It’s looking more and more like starting in Japan in August will just make everyone relatively miserable with the humidity. I once spent a summer in rural Louisiana and Houston, and my most salient memories are quickly scuttling from one air conditioned box to another and feeling like showers were both the best thing ever and the most useless thing ever. I remember the same thing spending summers in India as a child during the monsoon season, but without the a/c and with lots of mosquitos.

It seems foolish to me to wait so long to go somewhere and know that you’re walking into a hell of humidity where you’ll never want to be outside. You can start in the northern and more mountainous regions, but even if you spend a few weeks there it’ll still be bad on the eastern coast. So, what to do?

My new idea is to follow the weather! This means that we start in the Southern Hemisphere, namely in Australia and/or New Zealand and then work our way northward following the good weather. Many regions of Australia are relatively temperate during this time. New Zealand is in winter, but our ski passes will give us a free week at Mt. Ruapehu and I think it would be a dream to ski there if we could! I’m going to pretend that the practicality of taking ski clothing isn’t an issue, maybe we can just rent like you can here?

So now that I’ve read a bunch of books on Japan and gotten all excited for that, I’m waiting for some books on Australia and New Zealand to come in from the library so I can dream about those.

Looking at the map the plan would be to spend a week in Australia/New Zealand (I know they’re far away really) then a week in Indonesia, moving north through Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and then Japan. If the Fulbright doesn’t work out, then we can spend longer in each place and be more leisurely. I’d love to go to China and see the Terracotta Warriors and the Great Wall too-it’s always been a dream of mine.

-sf