Grad school ended, which was fun.

Reflection is in order at this momentous juncture, some unflinching analysis of the past two years and where they've left me. How did this lump of coal turn into a diamond? How did this flannel-clad naif, fresh off the bus with a backwards-facing baseball cap and stem of hay pinched between his teeth, turn into the leather-sheathed vanguard of rockness you see today? Was I truly welcomed to the jungle, or ensnared by it?

Thankfully embracing my new status as a holder of the most respected and academically rigorous degree on the planet means not having to dwell on such matters. Onward, my friends and followers.

Dom and Jonnell were married under the auspices of adoring friends, family, and several billion gallons of water droplets plummeting from the upstate New York sky.

Much like the other wedding I attended on this trip I was pretty bad about taking photos, opting instead to run around having fun. This doesn't mean, by the way, that if I come to your wedding one day and take loads of pictures that I'm not enjoying myself.

To be honest I was too relaxed and preoccupied having fun to take many pictures of this trip, but that's not regretful, it's satisfying.

I went to negotiate peace in the Middle East once and for all but got sidetracked driving around Israel.

I collected some simple data from my trip, now presented in the style of Harper's index:

Length of trip in days: 89
Days spent in transit: 35
Nights of accommodation paid for: 46
Nights stayed with parents: 20
Nights stayed with friends: 14
Nights slept on planes: 4
Nights voluntarily slept at airports: 3
Nights involuntarily slept in car: 1
Total number of flights: 24
Hours flown: 93
Airlines flown: 9
Airports used: 19
Separate occasions using Hong Kong International Airport: 6
Upgrades to business class: 0
Boarding passes disposed of before deciding to save them all: 2
Countries visited: 10
Countries newly visited: 7
Friends seen: 35
Triangular coin types encountered: 1

You can view the full tracking spreadsheet here (minus friends' names, for privacy) and export to .csv for your own data analysis if you like.

And now some closure. The ample solitude and lack of responsibility presented me with an uncommon opportunity to reflect and take stock of my life... which I didn't do. In a way that's odd, since I'm in a state of great uncertainty, bordering on confusion, and faced with some immediate decisions, or lack thereof, that will impact my life in significant ways for years to come. In another way it's not odd at all: this was a trip whose simple purposes were to take advantage of flexible logistics and see places I probably won't be able to conveniently visit for a while, and being too preoccupied with home was a surefire way to make sure I didn't enjoy those places while away. It's evident by my ramblings here I only succeeded in deferring that contemplation, not avoiding it. I hope you enjoyed being a part of my therapy session, please give your $10 copay to the receptionist.

Now that I'm back home in London's tepid embrace I will post a longer update about my trip, but in the meantime you may enjoy this video which composites most of the random moments of boredom, bewilderment, or (less commonly) design when I decided take some footage on my lil' point n' shoot.

I really thought this would be the second time I'd titled an entry with a Kids in the Hall quote, but after several minutes of searching the archives, I think we're breaking new ground here.

Later western visitors had the good taste and legal standing to peruse Aitutaki more thoroughly, but it didn't really make a name for itself as a getaway spot until it served as a stopover for the predecessor to Air New Zealand on their "coral route" - a flying boat service between Auckland and Tahiti favored by the rich, famous, and fabulous, at least so say the romantic chroniclers of postwar commercial flight. Before visiting I wondered just how far the word had spread since then - after all if I had heard about it the cat must be fairly well out of the bag.

There are two factors though that limit Aitutaki's buzz within the mainstream tourist circuit.

First, it's hard to reach. Flights from a single origin - Rarotonga - operated by a single airline - Air Rarotonga - service the island a handful of times per day, and many of those have a capacity of only a dozen seats. Add to that Rarotonga's relative remoteness itself - outside of Polynesia you have three options for departure in the southern hemisphere (Auckland, Christchurch, and Melbourne) and only one in the northern (Los Angeles) - and interested visitors will need either a fair amount of time combined with little regard for budget or an inordinate amount of time and compatible existing regional travel plans (that's me).

Second, there's a lack of any coordinated marketing. Rarotonga serves as the focus of the promotional effort for the Cook Islands' government and big businesses, something which requires all the resources the tiny nation of 20,000 has to offer - there's not much awareness left for Raro in the "Pacific island" cordon of the geographically distractible minds of western tourists once they've been pounced upon by touristic juggernauts Hawaii and French Polynesia (Tahiti and Bora Bora form one heck of a branding combination). Aitutaki is left with no budget at all.

