An Overview of My Plans

Dear all,
        First things first: Welcome to my blog! I'm going to do my best not to bore everyone to tears with this so you can expect updates once or twice a week. The only thing more boring than writing blog updates everyday is reading blog updates everyday.


If you don't know who I am here's a bit about me:
        I'm Ben Van Domelen and I'm from... well... all over the place. I was born in the U.S., but I spent the first five years of my life in the Netherlands. After that, I moved back to the U.S. for about 8 years until my parents jobs whisked me away to Egypt. A short three years later I found myself in Denmark where I have been living for the past three years. That's my life in a nutshell, more or less.
        Throughout all these travels I've had plenty of opportunity to travel the world. I've been camping in Madagascar, I've bungee jumped off a bridge in Zimbabwe, I've competed in wrestling tournaments in Dubai, rugby tournaments in Norway, and I've volunteered my time in Peru.
        Now I'm taking three months out of my gap year to travel and volunteer my time in Peru again.


With that brief autobiography out of the way I can give an overview of my plans:

• On the 20th of January I will be leaving Denmark for Madrid, Spain where I will spend five days exploring the city.
• On the 25th of January the 'real' trip begins and I will be flying to Lima, Peru to begin my Peruvian travels.
• From the 25th of January to the 17th of February I will split my time between Lima, Cusco, and the Sacred Valley. I plan on seeing Machu Picchu in addition to doing a bit of urban exploring: Cathedral spelunking, coffee bar-hopping, taxi surfing, etc.
• Between the 17th of February and the 18th of March I will be working with a fantastic organization called "Kiya Survivors"at their children's home in the valley town of Urubamba. More detailed information about them will be coming up.
• After this time I will move myself to the northern part of Peru near to the Ecuadorian-Peruvian border to do a bit more volunteering (also with Kiya Survivors). This will take me from mid-March to early-April. I will be linking up with a group of students from Denmark under the name of "Team Peru". (Their blog: http://teamperudk.tumblr.com/)
• The rest, until mid-April, is all up in the air.

Any questions? No? Good. I'll explain everything as we go along.


        If you've read this far you're probably asked yourself why in the world I've named this blog "Out of the Ordinary, but not exactly Extraordinary". The title of the blog comes from a line in Jean-Paul Sartre's book "Nausea" in which one of the characters attempts to explain what an "adventure" is saying, "Monsieur, it seems to me that you could define an adventure as an event which is out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary". Getting on the wrong train, stopping in an unknown town, losing your wallet, sharing an few hours flattened between a dust-covered window and an unknown person on a rickety old bus... these are all very much adventures to me and I plan on having many of them during my travels.

So, without further adieu, let the adventures begin!