REI is quickly becoming a second home for Gabriel and me. It's one of the few places on earth that you can purchase the bug-annoyant Deet in a 98% concentration. My big purchase for the day was a Garmin eTrex GPS receiver. If you know me at all, you know that I have a terrible sense of direction. I get lost driving home from the Burbank airport - a drive I've made well over ten times. The prospect of adventuring around areas I've never been before, with street signs written in languages whose alphabets I do not know, makes me a little anxious. My hope is that at with a GPS receiver, I can mark my home base in each city, and if I get hopelessly lost, I can always follow my digital bread crumbs back to my mosquito net and sleep sheet.

I leave for Bangkok, Thailand on Friday (Tomorrow!) where I'm hoping to avoid the large-scale anti-government protests. This should be an adventure, apparently the government just declared martial law!