Both of these factors stem from a root cause, alluded to above, which is Rarotonga's dominance of Cook Islands politics and resources (the large elliptical capital island even has both kinds of buses around its perimeter: clockwise and counterclockwise). Whether adherence to the traditional tribal patronage of outer islands to their national chiefs or the imported democratic entitlement from being the seat of the national legislature and purse (and home to 75% of the country's population), Rarotonga has final say over international matters concerning Aitutaki. That would be less of an issue were so many Rarotongan resorts not in direct competition with their neighbors to the north, and not so free with their donations to Rarotongan politicians, lawyers, and lobbyists. New entrants too, mostly of the foreign variety, find their aspirations to develop on Aitutaki stymied and rerouted to Rarotonga, and for a price at that. Even if they persist, negotiating a lease from local Aitutaki landowners requires consent of the extended family and takes years at best.

From a purely selfish perspective though the loss to Aitutaki's hospitality industry is the gain of the "independent traveler" seeking to revel in natural splendor while avoiding tourist traps. The satellite map of the massive lagoon alone should be enough to spark cursory research from all but the most hydrophobic. It doesn't disappoint.

Because the fewer than 2,000 local inhabitants have no alternative (following the demise of a banana export scheme 30 years ago) they have managed to make some progress against the best efforts of the federal government, and tourism is the predominant industry on Aitutaki, and perhaps the only real industry at all. I've heard from some who stayed longer than my single week that this causes some resentment below the surface, but superficially I noticed none. The effect of disenfranchisement shows in the island's demographics though - as young adults leave for university and economic opportunity in the associated state of New Zealand (where more Cook Islanders reside than in the Cook Islands themselves), most never to return and those who do only upon retirement, this home for centuries is slowly aging and depopulating, a microcosm of the country as a whole.

The real miracle of the place is that it's the least touristy destination you'll find that depends heavily on tourism. The causes working against developers noted above - cronyism, bureaucratic recalcitrance, and having to coax one tiny shorefront partition at a time - keep the resorts small, usually under 30 units, and the locals free from those obstacles lack the means to open more than modest bungalows or guesthouses. The result is a loose patchwork of lodging ranging from home stays for NZ$40 a night to beach-front villas at NZ$2300 but without any preeminent establishment, location, type, or aesthetic.

Add to that the scale of the island and its lagoon (large, as avowed by yours truly, who decided it would be a good idea to circumnavigate the 22 miles of the main portion on foot in 92 degree humid heat) compared to its guest population (small), and it really does seem relatively untouched and socially old-fashioned. I repeatedly encountered the same fellow visitors, sometimes accepting scooter rides from them, and ordering lunch from a local once is enough to warrant a follow-up conversation in the market the next day. The missionaries of the nineteenth century, especially the Seventh-day Adventists, found the hearts of the natives as fertile as the volcanic soil, and as a result the island is pious (almost too pious - I landed on a Sunday to protesters bearing signs and campaigning for the cessation of the single inbound flight on the sabbath), quiet, and free from modern distractions. I even had to ask my host on the way to the airport my final day whether they had mobile phone service on the island, as I'd not seen one the whole week (they do).

The ultimate reason for coming, modernity aside, is for the jaw-dropping natural setting of the giant lagoon and its surrounding islets. It's hard to represent properly in pictures, as it's expansive and flat, and can't provide the photographic meat front-and-center as I'd like, but I tried. You will be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful backdrop over which to flee from a charging billy goat on a motor scooter your stubborn self finally rented after walking 22 miles in 92 degree humid heat.

So Vanuatu sits astride the Tropic of Capricorn, a chain of 82 diverse islands free from the taint of tourism except for a few towns and the eco-adventure mecca of Tanna island. Some of the younger generation have learned to hustle a bit for the foreigners' dollars but in typical Melanesian nature they do so gently.

Vanuatu is not some lost kingdom however. The familiar sounds of T.I. and 80's-era Madonna fill the radio waves, and the infrastructure is there to support any traveler not too finicky about exact timetables or electricity. Of special note is the custom of family-owned beach and village bungalows being rented out to and meals prepared for guests. For around US $30 per day one can get a beach-side hut and three tasty square meals. That's what I did, and I liked it, despite my having to in turn provide hundreds of tasty square meals for mosquitoes.

