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I’m Headed to South East Asia for a year…

The headline says it all. My wife and I have rented out our home, given away our car, taken leaves or quit our jobs, and are in the process of packing and storing everything we own. I’ve been waiting to announce it until both of our workplaces and friendship circles are in the loop - which now they are. (image credit: wikipedia)

January 28th, we head from Winnipeg to Victoria and visit friends and family until Feb. 1, when we head to Singapore. From Singapore, our intent is to explore Malaysia for a few weeks before heading to the jungle river deltas of Bangladesh to meet up with the Hands On Disaster Response volunteer crew, working to get communities back on their feet after the devastation of Cyclone Sidr. Were hoping to be there at least a month.

From Bangladesh, its to Bhutan (home of the measure “Gross Domestic Happiness”), and then likely back to Bangkok and the Indochinese peninsula (Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos). Depending on finances, we’ll likely end up in Taiwan for an extended period where friends in place already can help us land gainful employment.

During this time, my hope is to live the wandering blogger / entrepreneur’s life: laptop in hand, I plan to continue writing here (and elsewhere), and working on my various projects as time and Internet availability permits.

I’m hoping that the exposure to new people, places, languages, foods, ways of living, societies, religions, and so on provides creative impetus for my next decade of entrepreneurial and career growth, as the academic greenhouse of university life did for the last.

One fascinating thing about this trip already is the how deeply intertwined it is with technology. The volunteer group? Found via digg and a YouTube video. The bulk of my communication with friends in Singapore has been via SMS. My wife and I are packing a laptop, several digital cameras, and signing up for a Flickr Pro account. We’ll be staying in touch via VOIP calls via laptop, email, Facebook, and SMS. We’ve got generally awesome hands-on accounts of everywhere were headed from the thousands of travel blog posts that have been written.

The last time I went traveling for an appreciable amount of time was 11 years ago, for a six month trip to Australia. At that time I didn’t even have an email address. One thing is abundantly clear already (see the previous paragraph!), before even getting on a plane: The world has been fundamentally changed by 11 years of the internet. As one plans a trip like this, you can’t help but feel at times that the world has gotten smaller as result; those moments, however, are balanced by the fact that for every moment of perceived smallness, you’re introduced to a thousand places, people, and opportunities that you’d never have known about otherwise.

So: I hope that you’ll join me in exploring a new part of the world by keeping an eye on this blog - which I hope to populate with great tech content from an entirely new perspective. If post volume here has slumped over the last few months, I apologize in advance: the act of decommissioning one’s life is complicated and eats up a tonne of time. If post volume continues to vary wildly, I apologize for that too, and blame it on the vagaries of connectivity and the availability of beach-side bars.

Thanks to everyone who’s read, commented, or otherwise participated in this blog to date - I’m looking forward to keeping it going in 2008!

-R

travel volunteering

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