Appropriately looking like a grunt in the army who doesn't know his ass from his elbow, here I am a week into the trip and before I have even started the bike. Looking back I hadn't the slightest clue what I was getting myself into!

Books Brought On The Trip:
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
US Navy Mathematics, Math and Algebra
Barron's GMAT
Photoshop 7 Bible
Excel 2002 Inside out
Excel 2002 Formulas
Dreamweaver MX Bible
Using Dreamweaver MX
Teach yourself Access in 24 Hours
Access 2002 Bible
Photoshop 7 Classroom in a Book
Project 2000 User Manual
Carl von Clausewitz -Principles of War
Introduction to Data Mining
Psychology - The Structure of Intelligence
William James - The Principles of Psychology
A.H. Maslow - A Theory of Human Motivation
Ultimate NLP Home Study Course
NLP Workbook
Confessions Of J. J. Rousseau
Don Quixote
US Army survival manual
Principle's of Hypnosis
Al Qur'an(The Koran)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Land Of Footprints
Personal Narrative Of A Pilgrimage To Al-Madinah & Meccah
Diary Of A Pedestrian In Cashmere And Tibet
Ladakh - Crossroads of High Asia
The Other Sex - Simon de Beauvior


Audio Books:
Anthony Robbins - Personal Power
Alan Watts - Selected Talks
Brian Tracy - Accelerated Learning
Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
Jim Rohn - Cultivating Unshakable Character
Peter Lynch - Beating The Street
Mary Buffett - Buffettology
Richard Bandler - Using Your Brain
Stephen Covey - 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen Covey - First Things First
Stephen Hawking - Brief History of Time & Nature of Space and Time
Dracula
Civil War - Voices from the Front
Robert Heinlein - By His Bootstrap
D.H.Lawrence - Women in Love
Anonymous Rex
Oliver Twist
A Clockwork Orange
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Mario Puzo - The Godfather
21 Secrets of Millionaires
The Art of Happines - Dali Lama
21Laws of Leadership
Book of Lord Shang
C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters Around the World in 80 Days
The Picture of Dorian Gray

On the Holy Ganges in the t-shirt with its stated final goal of 12,000 kilometers which became a totum for the trip.

The last picture from the trip was a final shot of the odometer in front of Inder Motors, back where I started nine months earlier but after 12,279.7 kilometers of learning's, adventures and friends.

If you were to ask, "What the hell are you doing?" you wouldn't be the first. Its a heck of a question, why I am taking this trip and what I want to get out of it. In truth I have a lot that I hope to get out of this time away, though some of it might take a little explaining.

(Original) Onwalkabout Plan - 2003-04-16

walk•a•bout (wok-bout) n. -
- Australian. A temporary return to traditional aboriginal life, taken especially between periods of work or residence and usually involving a period of travel through the bush. A walking trip.
- British. A public stroll among a group of people for greeting and conversation.

The definition fits my situation perfectly. This trip to India comes at a period between work, having ended my employment with Ion Global and also at a period where my intention is to move away from Taiwan where I have based myself for the last 13 years. Its a time to learn about the Indian people and culture through traveling through the country and trying to get to know the people by living among them and talking with them. While not exactly a walking trip, I've chosen to do the trip by motorcycle a opposed to other means of transportation as it does not put one in a box, safe behind glass, but leaves me exposed to the sounds, smells and environment that is India. While not "the bush" of the definition, some of the places I plan an going are still in a very primitive state and equal to the intention of the word. Clearly, while on this trip, I'm going to be "on walkabout"

Schedule
I've put off taking a trip to India for so many years the India Lonely Planet has collected dust and started to disintegrate before it even had been opened. I've thought about the trip for a long time, but never taken it, mostly because I didn't want to spend just a couple of weeks or a month in India. It is too big a place and I knew it would be too hard to understand if I gave it just a few weeks of travel. I have also said for years that once I left Chinadotcom I'd take a serious sabbatical before jumping back into the workforce and when that time came, I knew I finally had my opportunity to see India without time restrictions. I'm making this trip without a schedule, I am here to learn what I can about India by seeing as much as I can, and meeting as many people as I can - as long as I'm enjoying the trip. That's a very important qualification, if it becomes too difficult or I start losing my sense of humor, then I'll quit. So as for the schedule, it is as long as I am learning something, seeing new things and still enjoying the trip.

Goals
There are a number of goals for the trip, perhaps somewhat surprisingly only a few of them relate to India. While there are a number of places that I want to see - the Taj Mahal, Amritsar, the Himalayas, Kashmir, most of my goals have to do with learning things that one usually wouldn't make the time to work through. The first is to spend time working on photography. Over the last year I have found my interest in photography to be very deep, but the only way to really improve is to focus completely on it as opposed to the dabbling during off-work hours. India presents an endless supply of new and interesting things to photograph so in essence India is the perfect multi-dimensional model to practice with.

Besides photography, there is a long list of other things I want to learn. I have brought 233 books with me (all digital format) and 30 Gigabytes of audio books. I've founding riding a motorcycle is the perfect time to be listening to audio books. It will be impossible to get through all of them I'm sure, but I have a prioritized list of things I want to learn, as long as that first condition is met that I am still having fun. Probably the most important of these books are GMAT preparation materials. I took the GMAT in March and while I did very well, I have my heart set on applying to INSEAD but to get in I need another 100 points on the GMAT to meet their requirements. So, part of the trip plan is daily homework. The same goes for a number of other things I have never spent the time to learn or become proficient in - Photoshop, Excel, Access, etc. Tools which are used everyday but which to become proficient will take time and plowing through several 700+ page manuals. This year I am simply going to take time out to learn to learn to powerfully wield the tools of the digital age.

