Travel Update

As always, the pre-trip guilt is setting in. Why am I going? I shouldn’t be going: with two screenplays 90% complete and a third one 50%complete, I feel like I should be spending the next couple of months completing them, instead of traipsing around South American.

Nevertheless, I depart Newark, NJ on October 24 and arrive in Quito Ecuador the same day, where I’ll have five days to hangout and practice my Spanish before venturing aboard a charter boat for an eight day sightseeing and scuba diving excursion to the Galapagos Island. After the Galapagos excursion, I head back to Quito for a few more days before boarding an Overland Truck and heading south to Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, with side trips to Uruguay and Paraguay eventually reaching Brazil on February 1st to partake in Carnival in Rio de Janeiro for six days. After which I fly back to freezing cold NJ on February 6th.

As for preparations, most is complete. I've had all my vaccinations (Polio, Tetanus, MMR, Yellow Fever, Typhoid, Hep-A, Hep–B, Meningococcal); passport and extra photos are in order; I don’t need any pre-trip Visas; I purchased travel insurance that covers me for extreme sports (motorcycling, scuba diving, jet, and water skiing, mountain climbing, sky diving, bungee jumping, spelunking, whitewater rafting, surfing or parasailing)* and emergency evacuation; and I’ve also reviewed my check list from my previous travels. Everything seems to be in order. I’ll be taking my computer and camera once again and blogging along the way.

My reading list, with a South American flavor, includes:
“The House of the Spirits” by Isabel Allende
“The Machu Picchu Guidebook: A Self- Guided Tour” by Ruth M. Wright & Dr. Alfredo Valencia Zegarra
“The Conquest of the Incas” by John Hemming
“Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garci’a Ma’rquez
“100 Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garci’a Ma’rquez
“Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” by Mario Vargas Llosa
“Galapagos: A Natural History” by Michael H. Jackson
“Blue Blood” by Edward Conloan
“Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web” by Tim Berners-Lee
“The Magic Lantern” by Ingmar Bergman
“Fellini’s Films” by Frank Burke
“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond

* I won't be participating in all these activities but they sound impressive so I included them.