Why did I go through all the trouble to put up this website about my trip? you may be wondering. After all, I am no great adventurer, no Heinrich Harrer. Anyone can travel where I did. Nor am I a supergenius, a great writer, or an expert in the areas I visited.

But I maintain that everybody has a unique perspective on things, so this is my $.02.

Mostly, it was a scrapbook for myself, since I have a lousy memory and I figure that if I'm going to take 10 months off and travel the world, to places that might not exist when my grandchildren are born, that I should try to remember a lot of it later.

My travelling companions, Anton and Sherril, took almost all of the pictures, and most of them were slides. Since it costs $8 to make a print from a slide, I realized that the only affordable way for me to make copies for myself was digitally. So I rented a slide scanner, and typed in my journal from the trip (saving my future self the eyestrain of reading my handwriting). I typed in straight html, adding img tags for the pictures as I went. I chose pictures that illustrated what I had written about, but I found that as I looked at the pictures they jogged my memory, and therefore the pictures drove the story as well.

Also, I noticed that there are very few good non-commercial travel sites on the Web. Or good photojournalistic ones. While mine is not much better than other amateur "here's where I went on vacation" personal sites, at least I put some time into it.

Forgive the typos and poorly worded phrases; some of the writing makes me cringe, but I just don't have the time to polish it all. I could spend months tweaking it, but that would be ridiculous. It's a stream-of-consciousness thing.

I'm no designer either, so I did the best I could. My designer friends, Jenny Martinez and Toby Hilden, pitched in with some graphics: Jenny made the maps and the homepage icons, and Toby made the compass navigation graphic and the title banners for the countries.

Me waiting (Asia-squat-style) after we got a flat tire in Cambodia.

Anyway, none of my family and friends got to see a slide show from the trip, so here it is. I also hope this information is useful anybody who's thinking of travelling in general or especially to these countries. And anybody who's already been to these places might be interested in comparing notes. Finally, this is for those of you who are curious about what things are like in other places but would never want to deal with malaria, bedbugs, or carry-on chickens.