So that is my plan. See as much as I can, travel and learn. In the mornings and evenings work through a long list of things that I have put off or not had time time for before. This will be a trip of education and the classes and the campus will certainly be different from any other I have attended before, but one of my own choice.

Wish me luck and I hope you will join along in my progress. The most obvious will be the photographs, I hope we will both be able to see improvement in the images that will make up this site. Since I don't have a "teacher" for this trip, you are invited to send me your comments and give me a "report card" so I'll know how I'm doing.

2003-09-27 - Mid-Trip Update
It is amazing to look back over the site and this plan after six months of being on the road. Many of the trip goals I set out at the beginning of this have already been accomplished - I have been to the Taj Mahal (and poisoned in the process), driven along and over much of the Himalayan range, crossed the highest and second highest roads in the world and flown over Everest. Amazing! Memory is a funny thing, looking back on the photos from Shimla or the Road to Leh they already feel so distant though it has only been a couple of months. The people I have met on the trip seem so far away, though to them it probably seems like I just left. I am continually amazed to find that looking back at a journal entry that feels so long ago, only 30 days or so have passed since it was all new.

I have spent five months in India and a month in Nepal, but the trip seems as fresh as the day I wrote this plan at the beginning of the trip, and there seems so much left to do! I did find that listening to audio books while driving a motorcycle in India is a recipe for disaster but I have still listened to many of them before bed. The software manuals have not received much attention but perhaps that is not surprising, and the most important goal to work on the photography has left me with 91 favorites to this point, which frankly I am very proud of. There is much more to learn, but I am sure these photos will bring lots of smiles when I have hair of gray and am sitting in a rocker.

I still wonder what the road will bring next and I am still having fun!

2004-02-07 - Trip's End Update

A month has passed since leaving India and life already seems to be returning to a more normal path. Just the other day someone asked me where I stayed in Nepal and for the life of me I couldn't remember the name of "Pokhara" even though I spent a month and a half there. As with everything, this trip has come to an end and in some ways it is already fading away.

But unlike any other year of my life to date, this trip, this year, is packed away in this website, a bottle which I can open up and find the name of that town, look at the faces of friends met on the way or marvel at the road crossed.

On the second half of the trip, I completed my business school applications and GMAT test in Nepal which was a major undertaking but the setting made things much more enjoyable. I rode out to the far east of India past hours and hours of lush tea plantations and even walked into a burning building to get pictures of a fire. Crossing Bangladesh I saw one of the world's last countries to have almost no tourism and became a walking zoo with people surrounding me everywhere I stopped. I visited Mother Teresa's Sisters of Charity in Calcutta and then drove across construction from hell to reach the holy city of Varanasi where I bathed in the fabled holy waters of the Ganges. Probably the highlight of the second half of the trip, sitting in the shadow of the temples of Khujaraho and marveling at their majesty as the sun set was incredibly moving. Then there was a last short ride through a small piece of Rajasthan and a couple of days of sunshine to wrap up the trip.

This entry from the last day's journal sums up the trip...
"What sticks in my mind on this trip in is the odometer clicking over as I drove back to Delhi. When I was in Nepal having, a jacket made to remember the trip I had to pick a final number of kilometers for the trip. It had taken me six months to reach 7,500 kilometers but pulling out my maps and the places I still wanted to go I took a guess at 12,000. As I went along this became more of a totem as the thought of finishing at 11,500 for example but having that 12,000 on my back would always leave me just a bit short of my goals and the jacket would forever be reminding me that I didn't quite finish. That the odometer rolled past 12,000 just as I reached Alwar, my last stop, was very fulfilling and seemed perfect for the trip's end. Of all the goals I set, I managed to complete every one of the big ones. I rode the length of the Himalayan Range and crossed the highest roads in the world. I took on a country where I did not speak the language and traveling is tough by myself and came out fine. I covered 13 of India's 26 states, and spent enough time to really get to know the country. On the way, I met some people I hope will be friends for life. Most importantly reaching the 98% percentile on my GMAT scores far exceeded my goals and there is enough improvement in my 135 favorite photos for me to be very satisfied. Riding through the afternoon Rajasthan sun I felt overjoyed that I had set a goal so far in the distance that I had no idea what it would even entail to complete but still managed to find my way."

Most people never have a trip like this, a chance to go OnWalkabout simply to learn about oneself and the world around them. In this, I was truly fortunate and making the time for this experience is one of the best things I have even done. It may have been a once in a lifetime trip but in that, it will hold a place as one of my life's highlights.

I suspect that I will not have children until late in life and I may never have enough time to spend with them or my grandchildren for them to really know who I was. This year and the Onwalkabout website hopefully will open a window for them. This website is dedicated to those kids and grandkids who occupied many of my thoughts during the trip and I hope that they find marvel in this time capsule of a world that will be much changed by the time they go onwalkabout. - Mike Rogero, Chile, Feburary 2004