If you're in the region with time on your hands, check it out. It's one of the most relaxing places I've ever been as evidenced by these pictures.

Saturday morning the only non-cartoon on television was a political news hour in Italian directly from Rome, followed directly by the Greek equivalent (then by a Nickleback video which, in its level of intelligibility, might as well have been Greco-Roman). These shows aired on one of the four local terrestrial stations, not a foreign satellite package.

But all of that said, as a tourist you don't normally come to Darwin for the rainbow coalition. You come for Kakadu, Australia's largest national park. That's why I went, and that's, with two exceptions, what I took pictures of.

Kakadu's the size of a small country and contains within its borders rock plateaus, swamps, monsoon forests, grass wetlands, waterfalls, billabongs, a huge gamut of fauna (including wallaroos and more small lizards than I knew existed), and some prominent examples of aboriginal art. When the sun sets you can drive for half an hour in the twilight without seeing another pair of headlights, the up-tempo metronomic tick of panicked jumping toads hitting the car's front grill the only reminder that while you may be the only person for miles you're far from alone. I did it a great injustice by only spending a few days there.

Preferences for or aversions to adventure notwithstanding it's a marvelously picturesque place (but be forewarned: the pictures I took are also marvelously monotonous if you don't like cityscapes and sunsets).

Hong Kong book-ended a three-day trip to Singapore, which I expected to be completely sterile and engineered. Parts were - zoning laws seemingly keep all residences separated from noise-generating commerce and nightlife, and I did notice a lack of chewing gum on sale at convenience stores - but others I found to be surprisingly organic and raw (Little India and the food hawker stands are prime examples). Plus being a visitor one gets to enjoy all the convenience and modernity of the city-state without suffering the lack of press and speech freedoms, or worrying that it's a democracy only as much as the Lee family defines it. On that note, I once wrote the following in response to the mention of how Singapore represented Rovian political theory at its most extreme.

If Karl Rove is a student of political manipulation and will to power, Harry Lee is a tenured dual-degree Ph.D professor emeritus with a lifetime campus parking spot. I'm still dumbstruck that a privileged Cambridge-educated lawyer initially aligned with a conservative, almost reactionary, British-sympathizing political group could so cleanly and quickly defect to a communist-populist ideology (though ostensibly socialist, since communism was outlawed - staying within the letter of the law while blithely ignoring the spirit is a Lee hallmark). And how expedient it was that he did so, and founded the PAP, the same year the British started letting poor people vote.

His eldest son is the current Prime Minister, the other is CEO of Singapore's largest company, the majority of which is owned by a holding company ($55 billion in assets and growing) with his daughter-in-law at the head. He drove almost every erstwhile ally into exile and/or disrepute (and why stop at a smear campaign: Devan Nair even claimed to have been drugged). He restructured the judicial appeals process after a ruling didn't go his way. In 1969, perhaps overtaken by the free-loving flower power zeitgeist, he abolished trial by jury completely. He effectively outlawed every Chinese dialect save Mandarin.

He's Bush's breeding (i.e. flair for nepotism) and Rove's brain rolled into one. And he couldn't be more popular, for exactly the reasons you mentioned: the people are safe, healthy, and rich. It seems the demand elasticity for freedom and self governance is greater than some of us would like to believe (and that affluence can be a partial substitute thereof).

Any democracy that permits a head of state to maintain power for 30 years (and promote his/her son to the post a decade later) is a nominal one, blind at best, and temerarious at worst, to Acton's maxim. Benevolent dictatorships are groovy until you take away the benevolence. Wait and see if Lee Hsien Loong abdicates if he can't keep pace with pops.

Having now been there I would still agree with most of this (albeit a less self-important version - invoking "Acton's maxim"? wow.) and add, in addition, that the food is ridiculously delicious. Photos.

I'd always imagined Thailand to have a hard-pulsing, all-consuming tourist circuit, with the key traps pooling hordes of sweaty pink-faced foreigners. Granted they might consider themselves a diverse lot, some there for eco-tourism, others for an unending series of massage and spa treatments, and still more with no purpose beyond simply proving to the world that ambling through crowded streets wearing open-toed footwear and a brightly-colored shoulder-harnessed 80-liter life-support unit constitutes a life fully examined. There might even be that rare breed of party animal who's less eco-tourist than alco-tourist, who gazes upon a proud civilization's monumental splendor at sunrise and thinks in awe "it's beer thirty!" - the type of person I saw wearing a t-shirt to the less-than-festive War Remnants Museum in Saigon that read "Angkor What? Pub, Cambodia: promoting irresponsible drinking since 1998." Somewhere, I assume, is a list on a whiteboard entitled "UNESCO World Heritage Sites on which I have personally vomited," and it is growing.

