Originally Posted by
christep
You edited you post long after I posted my response.
No, I didn't. I edited it to fix a typo so I'm not sure what your suggestion here is. I am not skipping India or China. They are in my itinerary. I have a guide who is planning our trips in India and China specifically and taking care of issues there. We are only making short stops in China as the body modification culture, due to their government and serious restrictions on personal rights, as well as my website being blocked at a government level in many areas.
Originally Posted by
christep
Who mentioned Africa or South America? The two most populous nations in the world are China and India! Those need visas in advance.
You replied to my post which had mentioned both of those locations as not being included in this trip which is why I thought you were talking about those two continents since they're the only ones not included in this current tour.
Originally Posted by
christep
And unless you're trying to maximise air miles you should have a look at a map of Asia Pacific - your routing is going a very long way round!
First you make a statement like "only in America" would someone "skip two of the most populated countries" and then proceed to suggest that one of the countries that I am visiting doesn't have a body art culture. Is it your expertise that I should forgo Japan for China and India instead simply because they have a higher population count or does your body art knowledge end at what you've seen in National Geographic?
I don't see how I am going a "very long way around". LAX-Australia/NZ then to Japan, China, Thailand, India, Isreal and Europe seems fairly logical to me. All of the planning has been done with a world map and organizing it by the way that would make the most sense, taking account into weather and local activities and cultural festivals that we plan to attend.
Originally Posted by
christep
You are aware that the only people with tattoos in Japan are gangsters or their concubines (who are tattooed as a sort of ownership mark)? You'll get some strange looks there. (And getting around unless you speak the language is non-trivial)
That's like saying that the only tattooed people are sailors and inmates in America when 1 in 3 University students now has at least one tattoo. My host in Japan runs Burst Magazine which is a magazine dedicated to our culture. They also run Burst China, which is a Chinese version of the magazine.
Unless I've somehow missed it and you're an authority on body modification, you're making some rather uneducated statements about a very large subculture, one that has roots in almost every culture around the world. Statements like that show an apparent bias against a culture that is near and dear to my heart as well as one that I have worked in for the past 12 years.
I run one of the oldest sites on the internet that is dedicated to body modification. It started in 1994 as a usenet group and has grown over the past 16 years, with more than half a million readers daily of our blog alone and more than 20 million visitors to the rest of the site every month, I think I know what I'm talking about when I say that you are very wrong.
Regardless of what the reasons for my travel, it's irrelevant when I'm asking about booking the actual tour itself. If you don't have anything to contribute to help further the goal, then there isn't really any reason to post passive aggressive commentary that doesn't help anyone.