with Airtreks, a travel agency out of San Francisco, that specializes in low budget dirtbag travel. They got me a flexible ticket with all 3 of those flights for $2450 with all taxes. I was really happy with their service and highly recommend them.


That's all for today...will cover Insurance, Gear, and Photo/Blogging websites in my next post.

My Upcoming Trip to Asia

As many of you have already heard, I'm going to be getting out of the Navy at the end of the month. By now, if you've gotten the link to this site, you've also probably heard that I'm going to be leaving San Diego on September 11th for a 3.5 month trip to China, Nepal and India. This blog will serve as my journal to share some of my experiences (everything from the incredible views I hope to get of Everest to the "Delhi Belly" that I hope to avoid) with all of you. As I make my way through Asia, I plan to update this every few days with some of my latest stories and a few of my favorite pictures. So I hope that you come back frequently to check out what's new and where in the world I happen to be.

By now, you're probably asking why I'm already writing when I'm 3 weeks away from leaving. You're right, I'm not going to be writing about the trip. Instead over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing some of my thoughts with regards to planning for a trip like this.

I've had this trip in the back of my mind for the last 2 years. Ever since I went to China in 2005, I knew that I wanted to see more of it as well as India. The part I loved most about that trip was that everything was so new...everything from the food (hmmm....dumplings), the language (had to learn at least a little bit of Chinese to get by), the way people interacted with each other and the history. I love to learn and every day on that trip was a learning experience. Up until a stop in Chengdu (Sichuan province), I never even thought of traveling to India. But while I was there, I met a Brazilian couple who amazed me with their stories of the 6 months they spent traveling around India. As one of the great cultures as well as being an up and coming country today, it sounded like a great place to visit in the future. Originally, my plan was to follow the Old Silk Road through the less touristed western part of China before crossing over the Himalayas to make my way India. Unfortunately, due to a past conflicts between India and China, crossing the border there wasn't an option. That soon changed into my present plan: 2 weeks in China (between Beijing and Shanghai), 3 weeks in Nepal (Everest Region) and 2 months in India.

So now that I figured out where to go, what went into actually planning the trip? Below is a list of the main tasks (organized by lead time) I needed to accomplish to get ready for this trip:
1. Research (everything else starts after this)
2. Vaccinations (lots of diseases out there that you need to be aware of)
3. Visas (surprisingly easy)
4. Travel Tickets
5. Insurance (confusing)
6. Gear (So many toys, yet limited funds to spend on them)
7. Blog/Photo Sharing Websites (much better than the last time I traveled)

Over the next 3 weeks, I'll be talking about my how I took care of each of these areas in planning for my upcoming trip.