A long year around the world.

Good news! The Concordia International office just announced to Sabrina and me that we were accepted for the study exchange program next year. And what is great is that we can go together! But we were accepted only for half a year in Cairo, so they gave us some options to consider, and in the end we decided to go to Hong Kong first and Cairo second. Hong Kong then! Who would have known?

So next year is going to be a long year around the world. It will start in May in Norway, where I will visit my step family and the vikings, then I will drop by France to visit my own family, and then I will go to China in the beginning of June. There I will travel around the Kashgar region on the silk road for a good 2 months. That should give me plenty of time to discover the area [relatively] in depth. I now daydream about Kashgar and its surroundings, the mighty Pamir mountains, the Himalayas, the desert, the half buried 1000 years old fortresses where the caravans on the silk road would take refuge for the night, and the wild camels! And the Chinese government allowing I might get a glimpse at the Tibetan region of Qinghai, and maybe even Xiahe, which was closed last year.

And when I'll be tired of moving around I'll go to Hong Kong for a couple of months. Then it'll be Christmas time and the 6 weeks vacations that comes with it, thus traveling again. And then the American University of Cairo for a semester, and finally back to Montreal July 2010... In short it is going to be similar to my first sabbatical year - 2005-2006 - when I traveled for a year in Latin America and New Zealand.

Discovering Yakub Beg's "Kingdom of the Six Cities"

The adventurer Yakub Beg ended up founding his own short lived Kingdom of Kashgaria in 1867, liberating the country from the Chinese Qing Empire and reestablishing Islam in the region. Kashgar became the capital of his new Kingdom and Robert Shawn, a British adventurer, visited him in 1968, and I will do the same.

Not that expect to find Yakub Beg still wandering around Kashgar; but I hope to make my own discovery of my own Kashgar and its fantastic history. Halfway between the Tibetan plateau and the heart of Central Asia, Kashgar has historically been a mix of civilizations where Islam and Buddhism met in its own way, almost always under the Chinese governance. What is there left? I hope many treasures... though maybe not what people usually understand by this word.

So be it; Kashgar I am coming,

So be it! CST game me my money, so I can go play at being reporter for National Geographic this summer in Kashgar, China... Though my plans for traveling with a motorcycle seems to fluster away, as I found out that it is forbidden to own any vehicle in China (unless living there or being Chinese, which I am not). So I won't ride. But I can still travel! And my wishes came true, I got the money, I got the time, I got everything I could wish for, so it's just to do it!
Now the harder will be to stay focused on my studies until the damn semester finishes! And then what? A stopover in Norway to visit Sabrina's family, and then China. I will have 2 months or so, enough time to find interesting travel stories to write about I guess!