The plan

Following our far-reaching decision, the next step was to come up with a travel route. We quickly developed a long list of must-see's and nice-to-have's (yeah, that's easy) - the hard part was to subsequently cut out many destinations. Again, we looked at several factors - years in consulting and academia just kill your ability to leave things unplanned:

• availability of flights & other means of transport like buses, ships, etc.
• climate & seasons
  
• visa requirements
• costs of travelling
• general safety (ideally few coups d' etat...)
• friends & family we know all over the place - wohoooo!

And here's the list of places which made it (see the attached map for details):

• Argentina
• Brazil
• Colombia
• Panama
• Costa Rica
• USA
• Japan
• China & Hong Kong
  
• Mongolia
• Vietnam
• Laos
• Cambodia
• Thailand
• Malaysia
• Singapore
• Nepal