T-minus-Eleven...

Back in May 2006, I was sitting on a inter-city bus, travelling back to Cuzco from Lake Titicaca. We had two more days on a two-week trip to Peru, and I was reflecting on the previous twelve days.

Shahid and I hiked the Inka Trail for four days and saw the sun rise over Machu Picchu. We'd drank away evenings with fellow gringo travellers in the Cuzco bars, drank away nights in the clubs lining the Plaza de Armas and gone on tours the next mornings hungover as Hell. We stayed with an indigenous Aymara family at Lake Titicaca, watching the sun set whilst sitting next to the temple of Mamapacha (the Earth Mother) and participated in a traditional village dance (I destroyed all the pictures of me in native garb). We'd suffered through an eight hour flight delay, a couple of eight-hour bus rides, and getting kicked out of our hostel room in the early afternoon -- whilst sleeping off a night of drinking -- because of a booking screw-up.

And I wanted more.

We met plenty of people along the way and I was surprised to learn that many of the long-term travellers were in their late-twenties to early-thirties. Up to that point I'd been under the impression that only rich youngsters on a gap year between high school and college, or college and a career, did this kind of thing. Finding out that my assumption was wrong was a revelation: it wasn't too late for me to consider taking significant time off to travel before retirement and old-age. Long-term travel for me could still consist of trekking in Nepal, hiking the Tongariro Crossing, climbing Kilimanjaro or camping out in Patagonia.

That was three years ago.

In eleven days, I'm jumping on a plane to Brazil, with a backpack and solid plans for just the first two weeks. I'll be circumnavigating the globe, and I'm not planning on coming back to Toronto for at least a year.

But, if you're reading this blog, you probably already knew this. Hopefully, I'll be entertaining enough for you to keep reading as I continue to update along the way. If not, at least this travel blog will serve its secondary purpose: in that if I disappear for a period of time without checking in, that you'll all know where in the world to start searching for the body.