We are at T minus 3 days and 12 hours, random ravings and some notes about the IDP.

Ohhhhhhh my godddddd we are less than half a week away from takeoff. This is getting unreal.

But first and foremost, a big shout out to all our new donors - THANK YOU! On behalf of all the causes we are collecting for, thank you very much for your contribution! Also thank you for the support! You guys rock!

Our meticulous "planning".

Our current route has us driving 3122km, a 10% increase from what we initially estimated.

Well, we figured out even more about our route and...this is what we have. Completely thorough, if I may say so myself. Assuming we can do an excellent 40km/h an hour there are going to some pretty tough 10-11 hour drives, which to be honest seems a little optimistic to me given the relative discomfort of the vehicle we're sitting in. Assuming we start driving at 8am in the morning and somehow not have lunch or pee breaks or any sort of shenanigans, we might make it into the next town/city for dinner.

I think we may have to adjust a little on the fly. Even with this somewhat adventurous schedule it gives us only 2 non-driving days, which may even have to be pared down to one. The two places we've picked currently to have a break seem to be the more picturesque places so I do hope we can spend more time there.

Also, we have a few days to make our way to Delhi. Clearly no plans required because after traversing that much in an auto rickshaw getting to Delhi should be a walk in the park.

Yep. So that's about all the planning we're gonna be doing. HAHAHAHA!

This document makes no sense but cost me $20.

Also, I hauled my bum down to the Automobile Association of Singapore and got myself an International Driving Permit.

So this document was created in September 1949. Let that sink it for a bit folks. 19-friggin'-49. Let that sink in for a little bit, because in 1949 our country wasn't even a country, so we could only join this little party in 1972, a few years after independence.

I tried to research it a little online and apparently there's a 1968 convention which was amended as recently as 2011, but neither Singapore nor India are a party to that. Some countries are parties to both, some are only parties to one, but apparently just because a newer version exists doesn't make the older one any less invalid, so why have the newer one instead of just adding countries to the older one?

Also, I don't really know how relevant these things are because I didn't have to produce anything other than my original driver's licence to obtain this. Which begs the question, if the only thing I needed for this document was my driving licence, why is that not good enough for me to drive?

My first instinctual answer involved bureaucracy and someone making a living out of the $20 we pay to have this little paper booklet printed.

A little bit more research leads me to conclude that this document is actually a translation of my driver's licence, and the myriad of languages in the booklet seems to confirm that. However, the number of language translations does not seem to correlate very well with the number of countries in the list, for example there is clearly no Korean, despite South Korea being a party, nor are there nearly enough different Nordic languages for the amount of Norse involved.

It doesn't seem completely exhaustive. Nor does it seem culturally-related or displays bias in any way. In fact it seems really random.  English, unsurprisingly, is first on the list, but the second (surprisingly) is traditional Chinese, which is only used by two fairly minor parties in this list, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the former being previously a territory of the UK but now part of China and the latter being a country but then again not really recognized as a country.

Other strange oddities I noted or random facts I learnt today:

1. France, specifically lists itself as including its overseas territories, but New Caledonia, which is a French territory, is listed as a separate entity.

2. Taiwan is currently on the list in the book, except that on the 1949 Convention on Road Traffic it is not actually on the list, in fact the usual politics took place because there's even a footnote that reads: "The accession by the Taiwan authorities on 27 June 1957 by usurping the name of "China" to the Convention is illegal and therefore null and void." This actually makes the inclusion of traditional Chinese even stranger to me.

3. There's a place called the States of Jersey, which is extremely unrelated to New Jersey, the more commonly known state in the USA. It's a Crown Dependency but not part of the United Kingdom, which is somehow still responsible for its defence. Also, it's not actually part of the EU, but generally is considered to be in the EU on the same terms as the UK for purposes of trade and movement. Although due to some recent turmoil that may now be in question. Whoops.
4. I wondered why Czech Republic and Slovakia were both on this list when they only broke up in 1993, having previously been known by other names such as Czechoslovakia. Then I found out that they had applied in 1993, so this document is actually fairly up to date. In fact the most recent addition was Montenegro in 2006!

Okay I think I've bored the general audience with my random geographical and political trivia so if you're still with me at this point thanks very much for reading as always!

Cheerios, Jik