We have a date!

Well, a provisional one at least...

So N and I finally went down to the travel agents and thrashed out a real, concrete plan for the Big Trip, which at the moment looks something like this:

22nd September - start tour in Rio and work up through Brazil, Bolivia and Peru (including the Inca Trail). We'll probably leave a few days earlier though to have a bit longer in Rio.
5th November - fly from Lima down to Buenos Aires.
13th/23rd November - leave Buenos Aires on tour to Santiago, going through Argentia, Patagonia and Chile. We'll probably also go into Uruguay for a few days whilst in BA.
5th December - Leave Santiago to fly into Christchurch. Work way up to Auckland on hop-on-hop-off buses in time to spend Christmas there with my brother-in-law's family and (hopefully) my sister, brother-in-law and nephew, who are coming over for Christmas.
3rd January - fly across from Auckland to Cairns and get hop-on-hop-off bus down the east coast to Melbourne. Go through the Red Centre via Uluru to Alice Springs and then on to Darwin.
5th March - fly across to Singapore, take tour up to Bangkok and then on through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
20th April - arrive in Delhi, then two to three weeks touring India (we haven't decided which one to do yet).
15th May - come back to London

This is all very rough at the moment but it gives an idea of where we're going and how long we'll be away for. It is a slight change to the original plan as we wanted to start in Peru and go down to Rio, and then do another tour to Buenos Aires, but the next one with Inca Trail permits wasn't a guaranteed depature and it costs less to fly down to BA than to do the other tour (most of which is covered on our Rio to Lima tour anyway). In a way I'm glad though as we'll have some opportunities to hike in Brazil and Bolivia before the Inca Trail, so I feel I'll be able to get a bit more acclimatised to it all, and we can always go across into Uruguay from Buenos Aires whilst we wait for the next trip. Although I'm going to get my gait analysed for running shoes next week so hopefully I'll start Couch to 5K by the end of the month and have built up my stamina for the trip before we go.

Money hasn't changed hands yet but I think now we have something resembling a date it all feels a lot more real. I'm still nervous but the excitement is definitely kicking in now. I will miss home and friends and family, and there are a few events I'm quite sad to be missing (a friend's wedding and various family birthdays being the main ones), but I know that the trip will make up for it. And we can always call home or email or Skype.

Also, I have travel books coming soon - Lonely Planet guides to Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia and a generic RTW one from Rough Guide - which in my incredibly sad way I'm immensely looking forward to reading (I read travel books like they're novels). I may have mentioned this before, but N's mum has also been wonderfully generous and has given us £1,000 towards the cost of the trip, which we will probably invest in our equipment. More on that another time.