Change of Plans

February 22, 2013

It’s a sea day today, which means we’re all in separate dark rooms doing post-production on the ship.  Matt and I have been working the the “Eagle’s Nest”.  Matt is editing a snapshot of our time in Tokyo at the InterAqua water conference that he and Rosa attended.  Very entertaining.  I’m working on episode 4 of our web series where I will be showing the story that we followed with Tendekayi in Shanghai visiting the Solar Ear lab.

We spent some time this morning solidifying our travel plans in Myanmar, and Matt, Danny, Mark, Larissa and I are going to be heading up north and visiting Mandalay and Bagan to see a monastery where they feed 1,000 monks every single day and 5,000 pagodas in a single location.  Thom and Joani were just in Myanmar, so they recommended a sight-seeing tower in Bagan where we can catch the sunrise over the pagodas.  I can’t wait!

In planning forward for the rest of the trip, the entrepreneurs have begun making some excellent connections in these countries and now have other travel plans than riding along on the ship’s route.  We’ve had to decide between staying with the few ventures left on the ship between India and South Africa, or sending people off into other countries to follow the travels of our entrepreneurs.  For Matt and I, they’ve chosen the latter.

Matt and I are going to head off of the ship for a two-week adventure.  We’ll port in Cochin, India on March 6 at which point the rest of the team and all of the entrepreneurs will be heading to Bangalore for an Unreasonable Event.  We will follow Mouhsine and Minh from Prakti Design to another part of India, I think it’s Chennai, to stay there, visit their friends and potentially take their biomass stove out and test it in a couple markets.  On March 17, we’ll be flying to Phnom Pen, Cambodia, where they had just visited during our Vietnam port, to follow them to a world-wide stove convention that anybody who is anybody in the stove world attends.  The other Unreasonable venture, One Earth Designs, is also planning on going, so we’ll get to see Catlin there, too.  We’ll stay through the conference and get to enjoy some of Cambodia since we didn’t get to visit there during our Vietnam stay, and also visit a local village where Prakti would like to donate a stove to a coffee shop owner that they had met while they were in Cambodia a week ago.  (This world travel stuff is crazy!)

After about five days in Cambodia, we will fly to Cape Town, South Africa and beat the ship by two days.  Matt and I will get some b-roll around Cape Town and shoot anything else that Minh and Mouhsine have planned, then meet the ship at port on March 25 where we’ll finally get to do some laundry.  Whew!

I’m looking forward to our crazy adventure!  But first, we need to finish these edits and have a great time in Myanmar (or Burma for you old-school cats).