Our plane landed in Singapore early in the morning of 4 May 2005.
254 days. 31 countries. 4 continents? 1 backpack. 2 daypacks.
5 pair of pants. 2 shorts. 18 shirts and tees. 8 pairs of socks.
1 towel. 5 bottles shower gel. 5 bottles of shampoo. 4 tubes of
toothpaste. 2 toothbrushes. 3 travelogues. 5 combs. 2 shavers.
2 haircuts. 2 umbrellas. 83 paid accommodations. 10 flights.
32 postcards. 7 parcels. One full circle.

Click on pages for enlarged views.

An example of our daily expenses record. And on the right is
the red packet from my mom before the trip.

We shot over 16GB of digital images.
Over 24,000 photos and short video clips.

That’s our Accommodation Chart for the whole trip.

Our Mexico bus travel records.

Long distance bus travels in South America.

The round-the-world route.

The plastic sleeve at the back of the journal,
with my collection of scraps from around the world.

That’s the calendar template.

The paper ruler I made, which was very useful
in quite a few drawing occasion.

And finally, end of book three.

ONE FULL CIRCLE.

 

END.

Day 254. And finally, the final day. And it had to be a shopping day.
Singapore to Russia to Finland to Estonia to Finland to Sweden to
Norway to Sweden to Denmark to Germany to Poland to Slovakia to
Czech Republic to Austria to Romania to Hungary to Croatia to
Slovenia to Italy to France to Spain to Portugal to Spain to Switzerland
to France to Belgium to The Netherlands to Britain The Netherlands to
Brazil to Argentina to Chile to Argentina to Chile to Peru to Ecuador to
Mexico to USA to Japan to Singapore.

Click on pages for enlarged views.

Those are Japanese coins.

My Northwest flight stickers back to Singapore.

The final boarding pass. The final country ~ Singapore.
And the circle is complete.

This was the third climbing gym I’ve visited this trip. The Castle in London, Rocodromo in Quito, and B-Pump in Tokyo. But I’ve yet to climb in any of them. I’m pumped from seeing but not climbing.

Click on pages for enlarged views.

Kamakura was over-crowded hordes of tourists,
mostly Japanese tourists.

B-Pump made me pumped.

These are some Metro stamps.

Look at the super complex Metro map.

Tokyo, the final postcard.

As they say, “Time flies while you are having fun.” I guess we must be having
too much fun. Suddenly, we were already on our 249th day, in Tokyo.
And in a few more days, we would be back where we started.
One full circle. Back in Singapore.

Click on pages for enlarged views.

Time flew. And faster than ever too. We lost one day when we flew
from San Francisco to Tokyo.

That’s the business card of our hotel.
Very tiny rooms… Japanese-styled.

And the map is behind.

We walked a lot in Tokyo. But we didn’t walk to New York.
We took a Metro. It’s actually Odaiba with the Statue of Liberty.

It was the end of April 2005. Almost the end of our trip.

We were nominated for a 40 minutes security check at the San Francisco
Airport while leaving for Tokyo. We have to remove our shoes and our packs
were extensively strip-searched. Luckily we weren’t searched like our packs.
I almost thought we were going to miss our flight.

Click on pages for enlarged views.

And we were back to shopping…

…with some Castro sight-seeing…

…and our flight to Tokyo.