This is The End...

At 10:30 in the morning we touched down and gratefully unfolded ourselves from a plane that made far too many strange clunking noises during landing. After a quick inspection from the immigration and customs people, we wheeled our bags into the clean, orderly country of Australia and were met by my very tired parents, who had come to the airport to pick us up at the originally scheduled landing time of 6:30 am.

Our nineteen month journey

We’d done it. We’d gone around the world and arrived back home the way we’d hoped to: in tact and carrying our original luggage. After over one and a half years we’d survived with no major dramas, no dangerous robberies and no serious bodily harm. The closest we’d come was the theft of $60 from a hotel room and a suspected collection of internal parasites (there was also the shipwreck, the birthday tumble from the moving truck and the Varanasi Experience - but those amounted to mere psychological damage than lasting physical harm).

We really feel lucky to have finished the trip with a minimum of bad experiences. We want to say a huge thanks to everyone who prayed for us, blessed us, talked to us, sent us birthday money, emailed us, didn’t rob us even though we were both asleep on the bus, helped us on our way or just thought of us as we trundled around the globe seeing some of the best, the worst and the most bizarre aspects of humanity and nature.

Back home

Finally, I’d like to give my biggest thanks to Angie. Angie is a wonderful travel companion, who isn’t afraid of an argument if we don’t get what we paid for, has no tolerance for any whiff of a scam and always finds the best hotel room for our money. If not for her, I’d probably be unconscious and face down in an ice-bath while some surgeon’s college dropout prods around my supple lower back looking for kidneys. I see him holding a never-returned textbook from the Bogotá library, his eyes darting nervously back and forth between my lumbar zone and a blood-spattered diagram of kidney. ‘Kidney: Ve como un frijole’ (looks like a bean) states the caption.

Even if it never came to something as dramatic as that, then I’d at least be much poorer and would have worn my way through several pairs of shoes after getting out of taxis way before we’re anywhere near where we’re supposed to be. She takes care of all that stuff, while I tighten loose screws that rattle in the window frame when the air-conditioning kicks in. We are a team.

Angie takes some time out from keeping us safe and waits for a sushi lunch

(Plus, she’s obsessed with food, which means I always eat well.)

The Big Day

The chapel overlooks Uluwatu

Originally, we were supposed to fly straight home from India, but Eric and Leah decided to get married in Bali, so that gave us a good excuse to add three Indonesian weeks onto the end of the trip. The big day came, and the weather was good, and the setting was stunning, and it was a wonderfully happy way to finish off our trip.

Paparazzi

Leah dabs away the happy tears, Eric wipes away the sweat.

Quite the setting

Angie in her sari, which behaved itself and stayed in place. Phew.

Happy Birthday America

We were still in Philly for America's birthday party, which is special, because that's where America was born. We put on the colours, ate lots of food that matched our clothes, sang the theme song and watched some in-your-face fireworks. It was quite a bash.

Angie's contribution to the big celebration - marshmallow and strawberry kebabs. Red, white and blue ones, of course.

A couple of days later, the party was still going. We went to watch some more fireworks, but got stuck in traffic. It worked well though, because then it started bucketing down, and we were stuck right in front of the show.

Adios Latin America!

A statistic: After fourteen and a half months, we left Latin America and entered El Paso, Texas. In the 444 nights since we landed in Santiago, Chile, we stayed in 148 different hotels and hostels. Some of those hotels we stayed in more than once, and we also spent 20 nights sleeping on buses. Add up other random nights on boats and camping and we come to a total of 211 different sleeping places. So, on average, we moved to a new bed every 2.1 nights.

From the Troll House to the Penthouse

After lots of messing about in Puerto Escondido, Angie found us a room. We'd hoped for something with a kitchen and a balcony, somewhere where we could settle for a week or so and cook and relax and enjoy a bus-free existence. Sadly, the hypothetical hotel room we had envisioned seemed not to exist in our price range. A terse German hotelier gave us this room instead:

Note the staircase-shaped ceiling and curtained-off toilet

The room was a dark architectural afterthought. They had built the hotel and noticed the space underneath he stairs might just be able to accommodate visitors at the low end of the price spectrum. I was reminded of my troll status every time I went to the toilet; in an Alice in Wonderland-style perspective trick, the ceiling tapered off in the shape of an upside-down staircase the closer I got the bowl, leaving me unable to stand by the time I was within range.

It wasn't all bad, though. The room was literally the closest room to Zicaleta Beach, and the delights of Mexican Pipeline.


