Into Thin Air (Finally!)

After a rough start to our precious two weeks in Bhutan, Laura and I were finally feeling better and were eager to get out and do some trekking in the Himalayas. Geographic Expeditions and Yangphel (their local partner in Bhutan) had worked a minor miracle and lined up a completely separate, somewhat abbreviated trek for the two of us that would still get us up to the Chomolhari base camp and back to Paro in the seven days we had to work with.

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The First 100(ish) Days – DF Edition

Now that Laura and I have been traveling for almost four months (which is hard for us to believe!), we thought it might be interesting to write a bit about how we’re doing living life on the road — the joys, the challenges, the surprises, and what we may have learned about ourselves and each other. We each have a somewhat different perspective on the trip so far (obviously), so we decided it would be best to subject you to not one, but two “state of the traveling union” blog posts. We flipped a coin, and I won (or lost, I can’t remember), so I’m first up.

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Trekking to Chisapani and Nagarkot

Even with our somewhat overwhelming introduction to Kathmandu (re-introduction for me), we were still excited to spend a couple of days doing some light trekking northeast of the Kathmandu Valley. We’d hired a guide and porter through Himalayan Holidays — the same company that Room to Read was working with for their anniversary trek — and they met us that Monday morning to start our trek. Laxman (our guide) and Jhalak (our porter) introduced themselves as cousin-brothers: their fathers are brothers (making them first cousins), their mothers are sisters (again, first cousins), and as it turns out, their wives are also sisters (making them brothers-in-law)! Pretty funny. They both spoke English well enough, and after a short drive out of the Kathmandu Valley, we started our trek up to Chisapani.

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K-K-K-K-K-K-Kathmandu

First, we want to apologize for the radio silence during our last two-plus weeks on the road. We’ve had some serious travel challenges to contend with — multiple illnesses, volcanic ash over Europe (yes, it impacted us even in Asia), developing world chaos, the near-complete shutdown of the entire country of Nepal, and now a serious lack of reliable internet in our hotel in Thailand — but we’re back in our (mostly) happy place and trying to catch up on catching you up on our travels.

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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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Follow That Blog!

Now that we’ve been at this travel blogging thing for a couple of months, it occurs to me that many of you are probably still checking the blog manually (daily, of course) to see what’s been posted. This works just fine if you’re only checking the Travel Log page, but there are also comments being added all the time (and not always to the most recent blog post), there’s the upcoming Books journal page (available Real Soon Now™), and we’ll add other pages in the future that you might like to follow without having to scour our entire website to see what’s new. Enter RSS feeds.

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Magnum Cum Laude

As you no doubt remember, near the beginning of our trip I discovered that there are nine (NINE!) varieties of Magnum ice cream bars available in New Zealand and Australia, and Vanuatu as it turns out. (Check out my original Magnum P.I. blog post for the sweet details.) I made it my personal quest to sample all nine flavors before leaving Oz (two months seemed like plenty of time), and I nearly completed the task before leaving New Zealand. Only one flavor escaped me, the one that I saved (savored?) for last, hoping it would be the pinnacle of my glucosic gastronomic adventure: the exotically named Magnum Ecuador Dark.

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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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Photos from Uluru and Kata Tjuta

A quick update before Laura and I hop on a boat and finish up our scuba diving certification course for a couple of days. We’ve uploaded photo albums from our first two days in the Red Center of Australia — Uluru and Kata Tjuta. We really do have some fun highlights to share from our week-long adventure in the outback (some of which don’t even mention flies), but they’re not quite ready for public consumption. Our brains are a little waterlogged from two days in the pool doing exciting things like pretending our air tanks have run out of air, doing underwater acrobatics to remove and replace our BCDs and weight belts, and trying to decipher the hand signals from our PADI instructor Chris (almost as difficult as understanding his Irish accent).

We’ll get the rest of the Outback photos posted when we’re back on dry land, as well as some of the happier highlights from our 4WD adventure. Stay tuned!