(that noise that cars make as they speed round the racetrack past you)

Trying to weather a ridiculously deflating vaccination program, while getting ready for another 6 months away ... but the recovery naps are winning. So if I haven't spoken to you this week, please bear that in mind.

And that my shit mobile company have binned every mobile phone voicemail I got this year instead of forwarding them to me; the only voicemail that works properly is the one listed in the column to the right on this blog. So if you left me a message - I didn't get it. Soz.

>Today a nurse stressed repeatedly to me the importance of avoiding
>unprotected sex with Ecuadorian men before 19th September. Some days
>it doesn't much feel like reality, does it?

More when I get to Ecuador, where hopefully, the altitude sickness and jetlag will feel just like this does. :)

While I'm tidying this place up ...

water spiral ...........

Tidying. Updating details of how you can write to me, or leave me voicemail (not that you ever do, you buggers. How many cards have you had?)

Sneaking in overdue end-of-journey posts I should have written a month ago...

And begging for tips on places / things you recommend on the next lap of the journey.

And eventually, the mysterioso confusion that reigned here for a year starts to defog ... I'm finally having a crack at explaining what I've been up to over the past year or so on some of the older pages of this blog.

The story is slow in coming, but most of it should be up soon enough .... patience! .... I'm getting to it, okay .... damn, this is taking a long time .... it's probably a displacement activity for packing rucksacks, isn't it .... where was I? Cup of tea .... mmm .... oh yeah, you wanted to read about what I got up to in:

2005: the Pacific
Hawaii
New Zealand
Cook Islands
Fiji
2005/6: South East Asia
Singapore
Malaysia
Borneo
Indonesia
Viet Nam
Thailand
Laos
2006: South Asia
Nepal
Tibet
India

I told you it would take me a while.

struck dumb

I got the address of my host homestay family in Ecuador, and suddenly The Terror has me wondering why, at 36, I suddenly need to speak Spanish?

I mean, I'm British: undergoing total immersion in a language isn't going to work, I should have learnt that at 14.
I'm simply going to revert to sign language and photographs, aren't I?

And there's three days of jetlag plus altitude sickness in which I have to communicate with the Benitez-Herrera family sufficiently to be fed, dried, ignored politely, and any stray insects calmly removed - the point of the escapade is that they don't speak any English, and I ... well, I studied a few phrases on a flight to Mumbai a while back, and learnt 'como dice' and 'buenos tardes'.

And I already know 'paella', 'salsa' and 'tortilla' type words.

'Cerveza'?

I know from stumbling, halting conversations in deutsch (with etiquette-challenged north germans in various konditorei this year) that simply speaking faster and louder in one's home language at someone struggling to follow, leads only to loud and angry altercations where I start shouting random german phrases.

This may not go down well in someone's family home.

Oh boy.

[They have two little girls, aged 14 and 8. I know any Brazilian would always bring a gift when visiting someone's home. Any suggestions on what gift to bring the Benitez Herrera family from the UK?]

equipment errors

You remember my long moan about breaking laptops, mp3 players, health systems, and friendships?

Well, lots of that stuff is still broken. I'm just learning not to blame everybody else.
I sent the mp3 player back, gingerly reassuring myself I still had all the mp3s people sent me stored on gmail, it's the matter of three days solid downloading to replace them ... and was bemused to find the player returned, apparently untouched, but suddenly working.

It wasn't till I went to stay at Lemonpillow's place last weekend that she pointed out (while I was wailing that the bloody thing wouldn't switch off now, and it was fucked, really fucked, and I knew they hadn't done anything to it), that I was pushing the wrong button to switch the thing on and off.

Oh.

route with a gap

Kalaupapa Peninsula

I booked my flight to Quito! 1st September.

Then I confirmed my place on a six week spanish course there.

THEN I looked up temperatures in Quito .... between 8 and 19 degrees, year round.

Aaaargh.

So the next two problems are:

1. How to get across the Darien Gap?

Answer: by sea through the caribbean, I think. I can fly from Surinam's Paramaribo to Trinidad, and I hope boat from there.

2. Where else to go in S America, before I hit central America / the sea.

The places I had wanted to go were Guyana, Trinidad, Venezuela (largely because it's next to the Caribbean / sea routes to central America).
The places I wanted to avoid were the Peru-Bolivia backpacker route (because it's a backpacker gap year route), Brazil (because I've been there, and because you get mugged), Colombia (because you get mugged, kidnapped, knifed, etc).

But the easiest way to travel along the northern bit is the Amazon, which means going via a bit of Peru at least, and via Manaus in northern Brazil.
It occurred to me I'd always wanted to go along the Amazon in northern Brazil, but the other way around, the romantic east-west boat trip to the interior: Recife - Belem - Manaus: and somehow I didn't want to spoil that pristine trip by buggering it up with real factual knowledge of just the exotic bits of it.

Worse, almost every country requires you to arrive with a ticket out of there pre-booked. AKA, you need to decide your time limit and route out of every country before you're allowed into it.
(I know this routine - it invariably means that the FABULOUS places you hear about en route are out of your time-limit and you can't go there.)

So I started reading around the region, and bloody hell:

• French Guiana* and Suriname sound stunning - much more the sort of place I enjoy than Macchu Picchu or the damn Andes.
• Guyana turns out to be one of the most dangerous spots you can go to right now: along the lines of 'don't go ANYWHERE alone'.
• And the Colombian coastal town of Cartagena sounds interesting too.

So now I'm stumped about planning a route across the top of the landmass.
(The other places I really don't want to cut out of the itinerary are Cuba and Mexico.)

How in hell do you cover a ton of countries, with pre-booked tickets out of there, without losing your mind or doing it all too fast?

[* French Guiana is /still/ a French colony.
So it's part of the EU, trades in the Euro,
and the addresses are via France, not the Americas.
Bloody weird.]