Finally met up with Rezal and Jamie after months! it’s such a nice feeling to catch up with the old familiar faces, and it felt as though we picked up exactly where we left off months ago! its no wonder how people can sit around a Starbucks table for hours and hours doing the same thing. i used to think the whole idea of ‘chilling out’ is a waste of time. but as i get older, i’m starting to enjoy this relatively non streuous activity (as compared to running 2.4km under 10 mins), as well as the amount of satisfaction it can bring. friends are such great inventions! i suppose you can also try talking to yourself, but well it’s easy to run out of topics to talk about ( how many different points of view can one person have?) and it’s also quite easy to get bored of yourself, unless of course you have a super inflated ego. so, having a friend / friends to share a conversation with is much more interesting. Friends are also the people who can share and help fulfill your dreams and your goals. Just like how Charles Blackmore together with a team of British, Chinese, Uyghurs (an ethnic group found in Xinjiang, China) and a caravan of 30 camels (animals are friends too!) embarked on a journey to cross the Taklamakan Desert in Central Asia. I highly recommend the book, “Conquering the desert of death: Across the Taklamakan” to anyone who has been sitting around a Starbucks table for far too long, who is lacking some crazy inspiration and is in need of a few  doses of adventure into his/her life. Read below for book description:

“The ferocious Taklamakan desert in Central Asia, one of the largest sandy deserts in the world and the harshest on earth, is known by the Chinese as the “desert of death” or the “place of no return.” Its unknown depths are said to be haunted by demons and spirits and legend has it that ancient cities filled with treasure lie lost and buried beneath its dunes. The only certainty is that no human being in history had ever crossed it from end to end. But, after five years of planning, in 1993, Charles Blackmore together with a team of British, Chinese and Uyghurs and a caravan of thirty camels, set out to accomplish the seemingly impossible: they would cross the Taklamakan, west to east, directly through its unmapped, untrodden centre. Conquering the Desert of Death is at once a deeply personal journey and the story of an adventure that will go down in history as one of the great achievements of exploration.”
– taken from Amazon.com