laurie was here

I needed to have a departure ticket in hand in order to enter Indonesia and I was headed there in less than 2 days, so I’d been seriously putting it off, mainly due to general indecision and flakiness: in the past 36 hours my post-Indonesia plans had changed from Borneo, to the Philippines, to India, to Northern Thailand.

But with no time to spare I figured out what my next step will be, and I couldn’t be more happy with how it shaped up: I’ll be flying into Singapore, then taking a long, long train ride all the way up to Chiang Mai. I had totally forgotten that trains were an option for international travel over long distances, but once I remembered they were I knew I had to do it.  I’ll be covering all of peninsular Malaysia and pretty much all of Thailand on the way up, and the journey will take 4 days at the very least, though most likely I’ll take longer. I’ve never done a long train ride like that before, and I’ll get to see some ridiculous landscapes and eat some terrible train food. It’s a month away but I’m really, really excited.

So for the first time this trip, I’ve reluctantly pre-committed to a departure date for somewhere I’ll be visiting (although what I’m doing in Indonesia between that time is totally undecided).  As it stands now though, I’m leaving for the island of Bali tomorrow, June 17, and I have a flight booked from there to Singapore on July 16.  We’ll see what happens in that month…