The First 100(ish) Days – LM Edition

I began writing this entry (when it was supposed to be our “three month update”) over a month and a half ago, back before I started having daily conversations with my husband about the status of our bowels. That is to say, back when this was a different kind of trip. The trip we are on now, on day #117, is not the same one we were on back then. Not better or worse, just different. We’ve now spent almost as much time in the developing world as we have in the developed world. We now know what it’s like to hit bottom (or at least, that’s what it felt like in our dingy, hot Kathmandu hotel room as both of us turned green from nausea and took turns taking our temperatures to see whose fever was highest). We now know what it’s like to have to completely change our travel plans at the last minute due to Mother Nature (thank you, Cyclone Ului!) and the fickle, arbitrary whims of a government on the verge of collapse (and to you, Comrade Mao!).

The good news is that the differences between the entry I was writing a month ago and the one I’m writing now mean that this trip is evolving. As much fun as we had in New Zealand and Australia, I don’t think we would have wanted to spend the next year traveling in countries similar to them. Other than their funny driving rules and their completely inexplicable relationship with yeast food products, New Zealand and Australia felt a lot like home. Eating yak meat at 13,000 feet surrounded by the tallest mountains in the world, on the other hand, did not especially remind us of our life back in the Marina. Nor did watching men throw themselves off of home-made wooden towers attached to vines they’d found in the jungle. Nor did using a squat toilet in our “hotel” room that may or may not have been poisoning us with its toxic gases. And the list goes on.

If the point of travel — or the point of long-term international travel, at least — is to get out of one’s happy little bubble and see how the rest of world ties their shoes and eats their breakfast, then I think we’ve finally really started traveling. And while this kind of travel is inevitably more challenging (I will put a poster of George W. Bush up in my home before I ever get in a cab in Kathmandu again, for example), the hard stuff does tend to look pretty damn good in hindsight. And that, I think, is one of the big lessons I’ve learned on this trip so far: the mind’s amazing ability to filter out the bad stuff and remember the good, at least when traveling. Looking back over what we’ve done and where we’ve been so far, the hardest places we’ve travelled and the most challenging obstacles we’ve encountered are always the first stories we start telling other travelers we meet on the road. It’s not even that we’re trying to get their sympathy (wahh! poor us! we had to deal with bush flies on our year-long vacation around the world!); it’s that we’ve kind of already forgotten how bad the bad really was. We’re just happy to have moved on with a great story to tell. Hopefully the next eight months will bring many more of those stories — though preferably not at the expense of our perpetually assaulted intestines. We’re kind of over that part of traveling.

The other thing I’ve noticed as we’ve gotten deeper into this trip is how hard it is to really be present in the current moment when our brains are so often engaged with the stresses of planning the next legs of our trip and our desire to stay in touch with all of you back home. No complaints about the latter — as much as this blog can sometimes feel like a monkey on our back, we absolutely LOVE being able to stay in touch with all of you and wouldn’t be able to keep going on this trip if we didn’t have your blog comments, Facebook updates, emails, and Skype chats/calls to remind us of the wonderful life waiting for us when we get back home.

But in terms of planning the next stages of our trip, there’s definitely a part of us that really wants to devote 100% of our attention to the country we’re currently in — its culture, food, music, language, and people — but that’s often hard to do when there are so many other items clamoring for our mental attention. We made a conscious decision to “plan as we go” on this trip, in part out of necessity (even with two Type A brains at work, there was no way in hell we were going to be able to plan every detail of twelve months of travel before we left home, especially not when we were also in the midst of planning two weddings!), and in part because we wanted to maintain a degree of flexibility that would allow for travel improv along the way. I don’t think we regret this choice at all, but it has proven to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it has allowed us to nimbly avoid imminent disasters (see cyclone and Maoists comments above) and to change our travel plans based on our evolving moods (see our recent Travel Blues entry), but it also means that we never truly get to disconnect and just be in the place where we are because we’re always feeling the pressure of planning the next step(s) in the journey. I think that’s been difficult for both of us, and recently we’ve started talking about slowing down our rate of travel to new places so that we can turn the planner part of our brains off for awhile, assuming that’s even possible for us.

There are lots of others things I could say at this point, but Dustin already hit on many of them in his 100 Days entry. Before I sign off, though, I thought I’d call out a few other smaller things I’ve learned over the last four months, in no particular order:

• Never underestimate the power of an episode of Friends or Gilmore Girls to make you feel better when you’re sick in a developing country. I’ve never loved Ross, Rachel, Lorelai, and Rory as much as I did when we were recovering from the flu in Bhutan.
• B.O. smells different in every country. 
• I’m pretty sure feral dogs are going to take over the world someday. They are EVERYWHERE. 
• Dustin will never, ever own a pair of sunglasses for more than 17 days.
  
• We’ve learned the hard way to stick to our #1 travel rule: A.B.C. = Always Bring Camera. You never know when the next amazing shot is going to jump out at you. 
• It seems the entire population of Germany is currently traveling, leaving us to wonder, who is watching all of the frankfurters back in the Motherland?
  
• The second-most important travel rule: A.P.H.C. = Always Play Honeymoon Card, which is closely linked to the two most beautiful words in a traveler’s vocabulary: free upgrade.
  
• Damn you, McDonalds, and your seductive free WiFi!
  
• A LOT of the world still smokes. Can someone please explain why?
  
• After clean water, every single country in the world deserves to have access to Arnott’s Mint Slices. 
• There is no better way to see the world than with your best friend. I’m a very, very lucky girl.

Comments

[Patrick]

Great post Laura -

Although you have 11 bullets in your closing, you should submit to Dave Letterman anyway. I think that he would love it. Particularly the one about B.O. smelling different in every country. :-)

Safe travels, Patrick

[Bill]

You are going to put up a picture of GW?

[Amanda]

Dustin:

I also have trouble holding on to sunglasses which is why my friends got me this for my birthday: http://stunnerofthemonth.com/.

Laura this would be the PERFECT present for Dustin!

[Katie R]

Yay for the updates on what you are both reading! And double Yay (Yay) for Dustin reading Gatsby!!! I might re-read it again soon. At some point I'd love the run down on all that you've both read. It would be fun to see the list!

[Laura Maestrelli]

Katie, you need to help me to get Dustin to finish Gatsby. He's been stuck on page 4 for the last week. I need him to love it as much as we do!! :)

[Katie R]

I forget what's on page 4, but it must be a really good page... Tell him to move it along so that I can start sending quiz questions for him to answer when he checks in on the blog! ;)