Humpf. Last Friday I resigned from the Supply Chain Strategy dept of Fonterra. This fact was insignificant until I realised there were only 11 days of work left before i depart. Equal parts yay, equal parts ut oh. Will officially finish with Fonterra after 40 pay days. Not a bad haul for a first dig at the crease. My last day of attendance will be the 29th of February.

The sheer number of small things we have to organise is almost beyond estimation (36?37?). However, I'm not going to bother with that stuff. Instead I'll outline our plans.

In some ways our trip started when we moved into a shoebox at the top of Symonds St with the express purpose of condensing our worldly possessions into roughly one car loads worth. This was/is liberating but tramautic. Thanks to those people on trademe who buy random crap.

Anyways the trip is:

1. Drive to Timaru stopping in Palmy, Welly, Blenheim and Chch to catch up with the scoundrels i know.
2. Fly to Sydney. Stress a lot. Get Married. Have awesomest day ever. Resume stressing a lot. Depart.
3. Fly to Bangkok for 5 days of Huahin doing very little and beaching very lots.
4. Fly to Dar es Salaam. We'll arrive mid afternoon utterly shagged from travel. We are to be met by some guy who we'll stay with for a day or so hopefully.
5. Travel north to Pangani. This is apparently 300 odd kilometres of "road" north of Dar Es Salaam. During our time there we'll work hard, travel a lot and hopefully conserve funds a bit.
6. During October, November, December we are free to do ????
7. Fly Home 12th December for some much needed Christmas Cake and fattening up (with a bit of luck).

I want to record my pre-impressions of Pangani. So far I've heard from Mondo challenge that it is a nice place, from some tourists that it is wonderful and from some past volunteers that the bugs/animals and people are horrific. Lets hope it's a combination of all of these things and truely memorable. Let's also hope it's not too hot, not too malarial and not too insurmountable!! The photos i found on google are spectacular which is good. There aren't too many things that a good swim at a spectacular beach can't fix...

Humpf. long first post. hopefully it'll be one of many!!!