Torres Stories

When I was 9-years-old, I bought a beta fish with my allowance money and set up a small aquarium for my new little friend in my bedroom. Since this was the first pet I was allowed to name by myself, I spent a long time trying to come up with the perfect name for him. I finally decided on “Patagonia,” a place I had probably heard about in my social studies class or possibly in an issue of National Geographic lying around the house. I didn’t actually know anything about Patagonia – I’m not even sure I knew it was in South America – but the word “Patagonia” conjured up all kinds of romantic images of faraway exotic places in my little third-grader brain, and that was reason enough to name a fish for me. Twenty-four years later, I finally got to see the place that had inspired the name of my wispy little fish friend. Partly because of my childhood fascination with Patagonia and, more recently, because of the stories our friends Tanya & Eric and Courtney & Patrick and had told us about their adventures there, Patagonia was one of the few places that Dustin and I had resolved we had to see on this trip. When Dustin’s appendicitis struck in Spain and we seriously considered coming home early, more than anything it was the prospect of missing out on Patagonia that spurred us to keep going.

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Patagonia, Or How Lustin Got Their (Exercise) Groove Back

After a month of full English breakfasts in the UK, nearly two months of eating mostly pasta, pizzas (SO many pizzas), wine, and gelato in Italy, a month in Spain downing pinxtos and tapas left and right (they were so small!, but none of them seemed to incorporate anything resembling greens), and my unexpected hiatus from exercise due to a pesky appendectomy, Laura and I were starting to feel a bit soft in early December. Actually, that’s an understatement; we were starting to feel like the Pillsbury Doughboy, aka Poppin’ Fresh (which would be a great name for a rapper, by the way) and his portly but adorable wife (Mary Poppin’ Fresh?). Anyway, my point is: we needed some exercise, and we needed it bad. Atacama in northern Chile wasn’t the most active start to our two months in South America, and a week of wine tasting in Mendoza – which shockingly also involved some serious consumption of red meat – didn’t exactly scream “back on the exercise wagon”. It was time for some serious outdoor inspiration: hello, Patagonia!

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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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Last Night I Dreamt of San Pedro (de Atacama)

It’s hard to believe it, but Laura and I have finally arrived in the sixth and final continent on our year-long adventure! (Sorry Jayson, no trip to Antarctica for us this time.) We still can’t quite wrap our heads around the fact that we’ll be home in a couple of months, but I have to admit it’s been fun making plans to see our family and friends at home in late January. We’re not quite ready to think about the practical realities we’ll have to deal with when we get back back – getting resettled at home (including re-introducing Nutmeg to chilly San Francisco), buying (or borrowing… hint, hint) a car, updating billing addresses and dealing with the piles of mail our parents have held for us, collecting and unpacking all the crap we’ve shipped home this year (scattered across three states), finding jobs (yikes!) – but I think we’ll be ready for real life again once January 19th rolls around.

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Will There Be Blog?

Almost six months ago, Laura kicked off our world travel blog with her sublimely titled There Will Be Blog entry. Given that it’s been more than six weeks since we flew from Thailand to Egypt to meet my brother for our Jewels of the Nile tour (also known as the Total Temple Torture Tour), and given that you, our patient readers, haven’t read word one about anything that’s happened on our trip since then (except for us surprising Ginny and Mark at their wedding in Currituck, NC), a reasonable question might be: will there be blog?

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The Spirit of Santo

We arrived in the little town of Luganville on the northern Vanuatu island of Espiritu Santo with only a vague idea of how we wanted to spend our time, but we knew there were some great scuba diving spots around the island (including the WWII-era shipwreck of the USS Calvin Coolidge), a few sandy beaches worth seeing (how could a place called Champagne Beach not be beautiful?), and one crazy cave that Lonely Planet highly recommended we check out.

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Island Time

We spent a lot of our first week in Vanuatu either watching cricket on TV (the spectator sport equivalent of waiting in line at the DMV), or sitting by the pool at our fancy-schmancy resort on Iririki Island. But we did try to get out and see something closer to the real Vanuatu while we were in Port Vila, mostly through hot and sticky walks around town that took us away from the main tourist strip, and by doing a full-island circumnavigation of Efate one day. Our Efate Island Tour photo album covers most of that ground, but we did want to mention a few facts and observations about Vanuatu that we’ve picked up since we arrived here.

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Shout-outs From the Road!

When Laura and I worked at Room to Read, one of our favorite traditions was the “shout-out”. At the end of every bi-weekly all-hands meeting, the meeting moderator would open up the floor for people to publicly thank one or more of their co-workers for going above and beyond the call of duty in some way. Usually it involved someone who spent extra time helping them with a project, or someone who took on a particularly tough or unpleasant task and finished it with a smile on their face. It was a great way for people’s extra hard work to be recognized in front of the entire San Francisco team, and it always felt good to get an “attaboy” from a co-worker every once it a while. In that same spirit, Laura and I would like to give a few shout-outs to friends and family members who have, in their own way, helped to make our trip thus far a positive, healthy, and fun experience.

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John, Paul, Gorge and Dingo

It’s a bit easier to write about our Outback experience now that the constant, maddening (infuriating!) buzz of the flies in our faces is more of a fading memory than the recurring nightmare that it was in the moment. It’s really hard to describe how challenging it was dealing with the flies, the heat, sleep depravation, the flies… I kept thinking it was a lot like the game of golf: you endure many, many frustrating moments where you swear you’ll never play the game again, but you have *just* enough long, straight drives and sweet putts to make it all worthwhile (with the help of some selective memory). Despite our frustrations with the flies, sleeping on the ground exposed to the elements and creepy crawlies, and a few insanely early wake-up calls, we really did have a once-in-a-lifetime experience in the Red Center (although we both agree that we probably wouldn’t go back for more).

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Bushwhacked

Our five days camping in the “bush” of Australia’s aptly named Red Center were hard. Very hard. At one particular low point, Dustin turned to me and said, “I’d like to take the Outback out back and shoot it.” We had thoughts like this fairly often. Among the various enemies we were battling were sleep deprivation (a 5:30am wake-up call was considered a “sleep in”); mozzies, which were especially annoying at night while we slept under the stars, unprotected in a “swag” (basically a padded sleeping bag); heat (it was summer in the desert after all); and water (thanks to the floods the week before, the ground was super-saturated, resulting in heavy dews at night. We literally woke up one night soaking wet in our swags).

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