With a little more than 24 hours left in Central America, I wanted to have a pause to reflect on what I've experienced in the last six months on the road, and how my conception of what this RTW trip is has changed.

Part of this reflection made me decide to draw this section of my travel diary, "A Year and a Day", to a close. I decided this for a couple of reasons. One was the length this travel diary has reached: I wanted to introduce a break in it just for ease of reading. The second is that my conception of my RTW trip has changed a lot since I left London in July, and I wanted to express that by starting a new part of my travelogue, one that posed different questions for me.

A fading British passport

Something that has been coming home to me over the last few weeks is how far away I feel from England. Although my accent and English mannerisms are quite intact, my emotional tie to the mother country itself is looking somewhat tattered. Six months travelling might not seem like that long a time, but for me, it feels like I've been away far longer. The way I am feeling now, going back would be very unappealing, I can't think of many lifestyles in London that I could be happy living now. I feel as though I have stepped away from London from a moment and the illusion has slipped - there are so many negative things for me about living in England that I don't think I would be happy returning.

But not only feeling distant from my old home; I have no idea where my next home is going to be. I have no idea where or when these travels are going to end, no idea of what I want my life to consist of when I stop carrying a rucksack. I would like these travels to end with me having worked out somewhere or wheres in the world that I feel myself more suited to, and this is probably going to be one of the themes of my travel diary over the next year.

Something that has been scaring me a little lately, is that if I feel more and more cut off from England, presumably England feels similarly about me? I remember England and my friends at a point frozen in time, the time of my departure. If I did go back, is it not rather naive to think I will be able to pick up with my friends where we left off? We will all be different people.

I suppose I implicitly accepted leaving behind friends and my old life by deciding to take myself out of England for a year plus - but the full potential consequence of that only really hit me in Costa Rica. Already several friends have fallen off my email recipient list, as they change jobs, and so my only contact with them dies. I think I never realised to what extent there might not be a familiar England waiting for me, if I got tired and wanted to return. How much can you change your life before you are effectively starting it again?

And while I wonder what I am doing to the friendships from home, as I travel on, the friendships I will be making will mostly be temporary ones, based around a time and locale that I will soon vacate. Travelling solo, with no end goal or homeward ticket, is a hard task. Who would deliberately choose such a colossal and lengthy aloneness for themselves?

But I do choose to continue. This is such an amazing, fascinating time. I feel sometimes as though I have already had the experiences of a lifetime - sometimes I feel surprised to look in the mirror and see the same face looking back at me.

I've watched the full moon set over the Pacific Ocean - did you know that as the moon sets it changes colour? From a bone cream to a bright yellow, until finally crossing the horizon as a burning orange, making the sea shine in the night. I stayed up late in Baja California after everyone else had gone to sleep, and in the cold, sat and kept the moon company as it fell.

There have been many other big wows. I've crossed deserts and passed cactuses as tall as oak trees, I've watched humming birds hold themselves in the air and adjust their whole body to sip water.

I remember little things, strange moments that I would never have otherwise experienced. Being marched up one of the mountain paths above Todosantos by my Spanish teacher, while he shouted out endless irregular verbs for me to conjugate.

Arriving in Pittsburgh, the first city on this trip where I arrived alone and had to find the youth hostel, walking the huge city blocks to what was supposedly the right bus stop, my knees aching from my rucksack's weight, wondering, "Am I really going to be doing this for a year and a half?"

The trip has also been very rewarding in terms of helping me develop a bit as a person, even after only six months.

The thing I'm most proud of is how at ease I've become in my own company. The rigour of all this travelling does feel like it has made me more self sufficient, less concerned with what others think of me. The thing that Gari said he noticed immediately was how I seemed more distant now, not in a cold, withdrawn way, but in the sense of not particularly giving as much of a shit about things. I do feel more relaxed in myself nowadays, my speech pattern has slowed down, I think I'm better able to listen to people.

