Travel Dreams: The World

A big part of the joy of traveling is the dreaming part; where do I go next?
I'm loving living in Santa Fe and will continue writing about it for as long as I live here, but I am also beginning to plan my second trip around the world. With the economy the way that it is, I'm afraid that if I don't cash in my frequent flyer miles now, I may not have the opportunity later. Already the airlines have upped the number of FF miles needed for an around the world trip.
Earlier in this blog I wrote about my last round the world trip travelling east and including Peru, Egypt, Russia, Madagascar, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Bhutan, Tibet, China, and Hong Kong.
This time I hope do do things differently and I would appreciate your advice about any aspect of the trip. My blog allows you to add your comments at the end of each section, so please do.
As in the past I will travel to countries I have never visited, but this time I will travel west. Here is a tentative plan for the trip.
1.Indonesia, focusing on Borneo
2. Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand
3. Bangladesh, Eastern India, and Nepal
4. Eastern Europe, Greece, and Egypt
5. Southern Africa
6. Central America
Also different, I'm thinking about traveling for a year (beginning Jan 2010) and taking my cat (Big Kitty) along.
If this becomes a reality and as things develop, I will include them in my blog. Hopefully other travelers can learn from the many mistakes that I seem to make while traveling. It's all part of the adventure.
Happy Trails from Ramblin Me

Santa Fe Where "Different" = "Normal"

After 4 months of wandering around Santa Fe, I'm starting to realize why it is aptly called "The City Different" and why it feels like coming home to an oddball/eccentric like myself. Just a few examples of how anything goes:
1. The calendar of upcoming events for a week in the local paper included Tibetan throat singing, Irish folk dancing, a Wiccan [good witch] celebration, Hannukkah on Ice, and an introduction to Kabala.
2. Buying cat food at Petsmart, I saw a woman dancing with all her heart to the 70s rock playing over the PA system.
3. In another store a 50+ year old woman with blue hair and a pink feathery jacket over layers of clothing told me that she "just felt like going back to her punk roots today."
4. The rodeo grounds and stadium are next door to the community center which contains an ice skating rink, 4 indoor swimming pools, gyms, and an expresso bar.
5. The average person here is by no means average. Most are Native American, Spanish, or Mexican, with white anglos in the minority. There are lots of tall lean older folks with long hair and dressed with flair and character. They are great looking, distinctive, articulate, passionate about their beliefs, but with a wonderful dry sense of humor. It's where all the good looking hippies have come to retire.

Los Alamos Final Notes

Before leaving the subject of Los Alamos, the town where the atomic bomb was invented, I highly recommend that you read Joseph Kanon's murder mystery titled, "Los Alamos." The story is fiction but the setting is Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project while the bomb was being developed and tested. It is a terrific read as well as a love story to the area around Santa Fe and Los Alamos. It makes you want to visit the area.
On a personal note; my visit to Los Alamos was an unexpected link to a part of my early life. When I was 5 years old, my family was sent to live in Japan as part of the US military presence there following World War II. It was only a few years after the US had dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan that ended the war. My family couldn't get military housing, so we found ourselves living in a Japanese mountain village where very few people had ever seen an American. There should have been so much hatred and resentment, but the experience was one of the best of my life. Visiting Los Alamos was like coming back to the origins of that experience.