One Great Year

Hi everyone!

Connectivity is too poor to post images. As soon as we can, we will post photo's of Uganda and Rwanda including the Mt Gorilla's. For those of you asking for a few more stories...here's a look into our average day on the road. Sorry for typo's...we have to type fast because the connection could fail any minute. I hope you enjoy...

From Rwanda:

It just occurred to us that we have been on the road for nearly a year. It’s easy to become completely absorbed in your surroundings. Right now as we are surrounded by green hills and sad stories, I have to think hard to picture the scenes of the Cordillera Blanca in Peru or playing Boules with our family in France. We have to think really hard to imagine what it would be like to cook a meal in our own kitchen—something we would love to do right now. We've been gone long enough that I already miss early parts of the trip. Looking back on our journey after one year, I realize how fortunate we have been to have lived this adventure. There was a point, maybe after leaving India, which we felt a bit less amazed by things that we thought would be mind-blowing. Since then, we have had to keep ourselves in check by making sure we are not taking any of these experiences for granted. For instance, in December we went from drinking coffee on the Ponte Vecchio to standing in the square where the Ukrainian Orange Revolution took place to looking up at the Aya Sofia in Istanbul and the pyramids of Giza in a matter of a few days. This was less by design and more due to circumstance of trying to get from here to there by the most efficient means. Nonetheless, it allowed little time for reflection on our surroundings and became difficult to absorb these experiences as they should have been. So since India, we have worked to keep one another in check so that we aren't taking a second of this experience for granted. In our posts we primarily write about the stand outs and superlatives--but there is much more behind these pictures. A year into our trip, we thought we would mention of few of things that are not on our blog, like how we live day to day and what its like to wake up and get moving in places that sometimes we would prefer to hide under the sheets. Of course a few stories have been thrown in that may have not made the blog along the way. Here goes...

A day in the life...(1 of 3)

Our morning routine for the past year is not completely unlike our weekend Seattle routine. Up at 6:30, brush teeth, wash face and bee line for the nearest vector of caffeine consumption. But the similarities stop there. Because everything we have travels with us on our backs, our wardrobes are limited to say the least. I have roughly three of everything, three shirts, pants, pairs of socks, shoes etc. Kori being a much smaller person (with smaller clothes) is able to carry a bit more. Half of our clothes are for backcountry travel...its fine to wear zip-off pants on a trail, but strolling through Stockholm is a different story. Our fashion well is even more shallow because of this. Choosing our outfits for the day is more a matter of smell than sight. Many mornings we pull our shirts and pants directly off the clothesline stretched from the doorknob to the window latch. Depending upon the country, we do our laundry a few times a week, daily or in the case of Ethiopia, hourly. There have been many times that the wash water has turned jet black when cleaning only one shirt. As you know, Kori is a clean freak so certain legs of this trip have required adjustments on her part. The dirtiest we have been? It’s a tie between the dusty countries of Mongolia and Ethiopia. Returning from the countryside of Mongolia, a jug of horse milk spilled onto (and into) our packs. We didn't realize this right away, as the milk was covered by 12 hours of constant bombardment of dust. Other notable mentions of filth include a sandal fill up with god knows what sludge in a Moscow slum, sitting on throw up in Peruvian buses (Dave you warned us) and being pooped on by birds (Uganda, India, Ecuador) and babies (India). While on the subject (of poop), its worth mentioning that outside of the USA and Western Europe, it (poop) seems to be everywhere. Now this may not be the preferred topic of conversation in an email describing our trip, but it seems to be unavoidable...literally. Walking on the sidewalks of Chile and Argentina require the dexterity of a minesweeper--there are dogs everywhere and they are champions at marking their territory in lock step with our pace. In parts of Argentina I felt like I was playing Frogger. In a moment we will never forget, a Great Dane dropped trash in front of a busy market in Buenos Aires. Knowing he was on the spot to clean up after his dog, the elderly owner reached down to the stack and picked up as much as he could with his bare hands (which were overflowing) and walked on. The Great Dane heeled perfectly in a display of pride next to his owner carrying the still steaming pile. In India, toilets dump directly onto the tracks and are left unlocked at stations. Needless to say, waiting for a train is a smelly experience, although the rats don't seem to mind. In an Ethiopia/Kenya border town, I was washing a dust laden shirt in the sink and yes...a piece of petrified poo was sucked out of the sinkhole and into the basin. The hotel manager's reaction: let it sink back down again and he'll clean the basin for us. We were speechless.