Having just completed my ninth cross-pacific flight, the little voice in my head that asks me why I continue do this seems to be getting louder and louder. It asked me why I continually force myself to endure such travel torture. Why I can’t go to Mexico just like all the Spring Breakers.

Simple. Where’s the challenge in that?

While I have to admit that this trip has been the hardest so far. I was back and forth for days wondering if it was a good time to go, if it was a good financial expenditure, and if there weren’t things at home that I should be doing right now instead of traveling (cleaning my gutters of leaves, perhaps). Then I recalled a great axiom shared with me by a Bangkok Taxi driver, "you can always make more money, but you can never make more time."

What about my gutters? What about my friends and family? And oh, for the love of humanity … what about the cranberry sauce? He never said anything about these things. Could his advice have been tainted? Didn’t he know the complex nature of two family Thanksgiving dinners? Easy for him to say, at the end of his 19 hour shift he got to go home to his wife and family. That’s a little harder for me to do, and not just because the restraining orders and pending DNA tests.

I’m still holding out to see if this was the right trip and at the right time. What I know for sure is that I have to be getting ready for bed. I just checked into the We Train International House. It’s a small guest house located about 10 minutes by Taxi from the Don Muang Airport here in Bangkok. For 400 Baht ($10) a night I have two twin beds (my backpack likes to have his own bed), Air-con, private bathroom, mini-bar, TV (with 6 of the same Thai channels) and although it’s marked "hot," a very cold shower. It also has a private balcony, but I can’t really tell what it overlooks – it’s 1:30 am and it’s really really dark outside.

On a positive note, the profits from the guest house go to Association for the Promotion of the Status of Women’s (APSW) projects. They include Emergency Homes, the Women’s Education and Training Centre (WE-TRAIN) and the Women’s Health Clinic. Can you tell I just took that directly from the hotel’s manual? Since I was only going to be staying less than 10 hours, I figured I would bypass Khao San Road’s hoard of backpackers and stay at someplace that has a philosophy. It kind of makes me feel good. Plus, it was cheap and saved me a 300 Baht Taxi ride.

As for my tentative itinerary:

Tomorrow I will get up early and try to find a haircut, see if I can check email (you’ll know I have if this is posted), then I’ll grab my bags and head back to the airport. I’m heading to Rangoon/Yangon tomorrow morning. I think most of my flight will be pondering what to call the country in my journal. Do I call it by the current Military regime’s preference for "Myanmar", or do I stick with the British colonial name of "Burma?" Burma certainly sounds so much more exotic. And people have actually heard of it. But based on some of the blank stares I’ve gotten from friends, most people probably don’t know exactly where it is on a map. Which is just as well. So the short part of the story is that some cities and places might have two names. Don’t mind that too much. I’ll try to explain as much as possible.

Until then, I wish you all happy times with good fortune and love.