I had no idea, but after 15 hours on the over night bus from Luang Prabang in Laos down to Huay Xai the border town where I first entered the country I really hoped so, and I looked still shaking sleep from my eyes to the seats in front of me where my travel companions sat, unlike most of the westerners on the bus we had an advantage, Pong speaks Thai, and joining him on his trip between Spicylaos and Spicythai in Chiang Mai made this the easiest trip I’ve made.

I still felt a little like sheep in a flock just going with the flow, but this time I feel like at least we have a shepherd who knew what was going on.

I didn’t really notice it was valentines day to be honest, unlike back home where every shop seems to be selling you something seasonally related, out here in the east it’s just another day. Though a few girls in the hostel decided to treat themselves to cheese and wine, an oddity in Asia generally but in Laos a welcome legacy from it’s years as a French colony but for me the 14th had a different meaning, my last day in Laos, by 5:30pm along with two friends we were paced onto the local V.I.P bus and set off on a gruelling journey.

When we first got on the bus I chatted briefly with the Canadian girl next to me, pleased with myself for been able to pick out her nationality more by the phrases she used then by accent alone. But it wasn’t long before the sun was setting and they turned the lights out on the bus, and a lull in the conversation lead to ear phones in and music on. I listened to the new Sigur Ros album which I was happy to have picked up from an Icelandic friend during my time at Spicylaos, but disaster struck when my batteries ran out soon after the album had finished and so my in motion entertainment was cut sadly short.

Two things stand out about the journey, firstly the bus was filled over capacity, and 4 or 5 people were sat on little plastic stools that were placed in the aisles as needed, keep in mind this is a 15 hour sleeper and you’ll see how hard work that must be for the people sitting in them, who ended up slumped in half sleep leaning onto and over the seats either side of them.

The other thing you notice once away from the cities is just how poor the roads are, the route already weaves through the mountains but the bus constantly needed to drove from side to side to avoid pot holes, and in parts the road was all but non-existent. When people back home moan about where all their road tax and the like goes they should be thankful they actually have roads. thinking back to my trip down the Mekong where you pass villages with no road access at all and a picture of just how little development there has been in much of Laos.

Getting back to Thailand I felt much more at home, once again ATMs were with in reach and seven-elven was there to make shopping for the essentials easy. Though a day later with the inital buzz gone I find that I miss the more relaxed pace of Laos.

Overall Laos was an interesting experience for me, I intended to just chill out but actually ended up been busier there then any place previous, thanks to the people I met there

As a traveller one of the most difficult decisions you have to make us when to join new found friends on their route as they move on, or continue on your own path. I backed out of my original purpose of goign tubing, and decided against returning to Chaing mai via the plain of jars and instead stayed an extra couple of days and return straight to Spicythai, a place I think of as home away from home right now. So far I feel like I’ve always made the right choices.

First, to bring my progress upto date, long story short with all the protests aginst the now ousted government in Thailand my flight was delayed and finally rebooked for the 9th, but some where along the line that actually got booked for the 8th, so last night at 3am as I was about to finish a late night coding session and decided to check in online, found it telling me the flight was the next day, and had a mad panic to throw everything together leaving a lot of mess in my wake (Sorry Mum!) I had a nice easy day in mind to just tie the last few things together and going for carvery, but instead here I am, sitting in Doha tapping out a blog post.

So far it’s all been a bit dull to be honest.
Manchester Airport: Seen it before.
Fly to another country on my own: Done it before.
Doha Airport: Seen it before.
The Dark Knight in flight movie: Seen it before.
Hancock in flight movie: New!

Yes, so far the highlight of my trip has been watching Hancock, which was surprisingly good, and i’d recommend giving it a watch.

When I finally make it into Bangkok this afternoon I still haven’t decided where I’m going to head on the 11th, it might be a little close to the full moon to head to the party on Koh Phangan, so perhaps my initial track of heading to Koh Lanta – one of the quieter islands to the South West of the gulf of Thailand – might be the best option to get some sea air and just chill out for a few days while I chill out and plan some more wild adventures and work on some website stuff.

Oh and the food in Doha Airport is terrible, not because it’s strange, but because the quality just seems very poor – I’ll have breakfast on the next flight though, and worst the coffee chain in residence is Costa Coffee, which I loath. Why couldn’t it be Starbucks?! And I have no idea what the exchange rate is or anything, so just avoiding buying anything here for now.

