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DRAFT

It is done. Flights to Thailand are booked, paid for, and sitting smugly in my inbox like a promise I actually intend to keep. Bangkok will once again serve as our gateway to South East Asia — a region that has the remarkable ability to make you feel simultaneously overwhelmed, enchanted, and mildly concerned about your digestive system, all within the first twenty-four hours.
The itinerary, in its current gloriously vague form, reads like a fever dream drafted by a geography teacher after one too many: four countries, three capital cities, one tropical island, and at least one UNESCO World Heritage Site, because apparently we need a building several centuries older than our own civilisation to remind us that we haven’t really accomplished all that much.
The next steps are straightforward enough — book the inter-country flights, research accommodations, draft a list of things to see, restaurants to try, bars to investigate with the appropriate level of scientific rigour. Oh, and contact the friends scattered across the region who are, at this very moment, blissfully unaware that we are about to descend upon their lives with luggage and opinions.
One notable change from previous adventures: the paper landing cards that used to be pressed into your hands somewhere over the Bay of Bengal, always at the exact moment you’d put your tray table down and opened a drink, are now gone. Electronic Arrival Cards must be completed online before departure. Progress, presumably.
In any case, there is absolutely no urgency whatsoever. Winter is nine months away. Which is, coincidentally, exactly the amount of time I need to talk myself out of packing too much.