A QUICK RECOMMENDATION...

Don't study Russian and Mandarin at the same time. The sounds of one are so fantastically different than the other, that it takes a full 10 minutes to contort the inside of your mouth in the right direction to switch.

DETAILED MAPS: NORTH AMERICA (#1)

Back to the beginning... the first phase of the journey will travel from the east coast of North America to the west coast, crossing 11 states and one Canadian province (British Columbia). As mentioned before, I will be stopping in Chicago to check in with Blindsided Books, and hopefully some sort of book launching event in an independent bookstore. More on that later.

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I am also going to be stopping in Seattle after two nights on the "Empire Builder" train from Chicago. This weekend I will meet my host, who I found through Couchsurfing.org and will actually be my guest here in NYC. I am looking forward to that, as well as a couple more days in the Emerald City.

As you can see, borders will not be a big part of the first few weeks, with only a simple United States to Canada crossing on land, and maybe some customs formalities on the cargo ship before leaving.

DETAILED MAPS: AFRICA

Have I ever mentioned that I like maps? A million times?

I realized that a lot of people were asking me about specific routes and that I had not explained it any better than with this very rudimentary map a couple months ago.

So I decided to start making better maps of how I think the journey will go. It's too much fun and a good break from redundant research. I have a keen interest in borders and movement, so I have color coded red the travel and borders that I will cross on land, and blue for water. I start with Africa:

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DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS...

I apologize to anyone that has actually missed my posting recently. I've spent quite a bit a time the last two weeks in bookstores copying out minute details from Lonely Planet guides and the like, and none of that is particularly interesting like stories of places and people accompanied by photos can be. I've also had some other things on my mind recently, and not this. I'm steadily working hard though. It's coming together. I started my first Russian lessons last week and kicked myself in the ass to work harder with Mandarin.

The good news though, is that I have a gigantic spreadsheet now full of information about schedules and such for all the places I will travel in Asia, Europe, and Africa, the culmination of a lot of work! I still need to work on all of Latin America, but I feel momentum on my side.

The realities of all this detail has caused a couple small changes in my routes, and put into higher definition some other places that I only vaguely thought about, especially in Africa. As stated before, I am hoping to avoid large cities as much as possible, and Africa is by far the best continent to do this, as rural life is altogether more interesting than urban, not to mention more genuine in my experiences so far. It will be hard to limit myself to the four months I have alloted to reach Cape Town from Tunisia, mainly because of all the interesting possibilities I have read about and most certainly will run across when traveling.

Movement has to be a priority though.