Four weeks to go ...

Four short weeks from today, we'll be in the air between Helsinki and Shanghai, and we won't see Europe again for 285 days. The list of 108 things to do is shortening, slowly. Insurance is bought, international driving permits applied for, Indian anti-malarial suppliers identified, tax returns sent off, much of our travel clothing bought, and our cost estimates checked and re-checked. I had fun yesterday building a spreadsheet which grabs exchange rates off the web and uses these to calculate and display our daily and weekly spending budgets in local currency for each country. The best part is that this can now live on our new 512Mb pen drive and travel with us - are we going to have chilled out fun in non-materialist cultures or what?! I'm even more pleased with getting a browser (Firebird) installed on the pen drive, which does all it's housework (cache, history, password store) on the drive. This means I can stroll into a Mumbai internet cafe and do online banking without worrying about the internet cafe staff helping themselves to several hundred times their monthly wage out of our bank accounts when I leave. It's also cool, and free - unlike the pre-installed browser-on-a-drive that the Guardian recommended. And it's open-source, too! I haven't tackled installing Firebird's cousin Thunderbird yet - if I can do that we may not have to use any different email addresses on the road than at home. Now, if you still reckon the posts on this blog won't get interesting until we leave the country, you'd better go and read about Chavez, the Venezuelan referendum, and the Independent on Sunday somewhere else (the offending article has since been taken of the IoS site - but I know it was there - I read it myself ...) - Mark