Of course in Thailand there are also the sex tourists, but that's a touchy subject (zing!).

Regardless of their self-identification they're all there to take advantage of a choice array of benefits from the people, culture, and land, and reciprocate in turn only money. They reduce the entirety of human engagement to a single dimension, and the more of them I see the less I can pretend I'm not one too.

So when I found out that a friend was living on a farm a couple hours outside of Chiang Mai I jumped at the chance to visit her but balked slightly at the need to thereafter spend time in the northern region's capital of tourism. I expected it to be overrun by exactly the types I just spent so much self-rightous time whining about - and it is.

Even on an absolute basis I saw many more foreign tourists in Chiang Mai than in Ho Chi Minh City, to say nothing of the relative effect of the greater numbers on a city nine times smaller. Entire districts, like the Night Bazar area, are designed to do nothing but (effectively, judging by what I saw) syphon away money. There are several resorts where the cost of a five-night stay will equal the total annual income of the average Thai citizen (though my perfectly adequate room cost a more reasonable $20/night). The stands at the local neighborhood Muay Thai boxing match I saw were 3/4 tourists. I even swear I saw Corey Worthington.

But despite everything it's a great place to visit, and visit alone for the foreseeable future, as it lacks the economic magnetism that makes Bangkok a more desirable place to domicile. Between the temples, elephants, and khao soi, not to mention the rest of that long list of Thailand's desirable qualities, it's hard to walk around blaming the tourist throngs for flocking here, and there are better things to do in the sunshine than scowl. At least they came here for valid existing things to see and do - it's not some mega-resort created from reclaimed land or indoor ski slope in the desert.

Of course a few days eschewing them all on a farm didn't hurt either.

Photos in the usual spot.

One trait it certainly shares with other developing countries is the tourist apparatus designed to separate the full brunt of local culture from visitors, exhibit it instead in a controlled environment, and in the process suck out disposable currency like the juice from the coconuts they so readily peddle with a smile and straw. Thankfully though this is confined to well-defined and escapable tourist ghettos, beyond whose walls lies a generally friendly populace, albeit occasionally guilty of aggressive salesmanship (but I am not one to discourage entrepreneurship).

There is one inescapable tourist marker, however, in the case of mix CDs used to appease foreigners during the long, but dirt-cheap, taxi rides. There seem to be two of these circulating around the entire country, featuring a haphazard bouquet of artists assumed to entertain the occidental ear. Upon the third or fourth time cruising past a row of rice paddies or a phalanx of motorscooters and hearing the exact same three opening tracks from Britney Spear (sic), Belinda Carlisle, and George Benson, one starts to wonder just who is being exhibited.

All in all though, not a bad way to ring in 2009. I took some pictures.

I'll be leaving Christmas day for a three-month vacation. I'll probably get into the whys and wherefores later - after all I'll have plenty of time for explanations - but suffice it to say I had the free time and the southern hemisphere is warm right now. I know a real round-the-world trip deserves far more time than I've giving this one, but not knowing when I'll have 18 months to do it properly I'll take what I can get.

I drew a rough map of the trip to kick it off. You may be wondering, "why is the starfish not happy?" The truth is that the starfish is the happiest of all the ocean critters depicted here, but cannot show it as starfish are notoriously uncomfortable expressing emotion.

If you have advice and tips for the locations where I'll be (excluding those in the US), please let me know. Destinations include, but are not limited to:

• Ho Chi Minh City
• Mui Ne
• Can Tho
• Chiang Mai
• Pun Pun
• Hong Kong
• Sydney
• Darwin / Kakadu National Park
• Brisbane
• Vanuatu (various)
• New Zealand (various)
• Los Angeles
• Crooked River State Park, Georgia
• New York City
• Washington, DC

I'm also going to try and squeeze in another SE Asian trip, so any suggestions within a reasonably short flight of Hong Kong are welcome. I also know a couple of you have done this in a much more hardcore fashion so general RTW backpacking tips are appreciated.

There will be photos.