Twenty five days...

Less than four weeks before departure and I'm starting to accumulate 'stuff' to take on the tour, such as...

• Malaria pills and a growing pile of assorted medications for various ailments
• Power adapter for the laptop and battery charger
• Maps of the areas we're visiting
  
• Spare 2G card for my digital camera
  
• Books and minidiscs of music to pass the time on long plane and bus journeys

Though I did come to the realisation that two 2G camera cards would allow something like 2500 pictures on my camera's second highest quality setting. Must remember to edit as I go, or that's just going to be too many to handle. To think that last time I was in Asia I restricted myself to only six rolls of film in four weeks!

Spent the morning playing glow-in-the-dark mini golf with my daughter. She's a bit worried about Dad travelling to the other side of the world and being away for three weeks, so I'm trying hard to spend as much time with her as I can.

Five weeks to go

Excitement this afternoon with the arrival of more documents from Dennis, Sue & Pauline, the tour leaders.

A detailed itinerary reveals that in Bangladesh, in addition to a fair amount of time in Dhaka, we will be spending a night in Agailjhara. A quick Google reveals this to be to the South of Dhaka. We also have a day trip to Feni which appears to be in the East of the country.

We also received some accommodation details. The web site for our hotel in Delhi lists the 'close proximity to specialty hospitals' as one of its main features! 24 hour room service and laundry service will no doubt be of more interest to us after two weeks of travelling and stays at the YWCAs in Dhaka and Kolkata.

With a forecast high of -16 for this weekend in Ottawa, I'm looking forward to the warm weather we'll no doubt be experiencing on our tour.

We'll be carrying out our annual inventory count at the Richmond Rd store in Ottawa on Sunday. This is never a fun job, but this year at least I'll be able to count products and imagine that in just a few weeks I'll be meeting the artisans that made many of them.

Learning Tour Preparations

6 weeks from today, 12 people from Ten Thousand Villages Canada will depart for the trip of a lifetime. Our journey to Bangladesh and India will take us to Dhaka, Kolkata, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Agra, along with many other towns and villages. We will visit artisans who produce crafts for Ten Ten Thousand Villages, enabling us to see how they live and work, and to experience first-hand the difference that fair trade makes in the lives of people in these countries.

We'll use this blog to let you keep up with our preparations, and the journey.