Flashback: Jewels of the Nile

Given the current political unrest there, Egypt seems like an appropriate place to begin writing about some of the places we didn’t have time to cover during our world tour last year. As we learned during our travels there, and as we’re now reading in the news on a daily basis, Egypt (and the Middle East in general) is filled with complexity, contradiction, corruption, and confusion. It’s a difficult place to wrap your head around, especially as a westerner, and we left feeling like we never got a true sense of what the day-to-day life of the average Egyptian is really like. We did, however, see some of the most impressive, ancient monuments and art we’ve seen anywhere in the world, and we got to share the experience with my big brother Dirk, which made the trip all the more memorable.

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New Years 2011: A Tango Odyssey

Hi folks! Another quick update as we head off on our final adventure before heading home (!) in less than two weeks. We’re in Guayaquil, Ecuador right now, and tomorrow we’ll be heading out to the Galapagos Islands for eight days (that is, assuming Laura’s appendix doesn’t stage a last-minute coup as mine did right before we were originally supposed to hit the Galapagos in November). We’ll be totally offline for the next week, but we’re planning to post a full report on our three amazing weeks in Patagonia as soon as we get back. With more than 1,800 photos to sort through (good lord) and so many great hikes and adventures to write about, it’s proving to be a slightly bigger job than we initially anticipated.

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Feliz Navidad!

Feliz Navidad from Buenos Aires! It’s in the 90’s down here and there’s not a Christmas tree in sight, but we’re managing to make the most of our holiday away from home. I made my great-grandmother’s meatballs and homemade sauce for Christmas Eve dinner last night, and we invited Kate and James, two British friends we met in Torres del Paine, to join us for dinner in the apartment we’re staying in here in BA.

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España, Good On Ya

Now that our appendectomy adventure is over (I’m knocking on wood now because technically one of us still has an as-yet-ungangrenous appendix), we thought it was about time to write about the non-medical-emergency parts of our month-long tour of Spain, also known as the Country That Never Met a Part of the Pig It Didn’t Want to Eat. This is my first trip to Spain, and for all intents and purposes, it’s Dustin’s too. (He was here briefly a few years ago, but in what now appears to be a prophetic case of bad luck, he came down with the flu shortly after arriving and spent the entire time in his hotel room.)

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Down to the Wire on the Fringe

Sometimes I wonder if my anal-retentive, slightly OCD, plan-focused, like-to-have-things-just-so tendencies, paired with Laura’s Italian “assertiveness” (let’s call it that) and her strong aversion to being made to feel like a sucker (she would make a pretty convincing Israeli :), might be a dangerous combination. The percentage of times that Laura and I have slept in the first room offered to us in hotels around the world is embarrassingly – or impressively – low. We’re never too proud to request an upgrade or ask for a different room if the one they’ve given us doesn’t meet our (admittedly unrealistic) standards. Sometimes, though, our determination to make things happen works out for the best, and the universe rewards us. At least, that’s how we like to look at it.

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Fringe Benefits

We’re wrapping up our month-long UK adventure here in Edinburgh, a city whose name I continued to mispronounce well into my twenties. We’ve spent most of the last three days here immersed in the sensory overload that is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, an arts/comedy/theater/freak show/music festival that takes place every year over the course of four weeks in August, and includes roughly TWO THOUSAND different acts scattered around the city. Think: urban Burning Man… with haggis.

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Tashi Delek, Bhutan!

After a successful but exhausting trek up to Chomolhari base camp, we were happy to spend our last few days in Bhutan doing more of a cultural tour. Most of the trekkers left immediately after the trek (since they’d done their cultural visits beforehand), but a few – Pete, Bernard, and Jennifer – joined us for a few days in Thimphu, the capital “city” of Bhutan (population 60,000), and Punakha. We enjoyed having a chance to get to know them a bit better since we weren’t able to trek with them. We were also totally blown away by the thoughtfulness and intelligence of our main guide, Tsewang, and we were thankful to have a chance to see Bhutan through his eyes before we left.

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Gross National Happiness

We said farewell to Tsewang and our six fellow trekkers on Saturday, and spent the rest of the day watching random American sitcom reruns on Indian TV channels. (We get why they’re still airing Friends, but why anyone thinks that Yes, Dear and Just Shoot Me are shows worthy of television immortality is a mystery we’ll just have to chalk up to cultural differences.) By the next day, Dustin was feeling a lot better, and by the day after that, he felt strong enough to tackle the steep, vertical climb up to the stunning monastery called Tiger’s Nest (a day hike we’d missed out on when our tour group did it a few days earlier). The hike ended up being a fantastic introduction to the Bhutan that had been taunting us outside the windows of our hotel room, with everything from beautiful mountain scenery to fascinating Buddhist culture.

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The Land of the Thunder Dragon

The first thought you have after your plane lands in Bhutan is: I’m never flying here again. No one prepared us for the approach and landing at the Paro airport (the one and only commercial airport in the country), which is probably a good thing because I’m not sure I would have gotten on the plane had I known what was in store for us at the end of our hour-long flight from Kathmandu.

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The Diving Boys and the Shutterflies

We were on Pentecost Island for less than 24 hours, but it was easily one of the most memorable parts of our entire stay in Vanuatu — and not just because we were lucky enough to witness the amazing land-diving ceremony there. But before we get to land-diving, a few other highlights from our whirlwind trip to Pentecost…

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