The idea of traveling on wheels

Two months ago, my good friend Lim Neo Chian asked me if I would like
to be his co-driver for a ROUND –THE –WORLD-ON-WHEELS trip in a year. I like the idea of doing things differently from the norm. By this I mean traveling on conducted tours where all logistics are already taken care of. I turned down Neo Chian’s offer for two reasons. Firstly, though I like the idea, I am not sure if I can “last” one year on the road . Secondly, being a novice, I might not have the experience nor ability to deal with the unknown and uncertainty. However, I am prepared to do a regional, shorter trip to test my interest.

One month later, Neo Chian armed with the Atlas and books came to my house and proposed a revised project, ASEAN ON WHEELS, PART ONE, in two months. He planned to travel to all the Asean countries. Due to the geographical layout of ASEAN, he planed to do it in stages. He wanted to navigate the Indo China countries first, then East Malaysia and Brunei, followed by the Philippines and Indonesia. I knew how serious he was when he came in his newly purchased Mitsubishi Pajero.! We exchanged some ideas and touched base on the plan. After a few meeting, I msut admit I was getting excited. Finally, I accepted to be his co-driver for Asean On Wheels – Part I. We will travel through Malaysia – Thailand – Laos – Cambodia – Vietnam – Laos – Thailand – Malaysia – Singapore from 27th April to 30th June, 2009. We have deliberately
omitted the detailed planning of each country we will be visiting as we want it to be a FREE and EASY way to see these countries. Ideally, we would like to have a group of 2 cars for this venture. However, we were unable to find another team in short notice. We decided to go ahead.
I will share what we see along the way in this blog and hope that you will like it. If you have a location you feel we should visit, or anything else which you would like us to find out during our journey, post your comments to me. No promises! If it is along the way, I would be happy to explore and share our findings. Visit Neo Chian’s blog at www.aseanonwheels.blogspot.com