But, on our second day, Angie discovered another hotel, run by a wonderful group of people. What made them so wonderful was the fact that they sometimes give away their rooms at reduced rates if you stay for long enough, look destitute enough or in some way manage to tickle their sympathy bone. So for the next four days, we were housed in this:

Note the kitchen, equipped with a coffee maker and oven! Also note the lack of any staircase-shaped ceilings (we were on the top floor)

Our private balcony

It was all a little overwhelming. We were sure they'd made some sort of mistake. They'd obviously given us a per-person price, which we had taken as a per-room price, but, unbelievably, there had been no error. These were the kinds of digs we hadn't even dared to dream about. It was the best room in the hotel, and for four wonderful days, this was the view:

Of course it came to an end, and when the people who'd booked the room after us showed up, we were thrust straight back in to the murky depths of true, budget accomodation.

The High Cost of Costa Rica

Budget buster Costa Rica flexed its financial muscle all over us when we went out to celebrate Charlotte’s birthday. A simple meal of pizza, beer and salad netted the establishment $60 in Oz money, including over $12 in taxes and other shifty add-ons (that really is massive given our budget for this part of the world). With our wallets smarting from the sudden weight loss, we planned a quick getaway into waters more forgiving of travellers who aren’t moneyed Californians on two-week sojourns between i-mergers. Onto Nicaragua, and quick!

Merry Christmas!!

Popayan

Another long bus ride took us to Popayan, which the guidebook interestingly describes as a safe place centred in a hive of guerrilla activity. Night busses are a no-no around here, as they often get hijacked and the occupants liberated of all their earthly possessions (the ones they carry on the bus, anyway).

After nine-months of getting into taxis, and occasionally being ripped off by the driver, I turned the tables on this, our halfway point, and ripped myself off. Here's how: The Colombian peso is an outrageously large currency- every Australian dollar is worth 1800 pesos (and falling)- so it's a little tricky to deal with all the massive numbers that get thrown your way. Compounding the problem is the fact that the 1000 peso note is the same colour scheme as the 10 000 peso note, so of course in all the darkeness of arriving at night and confusion of huge numbers and similar looking bills, I inadvertently substituted a 10 000 note for a 1000 note and ended up paying 12 000 pesos for a 3000 peso ride (a price which was already a bit steep anyway).


Christmas-themed illumination is a serious business in Colombia- at this time of year, every town decks out their plaza with thousands of watts of coloured lights and, in the case of Popayan, large glowing fruits. If I were brave or stupid enough to take out the tripod I'm sure there'd be some spectacular shots of beautifully decorated town squares, but Iíd like to keep a hold of my gear for a little longer.

Happy Halfway

Today marks the halfway point of our trip. Nine months have passed since we landed in Chile, and we're planning on landing back in Sydney another nine months from now. To say we're behind schedule is an understatement of a immense proportions. Originally, our loose itinerary had us looking for work in London at this point of the journey. Ewwwww.


To celebrate the occasion, I have finally got my photoblog online. I've been working on it intermittently for the past few months, and now it's pretty much ready to be seen.

www.trippinphotos.com

There's a link on the sidebar of this blog to get you there once this post goes to the archives. The photoblog probably won't be updated as regularly, but it's a nice way to look at photos anyway. Let me know what you think!

Mancora- Part 3

After the Colca Canyon adventure, we decided to burn up to Colombia as fast as we could. One pitstop had to be made to celebrate Angie's birthday. We spent a couple of relaxing days in Mancora, on the North Coast, our third time in the dusty little strip with perfect weather.

Mancora transport

While we were waiting for our bus to pull up (it never actually did), this truck pulled up and demonstrated another good reason to be a vegetarian in these parts. The sun was beating down at 8 in the morning, and this guy was selling chickens from crates in the back of his ute. They actually looked just like those bright yellow rubber chickens they sell in joke shops, but apparently these ones were going to be cooked and served to restaurant goers.

Bug Attack!!!!

Finally, we had an encounter with some of the monstrous buglife that is supposed to be malevolently skittering around South America. This specimem caused chaos when he attached himslef to Marc's finger, then used his iron legs to make sure he stayed there. After much screaming and spilt beers, the beast attached itself to a panic-stricken Marc's poncho, who managed to hold still long enough for this photo.