Feeling happier being by myself is also a good feeling. I quite like listening to my own thoughts, musing on something I've seen or plotting my next diary entry.

I try to give myself the encouragement and support that usually someone else with me might give, try to laugh rather than castigate my mistakes. Something I do which is perhaps strange to explain: when alone on a long bus ride, or lying in bed after a trying day, I imagine a bigger Daniel, his arms wrapped around me, as if saying, take comfort, you're a good person, you are on your way somewhere. Where this technique came from, I'm not sure, and I don't really know who or which part of me the bigger Daniel is supposed to be. But it just occurred to me fully formed one day, and does cheer me up.

So, in this inbetween time, this nomading time, I've got a lot to look forward to in 2004. I plan to explore SE Asia and work my way towards India, a country that seems more enticing the more I read about it. I want to travel slowly, do things in the places I visit - travelling fast usually means always only visiting.

I'm going to try and have the courage of one of my convictions, and attempt travelling without a guidebook. I don't plan to go completely without guides: I am going to buy detailed maps, going to read books on history and culture, going to speak to tourist information offices and get guidebook style info from them. I just find the perhaps inevitable dependency and herd mentality that guidebooks generate too depressing. Every traveller seems to moan about their guidebook, but we all still pay attention to our's text as though it was a canary down a mineshaft.

2004 promises to be a memorable year. It is a strange life this travelling. Some things about are just skills - one gets better at catching buses, navigating in strange places, bringing food with you on long flights, making strangers smile. Some things I've yet to quite get the hang of, such as managing the number of books I'm carrying around with me. I find it strangely hard to reduce the number of books in my rucksack, and in fact often end up exchanging the ones I have for a still greater number. Although it's nice to be a walking library, this has got to stop, and I plan to hand some of these in for some expensive book on Asian history as soon as I can.

So, plans for the coming year. Travel slowly through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, aiming to arrive in India in the Autumn. Make more effort to get to know local people - going to maybe speak to people over the internet before I arrive in a place, or hang outside English classes and ask people if they'd like some English practice, in exchange from showing me around their town. Beyond that, I just want to travel without deadlines and itineries, look around for opportunities to stop and work in a place for a while, learn some new skills and see what comes along the road.

Any regrets? About deciding to leave England to do this RTW trip, none at all. It really has been a unique time for me, and I don't know how I would have this kind of experience and this learning about my self and life had I chosen to do something else.

My perhaps biggest regret of my trip so far is that I haven't pulled in a long time. In Latin America I seem to have been immensely and exclusively attractive to two groups, school girls and gay men - but to women roughly approaching my own age, think again. While being a hearthrob to the above demographics has kept my ego afloat, it would really be nice to meet someone where there was compatible attraction... In the (very rare) occasions where someone both female and over the age of sixteen has liked me, this seems to have been mutually realised only when I am one hundred miles further down the road.

I was thinking of including some list of helpful tips for this kind of long term travelling, but really the only tip I can give is, if you are wanting to go travelling, go. I haven't met anyone in my life who said they regretted the decision to go travelling, that they wish they'd put more value on a steady income and career prospects. I spent a lot of time back in London trying to add up the pros and cons of going, but I now realise, that is an exercise that relies on the assumption that your pros and cons will be the same when you have finished travelling. Chances are you will develop a whole different list of priorities, and these will probably be more in line with what you really want from life.

Don't worry if you don't have a year or two free - I was amazed after three months at how much I'd seen and experienced. Don't worry if your money is too tight to see every continent, choose one country where prices are low and spend your time there. You will probably have a much richer, and certainly much cheaper travelling experience than the person who's passport is full of entry and exit stamps.

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed reading my travel diary so far, and thanks especially to everyone who has been emailing me. I'm going to continue my travels in a travelogue entitled, "No Place As Home", and this should start up on BootsnAll soon. Best wishes and thanks for reading.

Questions?
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