On The Road Again

My sharply trimmed beard has started to look a bit more scruffy, my clothes a bit dirtier, and my stomach a bit bigger. It is time to hit the road again.

The first thing I did when I got up this morning was pack my bag. Ten minutes later I was staring at an empty room and a full bag, and for about the hundredth time this trip I was marveling over the fact that everything I have fits into a 35L pack.

My emotions are pretty mixed right now. I guess the positive ones are a good place to start. I am excited to be traveling again. I have spent the last nine days doing very little aside from eating, working out, eating, watching movies, and eating. Therefore, due to this lethargic lifestyle I have developed, I am ready to continue my journey.

I am feeling quite a few negative emotions as well. For one, I am traveling again. Spending the majority of the last two weeks living in a house, driving a car (well being driven in a car), and hanging out with a friend who was not just a travel buddy, but an actual friend from home was really wonderful. It reminded me of all the things that I had been missing about life in Seattle. Second, I am headed to Myanmar (Burma) in a few hours, and while I am excited to be going there, I am a bit nervous about what I will find when I arrive. I have met tons of people traveling through Southeast Asia, but out of everyone I have met I have only met one person who was tentatively thinking about traveling to Burma. So while it is easy to travel in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, I am not sure if Burma is going to prove to be the same. I find the prospect of traveling around Burma for a few weeks without meeting any other travelers to be quite frightening. I guess when it comes down to it I am clueless as to what I will find when I get there. I do know that once I leave Yangon finding email service is going to be difficult in most places, and that the government often blocks access to email services like Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. As such, I doubt I will be doing any blogging from inside Burma. If that is the case, this will probably be the last post for about three weeks.

So that's it right now, a pretty mixed bag. Excitement and fear pulsing through my veins as I prepare for traveling through Burma.