The Death Road

Us and La Paz

There is a stretch of dirt cut into the mountains between La Paz and Coroico that until recently held claim to the title of the World's Most Dangerous Road. Up to 300 people a year used to come to horrible ends on this road, hence the grizzly superlative. About a year ago a shiny new bitummen strip was installed on the opposite side of the valley, doing away with the need for vehicles to crawl around the slippery, guardrail-less curves perched atop hundreds of metres of rainforesty freefall. These days the Death Road is the almost exclusive domain of Gringo mountain bikers out for a day of supervised downhill death defiance.


Our party of four set out from La Paz and climbed in a van to the plus 4000 metre starting point. The road starts in the clouds and winds earthwards into a valley. The usual Bolivian roadside decorations of plastic bottles and nappies are replaced, almost in equal numbers, by crosses and memorials for those that didn't make it further. Skeletal wreckage of buses and other vehicles can be seen below this initial length of bitumen, and the cold wind stings your ears.


The scenery is bleak and massive; huge mountains covered in dark low vegetation are spoted with cloud. After a drug checkpoint or two, there is a chest-popping length of uphill (we are still above 3000 metres here), which Angie and Bre chose to negotiate in the support van (cheating).

The Road

This is us looking at the remains of a beer truck at the bottom of the valley

The real Death Road begins soon after. We left the bitumen, deflated our tyres and began the traverse down the loose gravel. By now we had left the lifelessness of the altiplano behind and were cautiously careening through the beginnings of the Amazonian jungle. Every now and then a single lane stretch of straight road would appear from the curves, and we could release the iron grips we held on the brake levers, but soon enough a bend would materialise and it was back to the overly cautious pace of a biking snail.



When not utilising every ounce of concentration on keeping from going over the edge, we were able to catch a look over the ever present edge and see the valley floor terrifying distances down. Our guide hurtled around the curves regardless, always keen to get ahead so he could snap photos of our steady descent.

Resting on the memorial of one poor biker who didn't get to the bottom

As the road continued our confidence grew, and Angie suprised everyone by having quite knack for steering a bike around the dirty, deadly curves. We rolled downward for about three hours, passing by waterfalls, rusting wreckage, memorials and slowpoke riders from other tour groups.

You're supposed to lift your bike above your head here, but our jelly arms were barely capable

By mid-afternoon we had finished and found ourselves lunching in a lush jungle resort, 3.5 kilometres below where we had started that morning. We could breathe again, and we had ridden the 'most dangerous stretch of road in the world'. High on achievement, adrenaline and air thick with oxygen we said bye to the guides and wobbled off to the next destination.

Party!!!

6 Months Brings a Couple of Dubious Milestones

Today is six months since we touched down in Santiago. Our original plan of being in London by now has not eventuated (thanks be), and we are currently just South of the Equator, staring down the prospect of getting through a huge portion of the Earth (i.e. the Northern Hemisphere) within our remaining one year. Who could've thought the planet was this big?

Click to see optimism in all it's laughable detail

The date bought with it a couple of milestones for us, happenings that I was sure would've struck long before we hit this anniversary.

Milestone Number One- First Argument in Spanish

It was a nice bar. We sat on the terrace that overlooked one of Quito's main pedestrian strips where Security personnel are as abundant as the mortals they protect. The menu listed a miscellany of supersweet, superstrong suggestively named drinks. A card on the table advertised a two for one special on a selection of these, and we ordered a couple of Caiparhinas at the (what we assumed was) the discount price.

When the bill arrived and appeared wildly bloated (they provided a menu of lame excuses as to why the special didn't apply to us- the best one was that we had actually looked at the main menu before ordering), the 3 or 4 celebratory drinks provided the confidence to not only question the outrageous sum, but also confront the manager and launch into loud and boisterous argument, entirely in Spanish. After much flailing of arms, creative grammar and confused stares(ours), the confrontation climaxed with me dramatically emptying the contents of my wallet (about $1.50) on the counter as evidence of our budget accounting only for the cheap price. "Mires! Mires! (Look! Look!)" I earnestly implored, "No hay mas dinero!!! (there is no more money)". From the there the exchange tapered off into apologies and forced courtesies, and we left, strangely buoyed by the experience- it turns out that Spanish is an outrageously fun language to have an argument in.

Milestone Number Two- A Less Enjoyable One

Everyone said it would happen, and now it has. Someone helped themselves to our traveling cash while we were out of our room squabbling with the local establishments. Luckily it was only $60, but that's it ok? That's our turn done. No more stealing from us everyone. Cheers South America!