Maybe one guideline of this trip will be that it'll be guided by stories.

I just finished "India: a Traveler's Literary Companion."  It's very good!  I mean, I like it a lot.  A dozen or so short stories, arranged by geography.  They all sound very different.  I get a little feeling of being there.  Same with Stones into Schools.  Really amazing stories.  (okay, this is different; it's not fiction.)

The same was true with a movie I watched recently called The Fall.  It was a little different: it wasn't actually about these faraway places; it just happened to be filmed there.

But instead of reading about the ho-hum day-to-day of current hotels, restaurants, and sights to see in a guidebook, I'll try to guide myself by crazy places I've seen in fantastic movies and lush descriptions in books.  Worth a shot, anyway.