Organization of the following blogs: 

The Southeast Asia Journey 

and 

The East Africa Journey

and

Where the Travel Bug originated

______________________________________________

The Southeast Asia Journey

Note
During October and November, 2012 I reversed the Southeast Asia Journey blog entries so they can be read as that trip evolved, same as I successfully did with the following East Africa Journey entries. Unfortunately, due to my lousy IT skills, some of it didn't turn out as intended. If you'd like to read the southeast Asia entries chronologically you'd have to go by the dates of each post, starting with Adventures for a Soul with IT Angst in Seoul, of January 7, 2012.

The Southeast Asia Journey is

primarily a quest for (re)discovering one or more of Burma's off-limit Roads.

They are:

• From Imphal in India's Manipur to Mandalay in Burma, hacked out of the jungle by the British during WW II to get behind Japanese lines.

or:

• The Ledo Road from Assam in India to Kunming in China through Burma, hacked out of the jungle and over the Himalayan outliers by American general (Vinegar Joe) Stillwell and his troops, also during WW II to supply Chian Kai Check's army against Mao Tse Tung's PLA (People's Liberation Army).

or:

• The Burma Road from Mandalay through the Golden Triangle to Kunming, China, the famous way of Kipling lore.

   I abandoned several previous attempts to travel those roads because local people got involved. They assisted me in the illegal quest and when the authorities got wise to us I had to give up. Had we been caught by the Burmese junta, who gave themselves the Orwellian-sounding name SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), that would have meant certain death for my local helpers and probably something a bit less drastic for me.

This time, as in previous attempts, for obvious reasons, I'll fudge a few names and locations.

Following this Southeast Asia Journey report comes the one about the 

East Africa Journey 

This is the story on how I lost an eye in Zanzibar during a more than five-thousand mile trip by local means; bus, dallah-dallah, boat, train, motorcycle, walking and rental car, from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia on a zic-zac route to Cape Town in South Africa.

It has been a long time coming!

A little travel-related biography

My journeys are not the result of some latter day midlife crisis. The travel bug stung me already while still a kid.

Before my butt could reach the saddle on my dad's bike by ten-years of age I'd already been to many parts of Switzerland — by bike. The saddle was taken off and a pillow strung around the bar.

In 1949 my brother and I, nine and eleven-years old, were invited to Berlin. Post war Germany at that time was definitively not tourist-travel-ready but our trusting parents let us go by hitchhiking. In northern (West) Germany we found we had to take a plane from Hannover to Berlin because the Soviets, in a Cold War hissy-fit, had closed the border area between West Germany and Berlin. 

Berlin sucked, it was still in ruins and food was something akin to refried sawdust. Although we were to stay ten days, we left after two. 

From Hannover, where we landed again on our return from Soviet surrounded Berlin, we hitchhiked to Hamburg because we had heard of it being cool, then we got to Amsterdam, for the same reason, then Brussels, because we knew we had a cousin there. Since we had neither address nor phone number the elderly man who'd given us a lift to Brussels thought we were runaways thus delivered us to the Swiss consulate. The consulate contacted our cousin. After two days being scolded in his house for having come to Brussels without our parents' knowing it — no international phone calls then — he brought us to the train, got tickets to Zurich and warned us to be good — or else. We left the train after he left, cashed in the tickets and hitchhiked back to Switzerland. 

And so, from those days it went on — and on. By the time I left basic school at age sixteen I'd been to every West European country, except Portugal, Ireland and Greece, all by hitchhiking. The trips were financed from my delivery job in a laundry where I worked after school from second grade to ninth. The laundry changed ownership three times and every time the new owner(s) took over the delivery boy — me — with the inventory.

At twenty I went around the world, mostly hitchhiking, leaving home with only forty dollars. I needed to make traveling funds along the way. Did out-of-the-ordinary things like belly dancing in a gay bar in Beirut, Lebanon, and buying an undocumented car in Turkey, drive it through Iran to Kabul in Afghanistan where I sold it with a profit, just two examples among almost countless wacky stints that could easily fill a blog all by themselves. 

In Japan I worked in movies as an extra and in small roles, wrote articles for newspapers, taught spoken French, sold paintings, — and fell in love. That's where that headlong journey came to a full stop. I stayed almost a year in Japan, became a sushi fan and learned quite a bit of Japanese.

So far I've been to 152 countries, most of them visited intensively. I skippered across the Atlantic four times by sailboat, once singlehanded from England to the US, walked to the North Pole from Siberia, bummed around in the Australian Outback, crossed the Sahara seven times, and lived there three years, walked across the Himalayas into Tibet — illegally, drove a twenty-seven-year old car from Uruguay - Argentina - Paraguay - Bolivia - Peru - Equator - Panama - all of Central America to New York — alone. 

The list is long. The fun intense. I still have a hot love affair with our planet. 

This is to show that the journeys described in this blog are just a continuation of what I've been doing all along — besides rising four kids, much of it as a single parent.