Here is the rule of proximity: You get to one place, and it becomes
impossible, basically, not to start looking at whatever else is nearby. Climb
to the top of one mountain, and you see the whole range. If you make it as far
as Cambodia, what’s keeping you from Malaysia? From Malaysia, it’s just a
little hop to Indonesia, and onward from there. For a while, the world for me
was like a set of monkey bars. I swung from one place to the next, sometimes
backward, sometimes forward, capitalizing on my own momentum, knowing that at
some point my arms—or, more accurately, my quivering bank balance, accessed
through foreign ATMs—would give out, and I’d fall to the ground.
~ Amanda
Lindhout and Sara Corbett, A House in the Sky, 2013