The plan right now is to fly out on Thursday, Qatar Airways have been very helpful and rebooked my flight without question, so now I am hoping to fly out at 2:05 pm on Thursday the 4th,the only real down side is an 8 hour stop over in Doha.

So this leaves me with a few days to do some final packing, something I was going to have to rush yesterday, and it means I might catch a few people I didn’t quite manage to in the last couple of weeks.

I’m also going to work out an alternative route, probably via Malaysia, so if the delays continue, I can get moving – One way or another I want to be out of the UK by Friday.

It’s all good fun though, and I’m just going to sit back and see what happens, and has meant instead of a quiet night out Friday and just showing my face at last nights antics in town, I’ve been able to have a great night out and see 2Many DJs, and a Awesome night out in town.

The idea of getting out to various festivals abroad is something I’ve been playing with for a while, so it fits neatly in with my long term travel plans.  So my map has been updated to reflect the new destinations.
I have a handful of music festivals  already in mind for my trip, and while I doubt I could do them all, due to the cost and the time it would take to drive between them all (Which I’m sure could be done, but I’d rather move at a more leisurely pace) at this stage of planning it’s all out getting as many options as I can down on paper so I can pick them out when I start looking seriously at a plot able route around the world.

The list of Music Festivals I’m looking at currently includes:

Sziget  in Budapest, Hungary.
Fuji Rock Festival in Japan
Burning Man in the US (Not strictly a music festival, but deserves a place in this list)
Glastonbury in the UK
Iceland Airwaves in Reykjavík, Iceland
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK

There are a couple more that I’ve missed off the list since I don’t have the details available yet, but will add them in the near future, along with any new suggestions people make.

Fuji and Iceland will be tricky since I can’t drive there, so they will most likely form parts of other trips to those regions via plane, Iceland in particular I’ve been wanting to visit for a long time now so it’s a shame that it can’t be reached by land.

Glastonbury is already on my current festival circuit, along with a number of smaller festivals in the UK, but is added for completeness of the list. Huddersfield as well is perhaps an unusual choice but the events I’ve seen as part of HCMF I’ve seen for the last couple of years have been amazing and unique gigs.

All the rest have real potential to form part of my route at some point and will probable one of the leading factors taken into consideration when plotting destinations.

Still, I can’t do anything about war zones, but the other problem – not been able to drive though Russia at more then 43 miles per hour, I have a solution for.

After talking about it with friends last night, the solution as I sort of mulled over in my post is to travel west. This solves loads of problems in one go – Firstly, I can fly to over the Atlantic, and buy my camper van there. As a result, I get right hand drive which is a bonus considering most of the world drives on the right, and I’ll be able to drive all the way home without having a massive ocean crossing at the end.

This also means that if I travel around the US, Central and South America for a year or so, I should be able to hit Russia with the two years driving under my belt I need to drive at full speed.

It does seem to be the wrong way to travel, but I wonder if that’s just because as a European we tend to head over land towards the East, where as from the US, people would head naturally West as for them thats towards the biggest land mass. So that’s something that I should do a little bit of research into.

War and unrest on the other hand is more wide spread then I really ever thought about, Iran, Libya, Iraq, Sudan and a many other places the Foreign Office tells you not to travel to block Europe from some of the places in Asia I’d like to visit and make moving through Africa tricky as well. The solution is to drive though Russia for a good portion of the journey.

Looking over the Foreign Office Travel Advice pages makes for some very gloomy reading at the best of times, and while it does provide some useful information as to areas that are particularly unsafe to travel too, I think you do need to read between the lines on many of the entries as it’s clearly written to ensure that you can’t come back and say you weren’t warned about a situation by the government. Just reading the entries for France and Spain – places people visit with out giving a second though to – you’d get a very uneasy feeling.

Then there is another hickup – If you haven’t been driving for more then two years, the speed limit in Russia is reduced from 60ish miles per hour to 40ish. One option might be to go West rather then East, which would mean starting in the US, heading down, then back up and across to russia that way, if I take long enough I’d be able to drive at full speed by the time I got there. An additional perk of going the wrong way would be meeting people going East and finding out good places they’ve just passed though.

Nothing here makes for a real solid assessment, it’s all just ideas and random thoughts still at this stage. I’m planning on picking up a good size world map to stick on my wall so I can pour over something a bit more tangible. And finding all these issues has made me look at the world a bit more closely, and give a lot more thought as to the more practical aspects of world travel.