Introduction

Hello everybody!

This website will be dedicated to recording down my thoughts whilst travelling on my whistle-stop tour of the planet.

As I am only just learning the art of website creation, a great deal of blood, sweat and tears has gone into the faffing around with the html behind this site. Luckily, I've had a particularly uninspiring and uneventful temp job for the past couple of months so have managed to do a bit of the faffing at work. Woo hoo! Please marvel at the glory of the design and send me lots of complimentary comments (otherwise I really will cry).

I hope to be able to update every few days as I stop in internet cafes and the like, but have no guarantee that such things will exist in the places I am visiting. I desperately hope that the setting up of this website will not turn out to be a complete waste of time!

I also hope to be able to upload my photos as I go along but again, I am not sure how conceivable this will be on public-access pc's without the camera software being downloaded and/or some kind of (invariably expensive) bluetooth wireless devise being plugged in. If I can't, it will be a real shame but please don't stop visiting my little website ... remember, the counter never lies.

There is a facility for you to leave comments on my website after each of my entries. It would be nice for me if you did this but it is not the law. I will also be checking my hotmail account whenever possible so you can always go wild and send me an email if you prefer.

Before I sign off my first shiny new blog entry, and for the benefit of friends that I haven't been in touch with recently (sorry!), I really aught to give you a brief low-down on how this travelling trip came to fruition. However, because it could turn out to be a long, dull and complicated story, I shall summarise the story in 3 concise and easy to understand steps:

Step 1: Katie returns from Malaysia rainforest expedition and chats with Mark about aspirations to return to south east Asia one day (in backpacker styly).

Step 2: Mark and Katie forget about these crazy pipe-dream ideas whilst Katie graduates from uni, drains her life savings doing voluntary work and weeps over her lack of job prospects.

Step 3: Katie and Mark shack up together in Basingstoke (!), Katie's career prospects improve as she is offered money to go back to university and, in a fit of rash spontaneity with no thought to expense or lack of time, caution is thrown (or rather hurled dramatically!) to the wind and the once-in-a-lifetime, now-or-never world trip is booked! Hurrah!

...and the rest, as they say, will be recorded methodically over the six weeks whilst I am away.