This Blog is Over

Home for a few months now. Today seems like a good day to reflect.

First off, congratulations to Barack Obama and to the US. No matter your feelings about Democratic vs. Republican politics (or lack of difference therein), this country took quite a step forward in putting a man of color into the White House. I wish him, and us, the best of luck.

Somewhere earlier in this blog, I mentioned that Tami and I occasionally play a game: "Where were we a year (or two...or, now, three) ago?"

On this day in 2006, we were hunkered down, enjoying the warm mineral baths of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. We made a destination of "T or C" (as called by the locals) because we'd been camping in exceedingly cold temps for the preceding three weeks. We soaked in the heat and the hippie funk for three days before continuing further south.

(Early morning soak looking out on the Rio Grande - Truth or Consequences, NM)

On January 20, 2007, we prepared to leave Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The next day we were taking a boat down the Mekong to cross over Chao Doc, Vietnam. I may have had no point during our trip where I felt a greater sense of adventure...but also of apprehension. Vietnam shares a more complex history with the US than any country on our itinerary. I had no palpable idea of how we'd be received. Luckily it turned out very well. The people treated us warmly and the country, as a whole, stands as a highlight of our entire trip.

(Heavily laden rice boat making its way along a canal of the Mekong to the mill - Vietnam)

On the 20th of January 2008, we were in the former French colony of Pondicherry on the Bay of Bengal in southern India. Fresh from 13 months is Southeast Asia, we'd been back in India for just over a week. I wrote in my journal that morning of my surprise at how difficult it was, "yet again", to adjust to the chaos of the Sub-continent. As challenging at it was, Tami and I often find ourselves now, looking back on our adventures in India with sighs of longing. Over the course of two visits we spent almost a year there. Given the chance, we'd go back in a heartbeat.

(Chai vendor working his craft at a street stall - Pondicherry, India)

See what staying put at home will do? We're travel-ready ... even for India ... again! Unfortunately, that's just part of our DNA and a chronic condition. We're happy to be back and San Francisco looks better than ever. What a crazy time to re-integrate, too! The election and the economy have kept the news interesting if not slightly unsettling. I'm frankly amazed how thoroughly the latter pushed environmental concerns almost completely off the media agenda. Those issues are only getting more acute and $30/barrel oil...well, it doesn't help.

I could reflect nostalgically about this trip for hours. Most folks don't have that kind of time, though. In the spirit of brevity, I'll sum things up with a few numbers.

• 1,055 - Total number of days on the road.
• 11 - Total number of countries visited. (Doesn't include transit countries. Must have a visa stamp and/or must have walked the streets for a few hours minimum.)
• 240 - Number of unique places we slept. (Doesn't include repeat visits to places e.g. multiple visits to transit hubs like Bangkok, Delhi, etc.)
• $19.25 - Per-person cost per day - all costs included from departure to return
  
• $15.91 - Per-person cost per day - minus health insurance and plane fare
• 7 - Number of flights - destination to destination (not including connectors)
  
• 9 - Number of friends who visited us while we were outside the US. (Ken, Rich, Johan, Tish, Eric, Maggie, Mark, Sherry)
  
• 20 - Number of fiction books read.* (See below)
  
• 42 - Number of non-fiction books read.** (See below)
  
• Favorite Feedback - From my uncle Gordon: "I don't just look at your pictures. I study 'em. I look at the background and try to see everything that was going on when you were there. I try to put myself in your place and see how it felt."
• Tie for Favorite - Friends following in some portion of our footsteps e.g. Scott and Tami going to Koh Mak in Thailand, Eric and Maggie doing their own groovy trip.
  
• Things I miss most from being on the road: Frequent, random smiles and hellos from strangers. Fantastic tropical fruit. Cheap, public transportation that goes virtually anywhere. Warm weather. A tangible sense of history in the surroundings.
  
• Unsettling lesson: Where there's water, there's life. And ... the corollary: Where it's dry, there's little or none.
  

(Top of an irrigation dike near Hampi, India)

(The minimally-irrigated village of Nako, Himachal Pradesh, India)

• Biggest surprise of being on the road - How bad the food choices were.
• Runner-up surprise - How hard most of the people of this world work for their food.

(Farmer in the village of Langde, Guizhou, China plows a rice paddy the same way his people have for centuries)

(Buckwheat threshing - Kali Gandaki Valley, Nepal)

• Biggest surprise of being home - How limited peoples' questions were about the trip. Most questions were limited to: "Did you have a great time?" ... "Did you get sick?" ... "What was your favorite place?" and "When are you going to write a book?"
• Tie for biggest home surprise - How quickly time passes in the US. On the road we often remarked on how much we'd done since breakfast or how, on Thursday, something we talked about had happened only two days ago on Tuesday, seemed like ages prior. Now that we're home, we're experiencing that same old feeling of, "It's Friday already?!" Time really does fly here.
  

So that's it. Home. Healthy. Still adjusting. Eminently grateful.

'Bye bye...

It's all ahead now...


Books:

* Fiction - Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood), The Great Indian Novel (?), Delhi (Kushwant Singh), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemmingway), The God of Small Things (Arundahti Roy), All Families Are Psychotic (Douglas Coupland), The Life of Pi (Yann Martel), Perfume (Patrick Suskind), Sweet Thursday (John Steinbeck), Karma Cola (Gita Mehta), The Elephanta Suite (Paul Theroux), The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini), The Road (Cormac McCarthy), A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry), Shantaram - (Gregory David Roberts), 1984 (George Orwell), Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco), Main Street (Sinclair Lewis), Hamlet, Richard II, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare)

** Non fiction - In Ruins, Botany of Desire (Michael Pollan), A Tale of Two Valleys, Stupid White Men, Dude - Where's My Country (Michael Moore) , Ancient Futures - Learning from Ladakh (Helena Norberg Hodge), Highness - The Maharajas of India, The Gods Drink Whiskey (Stephen Asma), Seven Years In Tibet (Heinrich Herrar) , India in Slow Motion (Mark Tully), Small is Beautiful (E. F. Schumacher), The Snow Leopard (Peter Matthiessen), It Must Have Been Something I Ate (Jeffrey Steingarten), Return To Tibet (Heinrich Harrar), A Time of Gifts (Patrick Leigh Fermor), First They Killed My Father, Dispatches (Michael Herr), A River's Tale - A Year on the Mekong (Edward Gargan), The Girl in the Picture (Denise Chong), The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman), The River at the Center of the World (Simon Winchester), Earth Odyssey (Mark Hertsgaard), Lost In Mongolia (Angus ?), Kitchen Confidential + A Cook's Tour (Anthony Bourdain), Riding the Iron Rooster (Paul Theroux), Himalaya (Michael Palin), Cambodia Now (Karen Coates), Slow Reckoning (Tom Athanasiou), Emergency Sex (?), Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (John Perkins), The Prince of the Marshes (Rory Stewart), The Spice Route - A History (John Keay), The World is Flat (Thomas Friedman), The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle), King (?), Sorrows of Empire (Chalmers Johnson), Rogue States (Noam Chomsky), The Tree Where Man Was Born (Peter Matthiessen), Hell's Angel (Sonny Barger), Globalization and It's Distontents (Joseph Stiglitz), Soul of a New Machine (Tracy Kidder)