You can navigate through my trip (and the document) by using this context-sensitive map. It outlines the major steps in my journey and provides you with a shorthand way of moving from page to page. Alternatively, each page has previous, next, home, and map buttons at the top and bottom of the page.

    I've scattered both my photographs and my postcards throughout this document. Most fall in the approximate time they were written. I had originally planned to just use the entries from my journal in this travelogue. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I frequently got caught up in the experience and so I ended up making entries intermittently at times. So I was at first forced, and then enjoined by friends to include my recollections and thoughts.

    In some cases I've included audio clips of my commentary. I suggest caution in downloading these unless you're on a T1 link. I tried several different ways of compressing them but they all sounded terrible. In the end, I gave up and they're just whatever size they turned out to be.

    I've scanned in both my own pictures and both sides of postcards I sent to friends and family on my trip. Some of the postcards are a bit dog-eared, or have cancellation stamps on the picture surface. Not all of the pictures are as crisp as I might like. I can hardly blame my little Olympus as it is more often the man than the machine. So please be tolerant with the quality of these images.

    I scanned in these images on a Howtek scanner and used Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1 to touch them up. I then used GIFConverter 2.3.7 to resize them to thumbnails for display in the document. I've chosen this format (GIFs in the document) and JPEGs kept elsewhere for two reasons. First and foremost, we don't all live in a world of T1 links. I use a 14.4 modem and I hate it when it takes three minutes to download one page. Secondly, JPEG is much superior to GIFs when it comes to rendering scanned images. I flatter myself that some of my photographs are quite good and this is certainly true of the postcards. It seemed a pity to have to render those images just with GIFs.

    Well, you can use either SoundApp or SoundMachine to listen to these sounds.

    Quicktime (on PC and Mac) now plays these formats, Nov 2001

    Note that listening to these sounds works better with SoundApp than SoundMachine because SoundMachine doesn't handle the compression very well.

    Unfortunately, they don't sound great because I used 6-to-1 compression. Believe me, they sounded much better uncompressed. However, they averaged 400k or so and I thought you would rather not wait to download them. Do give me feedback if you want better sound quality and I'll try them as 3-to-1 or even uncompressed. Unless you're on a T1, I don't expect that you'll complain.

    I recorded these sounds using SoundBuilder 2.0.2 (a truly marvelous little program). I just stayed up late this evening with Rocket in my lap and read through my postcards (until my vision got blurry). I'll convert them to WAV format if I get enough feedback on that..

    I would love any comments that you care to make. Please contact me at: stefan@artandscience.com.

    Thank you for taking the time to read this document.

    Stefan Fielding-Isaacs,
    San Francisco, December 1994